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When I think about the battle for India's independence, I have to sometimes remind myself
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of the shifting meaning of both those words.
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For much of our freedom struggle, the word India would have had a shifting, nebulous
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meaning without the firm shape of the nation-state that we know by that name today.
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And equally, what was independence?
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Our early freedom fighters cared about the well-being of our people and negotiated for
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greater rights, but independence, in the specific shades of meaning of 1947, took shape pretty
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This is especially so when I think of our 19th century leaders who had the harsh reality
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of the British Empire to work with, a reality they could not wish away.
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When Dada Bhai Nawroji fought for his fellow Indians, what exactly was he fighting for?
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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I am Amit Verma, a man who Mohandas Gandhi once called, Father of the Nation.
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Nawroji was an inspiration not just for Gandhi, but an entire generation of our freedom fighters,
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and he epitomized what is known as a moderate school within the Congress party.
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He wanted peaceful change from within the system, so much so that he became the first
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Indian to win election into the British Parliament, so that he could push for change from within.
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He was 67 years old at the time, with a lifetime of activism behind him.
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And in his last years, having failed in his moderate ways, he turned towards a so-called
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extremist wing of the Congress party, men like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and gave them reason
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Dada Bhai Nawroji lived into his 90s, and when a man spent so many decades in public
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life, beginning with fighting for the education of girls and ending with a battle against
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empire, it's hard to build a simple narrative around him.
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Like so many other great figures in our freedom struggle, Nawroji contained multitudes.
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My guest today on the show is Dinyar Patel, whose outstanding biography of Nawroji, simply
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titled, Nawroji Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, is on the stands now.
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It's a rich and nuanced look at Nawroji's life, not just giving a sense of the interior
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life of this complex man, but also painting a vivid picture of Indian society and British
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I had been hearing rave reviews of Dinyar's book for a while now, and I was delighted
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to get him onto the show.
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Before we begin our conversation though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Are you one of those people who not only loves to read, but also wants to write better?
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If so, I have something for you.
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Since April this year, I've been teaching an online course called, The Art of Clear
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Four webinars spread out over four Saturdays, in which I share whatever I've learnt about
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The course also contains many writing exercises, discussions on email and WhatsApp, and much
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It costs Rs 10,000 or $150.
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You can check out the details at indiaankar.com slash clear writing.
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This link will be in the show notes.
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If you want to bridge the gap between the thoughts in your head and the words on the
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page, then The Art of Clear Writing might be just what you need.
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September batches begin on Saturday, September 5th, so hurry and register before then, indiaankar.com
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Dinyar, welcome to the scene in The Unseen.
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Dinyar, I loved reading your book on Dada Bhai Naoroji, especially because despite my
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deep interest in Indian history, I hadn't really read much about him.
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He was a peripheral figure in all the other books I'd read on Gokhale and the 19th century
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freedom struggle and so on.
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And part of the reason, of course, is that your book is really the first comprehensive
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But before we get started on the book, which had so many TIL moments for me and I enjoyed
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reading so thoroughly, I'd like to know a little bit about yourself.
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What has your journey been like, not just your bare bones career or academic journey
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to getting a PhD in history and at Harvard and writing the book and so on, but in general
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your intellectual history, who are the sort of thinkers who influenced you?
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Who are the books that made a big difference to your life?
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What drew you to history?
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What drew you to Dada Bhai?
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So I was born and raised in the US actually, I was born in Houston and I grew up in a relatively
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small town in California called Bakersfield, which is unlike most of California in the
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sense that it's quite conservative and it's the type of place that voted for Trump quite
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solidly in the last election.
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So keeping in mind where I grew up, it's a little bit of an unusual trajectory to, first
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of all, land up in Mumbai and also be studying Indian history.
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But I think that there were a few things, again, growing up that kind of pointed me
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in this direction, studying kind of the world around you.
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When at least I was in school, again, obviously before internet and such, while other people
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were reading teenage novels or whatnot, I would pick up books from a series that our
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library had on countries around the world.
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And I just got very interested in geography, in the US at least there's a geography B that
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takes place, so I used to take part in that every year.
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And so I think also just growing up in a relatively small town, you naturally become much more
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interested in the world around you.
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And the little bit of experience I had traveling before college kind of solidified that experience.
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I remember going with my mother to visit relatives in Calcutta when I was about 10 years old
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and that was kind of the first trip at least to India, which I really remembered and kind
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of left an impression on me and also traveling through different parts of Asia on the way
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to get there between Los Angeles and Calcutta through Bangkok and Tokyo.
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So once I got to college, at least, I was deciding between two different trajectories.
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I've always been quite interested in architecture and urban planning and still to this day,
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I kind of wonder if maybe I should have done that instead.
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But the other trajectory was doing something with international relations or history.
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And so in college, I went to college in Stanford, I started taking a lot of IR, international
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relations courses and history courses, and I eventually studied abroad or worked abroad
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for the equivalent of about one and a half years.
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And that really was a very formative experience for me.
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I mean, just kind of living outside of one's comfort zone and I studied in China for a
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Actually, I learned Chinese in college and I eventually gave it up once I realized that
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I just could not do the language, it's a very complex process.
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But nevertheless, that allowed me the opportunity to live in China for a few months in, I think,
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So a fascinating time to be there, just to do with all the breakneck change.
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I got to see the Three Gorges Dam being under construction, go to parts of China that were
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just opening up to kind of foreign visitors and signs of economic development around you.
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And slowly, I got drawn more and more towards Indian history in college.
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And I worked for a few years after college.
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And while working, I decided I wanted to do a PhD in history, in Indian history specifically.
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But I did not anticipate becoming an academic after doing a PhD.
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So even when I was admitted to my program in Harvard, I told my advisor, look, I probably
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won't become an academic historian after this.
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I'll probably go into more of a policy world type job.
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And I was looking at programs at MIT, for example, that had programs on IR and such.
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And as happens inevitably, I guess, when you're on a PhD program, you get sucked into it.
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So you don't really have a choice.
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So here I am so many years afterwards in an academic career.
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And when I began my academic career, at least in Harvard, when I started my PhD, I was very
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struck by certain things about the discipline of Indian history.
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I mean, when you study 19th and 20th century history in India, you notice that there's
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a great deal of focus on certain things.
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And the rest is oftentimes just a blank slate.
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So there's a great deal of work on Bengal specifically in the 19th century.
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You have the subaltern studies perspective on kind of this bottom up approach of history.
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You have a great deal of writing on a few characters.
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But again, there was hardly anything on anyone else.
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So this struck me especially for early Indian nationalist leaders, I mean, where were good
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up-to-date books and writings on figures like Naroji or Gokhale or Ranade or those other
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characters or even later on, I mean, people like Patel or Azad or others, where was that
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And so I got attracted to writing something on Naroji for partly that reason.
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And the other reason was I always had a longstanding interest in Parsi history.
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So PhD was a good excuse to kind of find out more about your community and your family.
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And Naroji kind of fit the bill.
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I mean, since he was a Parsi leader in addition to being a nationalist, he was kind of a natural
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choice for investigating and researching.
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But you know, again, when you are in a PhD program in the US in history and you propose
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to write on someone like Naroji, you oftentimes will get a lot of stares or you're people
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asking you, what are you doing?
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Because at least 10 years ago, that was not the type of PhD dissertation people expected
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You're supposed to do something kind of, I guess, you know, to use a word more fashionable,
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more in keeping with some of the political orientations of the field, maybe something
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a bit more narrow, definitely not something on a political elite.
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So I definitely got a lot of question marks from people.
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Why are you doing this?
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Why are you researching this boring elite, you know, who has very little to do with where
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the rest of the field is going?
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And I was very lucky at least in the sense that my advisor was very supportive, first
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of all, and I got to meet other people who were, you know, again, slowly changing the
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parameters of the field.
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So I met Ramchandra Guha when I was probably in my third or fourth year, I think was, I
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think third year of my PhD program.
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And again, I found someone who was extremely supportive and who has supported me ever since
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then and has again really helped shape the direction in history where now we are taking
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biographies more seriously.
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So I was very fortunate to have that particular source of help.
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And you know, through Ram and through others, I've met so many others who, again, are kind
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of pushing the boundaries and helping diversify the field of history beyond kind of the ideological
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frames that it's been, you know, oftentimes kind of channeled in over the past few decades.
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In fact, that's something that, you know, non-historians don't often realize looking
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from the outside in that so much of history writing is driven by ideology.
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Like you pointed out that it became unfashionable at one point to, you know, do biographies
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to focus on the lives of men, especially elite men, as now as you obviously was, and you
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instead want to, you know, follow other set narratives and, you know, look at bottom
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up currents of history and all of that.
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And so is that something that was a strain to fight against in the academy?
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Or did you find that meeting professional historians who don't take that approach,
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like Ram, for example, is something that helped you kind of work past that?
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And what do you feel about that?
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Does it color the way we view history or write history?
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It definitely is a problem.
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I mean, now I think that we're seeing a bit more of a diversity in history.
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But I mean, when we think of the current political moment we're in right now, I mean, obviously
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politics and the way history has been politicized, if you think of, you know, again, the whole
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principle of action and reaction, I mean, you can understand why we're in a particular
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moment right now when history has been so deeply colored by political perspectives from,
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you know, the other side, from the left side.
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So you know, I mean, when we have these particular narrow perspectives for studying history and,
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you know, India is no different in many cases from other parts of the world which have had
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these ideological straightjackets, you know, it has a knockoff effect.
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And yes, it was difficult a little bit, you know, while writing and researching the PhD
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to kind of justify my project.
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But with the help of people like Ram and others and, you know, you meet people along the way
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who kind of, you know, take on your supportive role.
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And I think as I started to write a bit more about what I was finding, you know, I was
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looking at a series of papers in the National Archives in Delhi, which really had not been
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looked at by more than three or four historians ever since Naroji passed away.
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You know, those tons of interesting new material that, you know, one finds in such a collection.
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And once you start writing about that, people tend to kind of latch on and realize that
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what, you know, what you're going after.
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So even though I've always been very skeptical about theory, I've never really enjoyed it.
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I found it very frustrating to read in graduate school and, you know, maybe I wasn't a very
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popular grad student on account of that.
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I do think that I do believe very, very strongly in kind of these strongly empirical groundings
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and methods that, you know, historians have have used and, you know, the really good historians
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have, you know, known to make sure to read everything that's out there or, you know,
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as much as you possibly can.
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And that really, you know, the example that I had from people like Ram or others like
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the senior Indian professor S.R.
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Mehrotra really made a very big difference in kind of providing a source of encouragement.
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And one of the things that I really liked about your book is, you know, when I get historians
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on the show and if you're talking about the 17th century or the 16th century or whatever
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century, which is not the current time, you know, I'll often ask things like what did
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they eat in those days, you know, what was their day like, give me a sense of the texture
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of their day and all of that.
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And they're kind of blank about that.
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And one of the things I enjoyed about your book is, of course, you said that there are
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a lot of papers which cover especially his London years, right down to, you know, little
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pre-quotidian bills and small memos and all of that.
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But from all of that, you could actually also, you know, draw a picture for the reader of
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the kind of clothes he wore, how that changed depending on the occasion and the thinking
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behind it, the kind of food he ate, how I mean, I was fascinated by, you know, he wakes
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up, he doesn't have breakfast, he has three raw eggs for lunch while standing and all
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And those I thought were excellent details, which other historians may have just chosen
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to ignore because they are so mundane and banal that you, but I'm glad that you put
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So tell me a little bit about your process.
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And that's really a two part question.
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One is the process for the project.
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How do you approach the project, where are the papers located, what kind of condition
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Do you, you know, like if they're at an archive, you go, you take them out, you photograph
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How do you handle them?
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And then secondly, just the mental process of then working on the narrative, where obviously
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you go in knowing a lot of facts about Naroji, which are in the popular domain.
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But you know, do you kind of have to ignore them and pretend that you have a blank slate
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in your mind and you're discovering everything all over again?
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Given that, you know, we all suffer from the hindsight bias, we know everything that has
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happened intimately, we feel it was inevitable.
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And your book doesn't seem to sort of make that mistake at all, you know, reflected,
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for example, in the way that someone like Mahatma Gandhi plays such a small peripheral
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part in it, though I can easily imagine other approaches to the history making, you know,
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because of what he went on to become, giving more importance to his connection with Naroji.
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But he was a peripheral figure for India and Naroji and that kind of comes across.
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So yeah, so these two, you know, one is, you know, what is the process in terms of physically
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what do you have to do?
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How long did it take you?
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Do you get this out in and then mentally, how do you approach it?
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So if you are studying Indian history in the 19th or the 20th century, and to a certain
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degree, the 18th century, chances are you're going to be in one of two or three places,
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including the National Archives of India or the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
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And I was in both places because Naroji's papers, so when Naroji died, there was a collection
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of probably maybe 50,000 documents in Naroji's collection.
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And there's a very kind of long history of what happens to those papers after he dies.
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They kept in Bombay and they rot away and every 10 years or so, someone will fish them
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out and see what's there and make a catalog.
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And there's a attempt to catalog and publish the papers, but it ultimately falls through.
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Eventually, they moved to Pune and there's a scholar there called R.P. Patwardhan who
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spends, you know, he's told by someone called R.P. Masani, who is Naroji's first biography.
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He was told by Masani that, look, it'll take you a few years, just go through the papers,
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show me, you know, tell me what is good to publish in a selected volume.
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And it took the rest of R.P. Patwardhan's life, it took him 20 odd years to go through the
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papers and cull out collections for publication.
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And eventually from Patwardhan's residence, they get transported to the National Archives
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And by this point in time, what had originally been a collection of about 50,000 documents
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when Naroji died had whittled down to maybe around 40 to 30,000 documents.
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And by the time I got there, probably 30,000, you know, maybe a little bit more.
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So what we have over here is a very clear track record of loss, which is true across
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the board in Indian archives and records, because of the climate, because of bad record
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keeping, because of, you know, people just throwing away the collections, a lot of stuff
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And Naroji is actually one of the best cases of preservation that we have, because at least
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here the collection is in the order of tens of thousands, right?
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If you look at someone like Ranade, we have a handful of his letters, right?
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If you look at W.C. Banerjee, the first president of the Congress, we have basically nothing.
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I mean, someone had his letters up until 1940, published a few in a not terribly good book,
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We never hear anything after that about what happened.
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So India's had a very shoddy track record of archival preservation.
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And at least with the Naroji papers, that record was much better.
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So a lot had been lost, yes, but the vast majority had been preserved.
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It was not in a very good state of preservation.
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So when I got to the National Archives, and I think that was the year 2011 to start my
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research, you know, I was taken to a room and said, here's the catalog, you know, tell
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me what you want, basically.
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So you know, only when I got to the archives did I discover that there are these 30,000
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And, you know, I thought I might be in the National Archives for a few months.
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I ended up being there for about two years, and I only got through about half of the collection.
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So there's another half that I haven't even seen.
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But I mean, one of the nice things about doing archival work in India, which you do not get
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at, say, like a British library or archives in America, is that if you show to the archivists
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that you're there for the long run, and, you know, you are, you know, an honest and committed
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scholar, they give you certain privileges that you would not otherwise enjoy in other
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So I started working very closely with some of the archivists and saying, you know, I
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found this document, can you make sure it gets preserved properly, because otherwise
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And over time, at least I was lucky enough to build up a relationship of trust with them
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that they allowed me to actually go into the back room and get material myself.
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So I didn't have to worry for, you know, about waiting for someone to deliver the papers
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I could go in the back and get the material myself.
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And that definitely helped me in the sense of understanding what the papers were like,
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what it's like to go through someone's life collection and how it's organized and where
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there are discrepancies and where there's too much material, where there's too little
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And so, I mean, to answer your question, at least of methodology, I, you know, I think
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the author Robert Carroll was onto something when he said, you know, you have to go through
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You have to turn every page.
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And of course, you know, in a PhD program, you don't necessarily have that luxury because
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you eventually have to graduate.
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And I definitely took much longer than I should have.
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I took eight years and, you know, I should not have taken that long.
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But I tried to get as close to that as possible.
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And I think at the ultimate end, it was very helpful.
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I mean, perhaps 80 percent of the material I collected, I never used in the book.
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But it helped me kind of create an overall structure of where this individual's life
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And it ultimately will help me as I write my next books as well.
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And Cairo, of course, has taken more than 40 years over his Lyndon Johnson biography,
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which I think the sixth volume will be out sooner.
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So that, well, so I'm glad you didn't follow his example that seriously.
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And the second part of the question, then, you know, when you begin, how do you sort
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Do you have a preset narrative in your mind that kind of changes as you go along?
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Or do you try to just sort of put yourself in the moment that a document is from and
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try to figure it out from there?
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You know, how did the book mutate and take shape in your head?
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So when I started the project, you know, I read the little material on Naroji that was
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I mean, the first biography, as I mentioned, for Naroji was written by Rustam Masani, R.P.
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Masani, and it was written in 1939.
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And it's a great book in the sense that it's far more comprehensive than mine in terms
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of wanting to know about Naroji's life.
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He had access to material that was gone and lost by the time I had the chance to look
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But it is ultimately colored by the politics of the time.
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I mean, Masani was a moderate and he was writing in a way to try to show Naroji as kind of
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a moderate, loyalist leader in that sense, somewhat separate from Gandhi.
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And he tried to hold up Naroji as a model of what nationalism was like before it took
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this kind of break from, you know, some sense of British loyalism, you know, this difference
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that took place after the Puran Swaraj Declaration was made by the Congress in 1929, 1930.
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And so, you know, I went into the archives with kind of this literature showing Naroji
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as being quite a moderate leader, ultimately a loyalist, not a terribly radical leader.
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And again, I think the most important thing I gained from reading his private correspondence
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was helping me get away from that narrative.
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I mean, ultimately, yes, Naroji during the course of his life made several declarations
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talking about how he was loyal to British rule.
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You know, he was a proud member of the British Empire.
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But at the same time, he was making completely contradictory statements.
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He was talking about British rule being evil.
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If you read his private correspondence with certain people, he's talking about British
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rule in quite condemnatory terms.
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I mean, he was talking about how British rule was responsible for mass famine and people
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were being killed in the millions because of the policies that were being pursued or
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not pursued by the British.
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So, you know, it kind of evolved, in my sense at least, a question of what does it mean
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So you can say that you are a loyal member of, you know, the Empire, you're loyal to
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the Queen or the King or whatever, but what does that mean?
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And ultimately, you know, I kind of understood Naroji's loyalism as a bit of a tactic and
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a way to kind of undercut a lot of the elements of, you know, nefarious colonial policy.
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You know, he said he and other early nationalists kind of built up this narrative of British
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But in reality, we have Y.
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British rule should be something about equality, democratic rights, some sort of progressive
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But in reality, you know, what you had in India was this very reactionary, undemocratic,
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fiercely authoritarian rule where, you know, progressive, any sense of progressive policy
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was completely absolute, right?
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I mean, it was very derogatory towards Indians.
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It didn't really support education.
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So you know, the idea of British rule was ultimately, you know, not British rule.
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It was some kind of idealized conception that involved separating yourself 99% from actual
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So in many ways, it was kind of a tactic, and that helped me kind of separate my particular
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view on Naroji from, say, what Massani or others had written about beforehand.
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And you know, this is important, at least from the standpoint of writing history.
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Whenever you investigate an individual, what someone writes and publishes in public is
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obviously very different from what they're saying in private or writing in private.
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And this only really comes across when you're able to do sustained archival research.
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I mean, again, not something like what Caro has done.
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I can't afford to take 40 years.
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But you know, if you put several months or perhaps years into it, you gain a familiarity
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with someone's life and you're able to discern what their real meanings were.
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You know, one of the things that strikes me, especially about how we view history today,
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is that we look for simplistic narratives.
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And especially we make these harsh binaries.
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Well the fact is that someone who's been in public life for decades, as Naroji was, will
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inevitably contain multitudes.
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And also what seems to happen, and what you've charted out very well in your book, is that
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at different stages of his life, and you of course divided his career into sort of three
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broad stages, but at different stages of his life, he's responding to incentives and a
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lot of the moderating statements come from that, like in that initial theoretical phase
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where he comes up with the drain theory, and because he needs to be taken seriously, he
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can't take a radical tone.
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So he's got to sort of be moderate there.
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Similarly, when he's standing for parliament, of course, he's got to again and again proclaim
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And once that is done, of course, he's, you know, towards the end of his life, he's a
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little more radicalized.
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Let's start by sort of talking about, at this point, the early phase of his life, which
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was quite interesting to me, because even his early years, like, of course, he leaves
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Bombay when he's 30, when he goes for the, when he goes to London.
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But even in that time, he seems to have lived a fairly rich life, been a community leader,
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you know, especially in something like speaking of feminism, starting girls schools, all of
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It's tell me a bit about those early days in Bombay and what his background is like
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he is, of course, from this Parsi priestly family, which had once seen much better days,
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but is relatively impoverished when he comes and he's expected to join the priesthood.
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And you've spoken about how, you know, when he's three, his father dies, and that probably
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saves him from a life of priesthood.
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And even though he does a little bit of early training, but otherwise, you know, so tell
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me a bit about the Bombay of those days and Naroji growing up and what was the sort of
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environment around him, which shaped him and which shaped his thinking about the empire.
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So if we want to talk about Bombay in the early 1800s, we automatically have to think
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about the places where people were coming from.
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I mean, Bombay as this immigrant center was drawing in people from all across Western
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And in Naroji's case, the place his family came from was Navsari and Dharampur.
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Navsari was a very old Parsi settlement, you know, there still is a relatively large Parsi
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And Naroji's family was from a priestly line, you know, they could actually trace the descent
#
right back to the first priest, the first Zoroastrian priest who settled in Navsari.
#
And so, you know, it's kind of funny, the people in Navsari who still believe that Naroji
#
If you go to Navsari today, you will see a Naroji birthplace.
#
And you know, ever since the early 1900s, people have believed that Naroji was born
#
Even Gandhi thought that Naroji was born there.
#
And he went and paid a pilgrimage to that site in the 1920s during non-cooperation.
#
Naroji wasn't born there.
#
And he was born out of this kind of poor migrant perspective.
#
I mean, his parents had left Gujarat in probably the year 1824, 1823.
#
And at that moment in time, there was a famine in parts of Gujarat.
#
So there's a good chance that his family was impelled to move because of the real specter
#
And that was the same reason that was pushing people, Parsi Gujaratis, you know, Maharashtrians,
#
Konkanis from all across Western India into this new commercial entrepreneur.
#
So Bombay was growing by leaps and bounds.
#
In the year that Naroji was born, 1825, the Maidan, what is now Azad Maidan, was covered
#
with tents of people who were living there who had just migrated from famine tracts.
#
So it's a city that's growing every day, right?
#
And you get the sense of a city that's really kind of in formation.
#
It was also a very kind of rough and tumble place at this point in time.
#
I mean, this was before, you know, the grand colonial buildings that were constructed that
#
we think of when we associate that particular era of Bombay.
#
So it was not an easy place to live in.
#
I mean, if you read descriptions of Bombay from this era, people talk about wide sewers,
#
that basically would lap up on the doorsteps of people, trash was a huge problem, the water
#
that you drank was muddy, and there was a good chance that it would kill you.
#
So it was not a great place to live in from the standpoint of the vast majority of people.
#
But I think that the important thing for Naroji and many others in his generation who grew
#
up to be important political leaders is that they recognize the power of the diversity of
#
I mean, unlike any other city in India at this point in time, you had people coming from
#
all walks of life and they were all living right next to each other.
#
So the region of Bombay that he grew up in, an area called Khadak, is located right next
#
to an area called Israeli Mohalla, which is where, you know, members of the Beni-Israeli
#
It's next to a very large Muslim district, today's Bindi Bazar, and just to the north
#
of it, you have very rich Anglo-Indians, Pisces, Jews, British individuals living in places
#
like Baikal, which were fashionable in that day.
#
So he got a very strong flavor of kind of this cosmopolitan diversity.
#
And this played a really important role in his early activities.
#
I mean, he was admitted into a school at a very young age.
#
And as you mentioned, you know, the fact that his father passed away soon probably saved
#
him from a priestly career.
#
And he instead goes into a free school that was a quite novel experiment in this era.
#
Free schooling was not common anywhere in the world really at this point in time, 1830s.
#
And that really commits him to a life of public service because he realizes, at least he says
#
so later on when he writes about this later in life, he realized from a very early age
#
that he owed something to the general public.
#
They had paid for him getting as good an education as you possibly could in Bombay at this time.
#
And he was learning from British teachers, he was learning from Indian teachers, he was
#
reading Shakespeare, he was reading, you know, the latest science and philosophy coming from
#
So, you know, he received a very well-rounded education, and as importantly, it was in the
#
So he grew up speaking English fluently and being able to write in English fluently in
#
addition to Gujarati, and he probably knew some Hindustani and Marathi as well.
#
So that really set him on kind of this course of needing to pursue a public career.
#
And so he attends Elphinstone College, he kind of widens his intellectual horizons more
#
at this point in time, because the professors there are quite progressive in this era.
#
You know, even the British people who are teaching are very forward-looking and kind
#
of freely associate with Indians and support their reformist efforts.
#
And ultimately, after he leaves college, he decides to join Elphinstone as a teacher,
#
and he rises through the ranks quite quickly and becomes the first-ever Indian appointed
#
to the rank of full professor in a colonial college in India.
#
So from this very early age, he is already marked out for success, and he's a symbol
#
of change in many ways.
#
I mean, he was this very poor individual who's now at the very top of Indian society.
#
And this impels him, this whole experience of getting a kind of a very liberal education,
#
feeling responsible to the public, pushes him to adopt progressive causes.
#
And one of them, again, was female education.
#
In the 1850s, no Indian community had a strong suit with female education, including the
#
The Piouses were almost as reactionary as any other community in India at this point
#
And Narojit, to his credit, gets a group of fellow Indians, not just Piouses, but also
#
Gujaratis and Maharashtrians also gets them together, forms a network of indigenous schools
#
for girls, and persists in getting their parents to send girls to schools in spite of threats,
#
in spite of editorials against them, verbal abuse.
#
And what starts as a very unpromising venture grows into an experiment where hundreds and
#
hundreds of Indian girls are being educated by the mid-1850s.
#
And this is an unqualified success.
#
So he really kind of helps turn the table on orthodox thought at this point in time.
#
Yeah, I was struck by a couple of strands here.
#
One was his passion for education, not just self-education.
#
And you've actually done another really interesting thing that I liked in your book, where when
#
I read the biographies of people, I want to know what are the kind of books that they
#
And you've got a little list of that.
#
And obviously, they're all freely available on the internet because they're, you know,
#
so I kind of looked up a couple of them, and it was quite interesting to try and figure
#
out what those strands might have been.
#
And he takes education so seriously that at one point towards the end of his life, you
#
quote him as saying, quote, several honors came to me during my lifetime, but no other
#
title created in me that sense of pride, which I felt in being known as a professor, stop
#
And as you point out, he was, of course, the first Indian to be made a full professor,
#
even the sort of the two people he really admired, you pointed out at Elphinstone, Bal
#
Gangadhar Shah, Sri Jambekar and Navroji Fardunji were assistant professors at the
#
So he was sort of the first.
#
The other strand that struck me and, you know, very often, I think what happens is that when
#
men get into women's rights, they get into women's rights, but they get into it looking
#
at women as instrumental to the world of men.
#
And Navroji actually went beyond that.
#
So you've got a passage here, which I'll quote, quote, like Kaikhushru Hermasi, Navroji
#
believed that, quote, good and educated mothers only will raise good and educated sons, stop
#
But he also possessed notably progressive views on female education, arguing that it
#
was a fundamental pillar for establishing gender equality.
#
Indians he argued would one day, quote again, Navroji's words, understand that women had
#
as much right to exercise and enjoy all the rights, privileges and duties of this world
#
as man, each working towards a common good, stop quote.
#
And this seems remarkably sort of progressive.
#
And it was clearly a cause he cared about, because like you said, he started schools
#
for first Parsi girls and then Maharashtrian Hindu girls and then Muslim girls.
#
And it was something that he cared deeply about.
#
Also give me a sense of, you know, he founded many organizations.
#
He was part of many organizations, notably what you call as Young Bombay.
#
Tell me a bit about Young Bombay and his other community work.
#
He also founded a Gujarati newspaper called Rast Guftar, for which he continued sending
#
dispatches even when he was abroad.
#
And all of this before he's turned 30, because he leaves Bombay when he's turned 30.
#
How is such a young man so incredibly active and already a leader in his community at such
#
So what you said about education really being kind of a hallmark of his career, I think
#
can be applied to pretty much all the nationalist leaders of this early era, this kind of pre
#
It's written all throughout the narratives of anyone you can pick, Ranade, Gokhale, all
#
the way down to people who are less known.
#
I mean, recently in my research, I've been coming across articles written in Modern Review
#
by a lot of people who are not very familiar to us nowadays.
#
And education is always that theme.
#
Education is the key for uplifting Indian society.
#
And I think the reason why education was so important for both Naroji and these other
#
leaders is that there was a general understanding that India was at a very low point in its
#
I mean, most people, of course, would have no point of reference.
#
They would not be able to understand how rich the rest of the world was in comparison to
#
But they understood a sense of what the type of poverty India was experiencing through
#
oral narratives of parents or grandparents talking about how at one point in time there
#
was this very prosperous trade in cotton goods through understanding that poverty was increasing
#
dramatically just through the spate of famines, just through the fact that so many people
#
were pouring into the city of Bombay due to terrible conditions in the countryside.
#
So at this point in time, with so much evidence of poverty around you, education was really
#
the one tool you had for betterment.
#
And it was also one of those areas which the colonial government obviously exercised control,
#
but you had enough space to also exercise your own agency.
#
So the British officials at this time would talk a lot about how Indians need to embrace
#
Western education and they're so ignorant and they're so backward, but they wouldn't
#
really lift a finger for that.
#
If you look at the amount of money that the government of Bombay was paying for Indian
#
education at this point in time, it's a few hundred rupees.
#
I mean, it's terribly low.
#
So Indians kind of fill the gap.
#
And so I think there were many reasons why Narroji was motivated to take on these educational
#
activities just by surveying the condition of people around him and realizing that he
#
himself had grown up in such an impoverished background.
#
So there was struggle makes people all the more motivated to undertake such work.
#
And this team of betterment and reform through education was something that, again, just
#
propelled young Bombay from its very start.
#
And a very similar dynamic worked in Bengal with young Bengal one or two decades beforehand.
#
So there really was an idea that something was wrong.
#
The best way to help India to provide some sort of self-help was education.
#
And education could provide reform in three crucial aspects, religious reform, social
#
reform, and finally, political reform.
#
And these three spheres of reform are completely linked.
#
It was impossible to think of one type of reform throughout the other.
#
And these three pillars of reform therefore became kind of the foundation upon which all
#
these different organizations that Narroji helped to found in Bombay in the 1840s and
#
So he helps establish learned societies.
#
As you mentioned, he helps establish a Gujarati language newspaper, which is explicitly for
#
the purpose of disseminating education and talking about the need for reform, not just
#
within the Parsi community, but within the wider Gujarati reading public.
#
He takes part in the first formal political organization, the Bombay Association in 1851,
#
So it's a very well-rounded attempt to kind of think about how Indian society needed to
#
be reformed and changed in reference to impetus from the West, but also in reference to what
#
Indians themselves thought about what was wrong and what the situation was like under
#
And there definitely was a very radical streak in all of this also.
#
I mentioned in my book how people like Narroji were influenced by a generation of quite radical
#
Maharashtrian thinkers from the 1840s who talked about colonialism being terrible and wrote
#
about it publicly and talked about something like a drain of wealth.
#
All before Narroji popularized the term.
#
So all these different forms of impetus explain how Young Bombay took place and why it took
#
place at that particular point in time.
#
And just on a tangent to use a phrase which has possibly become overused these days, but
#
is there a sense of what is the idea of India, if there is an idea of India, or what are
#
the ideas of India that are floating around in the ether which Narroji can sort of imbibe
#
I mean, depending on what sources you're looking at, India still could include Afghanistan,
#
it could include Singapore, it could include what is called the East Indies in the sense
#
of what we now know as Indonesia and Malaya.
#
And certainly since there were Indian populations in all of these places, there was an understanding
#
of India validly being a part of these regions.
#
Well, there definitely is a sense that the subcontinent as we think of it, everything
#
south of the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush being India, that sense is definitely coming
#
I mean, when you read the newspapers from this era, people are talking about what's
#
going on in Bengal, what's going on in Madras.
#
They're also talking about what's going on in Ceylon and eventually by the time of the
#
mutiny, parts of North India gather people's interest.
#
But there definitely is a sense that there is this kind of contiguous unit.
#
I mean, yes, there's a great degree of diversity in it, but there's a certain commonality and
#
there already is the idea that we should think about what Bengalis are thinking about because
#
ultimately we're part of the same milieu.
#
We should exchange letters with whatever political association is taking place in Madras because
#
ultimately their concerns are very similar to what we're talking about also.
#
So there was, I think, a certain sense of cultural cohesion happening.
#
And we can't discredit the role of at least British colonial administration in this process.
#
I mean, the fact that all of these places were under British colonial administration
#
obviously got people talking about how they could jointly together campaign for better
#
rights towards the same government.
#
And just looking at what sort of shapes Navroji's personality and his approach to dealing with
#
the British, the famous moderate approach, quote unquote, so to say.
#
You know, how big a role did the contingency of just the environment around him in Bombay
#
Because it strikes me like there's one passage where you write, quote, as a student, Navroji
#
was exposed to a constant tussle between a miserly government and Indian stakeholders
#
demanding more resources and better funding.
#
He did not have to look far beyond the classroom walls to observe the many yawning gaps between
#
imperial rhetoric and reality, stop quote.
#
And the sense that I got from your chapter on this phase of his life is that number one,
#
whatever empire might be, at a personal level, like you said, the teachers, the British teachers
#
he encounters at Elfenstrand are very progressive and different from what the establishment
#
Plus, there are other British people in power who take an interest in him, who try to help
#
him out in various ways, which to some extent could explain the fact that he isn't a radical
#
and thinking in terms of breaking away.
#
Instead, he wants to continue doing and he does for the rest of his life what he's learned
#
to do in these early years in Bombay, that if you want to change something, say if you
#
want more funding for schools, you petition, you try to take legal ways, you send a petition,
#
you try to talk to sort of all of these people.
#
You know, how contingent is the background of how you grow up and these sort of influences
#
and what you later on go on to do?
#
Obviously, you've also looked at other historical figures, like say a Tilak or a Bipin Chandra
#
Pal on one end, and maybe a Gokhale and a Ranade at the more moderate end, his fellow
#
Parsi Feroz Shah Mehta, for example.
#
Does that kind of background and all of that sort of make a difference in what you do for
#
the rest of your life, you think?
#
I think it plays a very large role.
#
You know, towards the end of his life, now Naroji was rightly criticized by many radical
#
nationalists as being too unwilling to give up this idea that the British people themselves
#
Ultimately, they were on the side of justice and only if you tried hard enough, you would
#
get what you deserved and what you demanded.
#
And that sentiment, I think, stems to a large degree from what you said, his upbringing
#
He was around a lot of relatively progressive minded Britons, people who believed in, obviously,
#
the British Empire, but at the same time, were critical of it and did make an honest
#
attempt to help people like Naroji.
#
So there was a definite sense that the system, as it was in Bombay, had certain advantages.
#
And the British rule, even though it had all these terrible flaws, at least that progressive
#
impulse was there and if you pushed and prodded enough and if you tried to convince people
#
enough, they'd come around to your viewpoint.
#
And that was something very difficult for Naroji to let go of.
#
By the time he's 80, he's just about wrestling with this idea that maybe all of this is wrong
#
and ultimately something like Swaraj, where you're completely separate from the British
#
Empire, might be a possibility.
#
And again, for someone like Tilak or Bipin Chandra Pal or others, this idea they had
#
thrown out the window many decades ago.
#
I mean, they had already realized that this sense of British justice was more illusion
#
And so it was much easier.
#
They had made this realization much earlier in life.
#
Naroji, since he had a relatively positive experience with many of these figures and
#
since the figures in his life who were British were more progressive in many ways, did not
#
So I think that's one ground which we can definitely criticize Naroji for not seeing
#
a more holistic perspective on what the British public was like or interrogating this idea
#
of what British justice meant.
#
So till 13, there have been sort of these two strands that I see in Naroji's life.
#
One is that he's intensely into education and he's a math whiz.
#
If he was alive today, he'd be a quant or a serious economist.
#
Some of that work is just remarkable.
#
And that's on the one hand where he's on the track and massive academic success because
#
he's the first Indian professor and all of that.
#
The other track is he's doing things within society, he started all these girls' schools
#
and he's part of these organizations, he started this Gujarati newspaper.
#
And then at 30, he gives it all up, or not gives it all up, but leaves it for the moment
#
and decides to go to England to basically work in a corporate job for the Kamas and
#
strikes out on his own a couple of years later.
#
So essentially, he ends up spending decades in England.
#
Give me a sense of what's going through his head at this time.
#
These two things are so important to him, everything that he's doing in Bombay as part
#
of Young Bombay and outside that and equally as an academic, he's making such a difference
#
here in Bombay and yet he goes there.
#
And this is in fact the criticism that will come to him even later when he's settling
#
down and wants to run for parliament after losing the first time and you point out in
#
your book how all his friends, including people in the Congress, because the Congress is supporting
#
him financially and morally and they're sort of with him, but they're like, no, you come
#
back here, we need you here.
#
This was very sort of interesting to me because it's not like he goes to England and he immediately
#
gets into activism for a better India or whatever.
#
So I was just trying to kind of figure out his motivations here.
#
It's very tough to understand and figure out those motivations because so much of the source
#
Amongst those 30,000 documents that I talked about, there's nothing for this era.
#
Most of the 30,000 documents come from after the year 1886 and we're in the year 1855 when
#
he decides to go out to England.
#
So it's very tough to reconstruct what his motives are.
#
But we do know that his announcement to sail and go off to England and give up everything
#
that he had done in Bombay came as a complete shock to everyone.
#
So when his superiors at Elphinstone College learn that he has decided to quit and join
#
a commercial firm, they're so caught off guard.
#
I mean, apparently the school principal says to him, Dada Bai, what a fall.
#
There are other officials in the government who are so panicked by this that they actually
#
use the telegraph to contact the governor.
#
And the telegraph had just been introduced into India at this point in time.
#
So they're using this newfangled technology because it's really urgent.
#
This star teacher is now leaving and he's been such an important part of the urban fabric
#
What we do know is that Naroji was only expecting to be in the United Kingdom for a few years.
#
He wanted about two or three years leave from Elphinstone and then he wanted to come back
#
That, of course, never happened.
#
He ended up staying on in Great Britain and he pursued a career as a businessman.
#
But, you know, if we try to think of what's going on inside his mind, a few things come
#
I mean, first of all, by 1855, he's getting much more involved in political activities
#
and political activities in the direction of criticizing colonial rule.
#
By this point in time, the Bombay Association has established this kind of a more forward
#
looking wing within the Bombay Association where people like Baudhaji Lard or Naroji
#
Fardoonji are participating and they're much more vocal in their criticism of British rule.
#
So what better can you do than to go to the heart of empire and see for yourself what's
#
You know, what is the heart of empire like and how does the, you know, the whole political
#
process work over there?
#
And the second reason, again, of why this would have been an attractive thing for Naroji
#
is that when he joins the karma company, he's specifically going there to work in the cotton
#
And in this era, the cotton trade was the big business for Bombay.
#
I mean, opium has just started to fade as being kind of this important, you know, component
#
of the economy and cotton was really coming in.
#
And by being an Indian in Great Britain, you are kind of, again, going against the tide.
#
You were, you know, cotton was flowing out of India and enriching Great Britain.
#
Here you were an Indian going out to Great Britain in order to kind of reverse that direction
#
a little bit and, you know, help Indians acquire machinery by which they can eventually build
#
their own cotton mills and maybe take a chunk out of Lancashire's profit.
#
So I think it was exciting in that aspect also from him.
#
And the last component where I think it really plays an influential, an idea that really
#
plays an influential role in Naroji's thought in his decision to go out to England is that
#
at this time, there is, you know, discussion about Indians being allowed to join the Indian
#
And again, the Indian Civil Service was this elite cadre, kind of the, you know, the origins
#
of what is now the IAS, and 99.9% it was, well, 100% at this point in time, it was British.
#
The people working at, you know, all rungs of power of importance in the ICS were British.
#
And through a system of civil service examinations, finally, there was the possibility that Indians
#
could be allowed to compete.
#
And so Naroji went out to England in part in order to kind of help guide the first Indians
#
who came out to Great Britain in order to compete for the civil service exam.
#
Because again, in this era, if you as an Indian wanted to join the civil service, you could
#
not take an exam in India.
#
You had to, you know, shell out your life savings, sail halfway across the world to
#
Great Britain, spend upwards to two years studying in an extremely expensive, cold foreign
#
And only then, you know, maybe take the exam and, you know, 50% chance that you might pass.
#
Or, you know, if you failed, you lost everything and you had to return to Bombay or Calcutta
#
or wherever, humiliate.
#
So this was not an easy prospect for anyone who wanted to undertake this effort.
#
And Naroji thought, you know, as someone who is interested in political matters, why don't
#
I go out there and as a professor, try to help people and help them get prepared for
#
And that's initially what he does.
#
I mean, when he goes out to Great Britain, he joins this cotton firm of the Karma family,
#
but he's immediately distracted.
#
He might have been a very bad businessman in this aspect, in the sense that he's immediately
#
distracted by political activities.
#
He, you know, starts to campaign for civil service reform.
#
He joins as a professor in University College in London, teaching Gujarati.
#
And this puts him in touch with people like Henry Maine or other important colonial officials
#
who are sitting as examiners for the civil service exam.
#
So Naroji is one examiner alongside Henry Maine and other important individuals.
#
And so he's automatically drawn into this political world that he could only see at
#
a distance when he was sitting in Bombay.
#
And I found it instructive to remind myself, and your book makes it easy to do so, that,
#
you know, going to London in those days wasn't quite what it is today, that you just take
#
a flight and you're there.
#
It took weeks to get there.
#
And London is a shitty city in those days.
#
It's polluted, it's grotty, it's Charles Dickens's London, it's full of disease.
#
It's easy and you've got various parts in your book where you paint a very vivid picture
#
of sort of the trouble Naroji had in just adjusting there and why he became such a focal
#
point of the community.
#
At this point, it's time to actually sort of begin with what in your book you describe
#
as the three phases of Naroji's life.
#
You've just reached the beginning of phase one when he lands up in London.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and then we'll get into the meat and bones of
#
it as soon as we're back.
#
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Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Dinyar Patel on his excellent biography of Dada Bhai Nawroji and you know,
#
at this point, Nawroji has reached London and we have reached London with him.
#
The year is 1855 and now begins sort of the first phase or rather he moves towards the
#
first phase of his career, which you describe as a theoretical phase where he comes up with
#
what is known as a drain theory.
#
And you know, one of the interesting points you made here is you pointed out how Nawroji
#
is often considered an economic nationalist, but you point out that economic nationalism
#
and political nationalism for him kind of go together.
#
They're so intimately enmeshed.
#
So tell me a little bit about the kind of work he does during this period.
#
Economic nationalism and political nationalism, at least in my perspective and at least in,
#
you know, in light of Nawroji's career, were two sides of the same coin.
#
Nawroji began his interest in, began pursuing an interest in Indian poverty out of this
#
question of reform, government reform, and ultimately poverty becomes the rationale for
#
political reform in India.
#
And I think there are a few reasons why, again, he starts to think about poverty and reform
#
So again, if you are in London in the late 1850s and the early 1860s, you are in the
#
biggest city of the world.
#
You are in the most powerful city in the world.
#
As you mentioned, you're in a terrible city also, right?
#
I mean, it's horribly polluted.
#
The Thames smells like sulfur.
#
The food is awful, of course.
#
I mean, so it's a difficult place to be, but it's also, it's a fascinating place to be.
#
It's kind of like Bombay today.
#
I mean, it's, you know, it's both, you know, dirty and smelly, but also very exciting and,
#
you know, very, it's an exciting place to be in.
#
And in this era, when Nawroji is in London, again, he realizes just how rich, you know,
#
in spite of all these terrible things about London, how rich Great Britain is in comparison
#
You know, the country is booming.
#
It's the world's most prosperous country.
#
There are factories everywhere.
#
There's a large working class that's being slowly empowered through political reform.
#
There are politicians who are talking about democratization.
#
And at the same time, you know, being in London and Liverpool, which was the other city he
#
lived in, he was, you know, miles away from the places where all the wealth of empire
#
was dumped and distributed across the country.
#
So when we think of the drain of wealth, he was at the very end of the spigot.
#
I mean, he saw the wealth that had been drained out, you know, come to British shores and
#
be disseminated through the banks and bank accounts of various British individuals.
#
So you know, there's a very vivid kind of understanding of how imperialism works when
#
you're at the very heart of empire.
#
And again, the last reason for why this era is particularly important is what is going
#
on around the empire and globally at this moment.
#
So of course, in the early 1860s, you have the American Civil War, which has an immediate
#
global knockoff effect.
#
All of a sudden, in one stroke, the cotton that had been feeding this great industrial
#
machine in Great Britain is cut off.
#
It had come from the American South.
#
And there's this huge panic, right?
#
People like Sven Beckert have written about it in his book Empire of Cotton.
#
You know, the cotton that was sustaining your industrial prowess is no longer there.
#
Well, eventually, India became one of those places where cotton was brought into to feed
#
these, you know, dark, systemic mills, so to speak, of Great Britain.
#
And Naroji's friends in Bombay and he in London get extremely rich during this cotton boom
#
during the American Civil War.
#
And as quickly as the cotton boom ends, they all go bankrupt.
#
You know, Naroji goes bankrupt because he loans out money to friends who turn out to,
#
you know, not have been able to pay him back.
#
He was a bit too honest of a businessman in that regard.
#
But automatically, you get this huge slump in Bombay, which eventually, you know, which
#
has terrible consequences on the countryside.
#
I mean, it contributes to famines in places like Kandesh and Gujarat by the 1860s and
#
So there's one kind of big global shock, right, that kind of brings home this idea of how
#
the economy is linked together and how poverty and prosperity are, again, two sides of the
#
The other big event that takes place, which, again, Naroji is seeing from a distance, is
#
the Orissa Famine of 1867, 1868, where, again, you know, he'd never stepped foot in Orissa
#
But the reports that were coming out of Orissa at this point were gruesome and terrible.
#
One out of every three people might have died.
#
And as later investigations took place, it was realized that this was largely preventable.
#
I mean, there were boats with grain that could have easily been shipped in, but, you know,
#
the colonial officials for various reasons did not do it, and the result is one million
#
And so the very first proper speech that Naroji gives on the drain of wealth, he doesn't call
#
it the drain of wealth at this point in time, he doesn't even use the word drain, is kind
#
of in reflection to these two particular moments, and especially the Orissa Famine.
#
I mean, he gives this speech in 1867, so the Orissa Famine is definitely very much on his
#
And he asks a question, you know, okay, so British rule, we're told, is good, it's provided
#
us with all these benefits, rule of law, it's supposedly better than the chaos that was
#
present in India before British rule.
#
So you have that, but at the same time, you have these terrible famines, whereas the life
#
that's secured through law and peace is ultimately being killed anyway, right, through terrible
#
What explains this contradiction?
#
And that really is the impetus for understanding Indian poverty in Naroji's mind.
#
Why is, on one hand, you know, British rule being credited with giving these benefits
#
to India, yet on the other hand, it's very clearly impoverishing the country?
#
Why is there this central contradiction?
#
And as Naroji progresses through about two decades of close economic analysis, he again
#
sheds this view that British rule was beneficent, that it ultimately was doing all of these
#
So these ideas that he had during his first few speeches that, you know, some of the drain
#
was justified, that the services that the British were rendered were being, you know,
#
paid back in part through the drain, he throws these out the window.
#
And he realizes that, no, the drain itself is a nefarious process.
#
And he realizes that, you know, the supposed benefits of British rule, like the railways,
#
irrigation systems, et cetera, are actually accelerating the drain.
#
You know, with the railways, you get the wealth out of places like Kandesh or Behrar or Gujarat
#
even quicker, and you impoverish the people even quicker.
#
So you know, this is also where this whole idea of radicalization kind of seeps in, this
#
kind of ability to kind of discard your previous notions and based on the facts and evidence
#
before you, go in a more progressive political direction.
#
Yeah, and it kind of strikes me, you've given an example of how in many of these early speeches
#
he's saying kind of fairly conciliatory things to the British where his tone is extremely
#
moderate, like at one point you write, quote, somewhat incredibly, he believed that part
#
of the drain was justified in exchange for the supposed political, moral and social benefits
#
It was inevitable that India had to sacrifice some of his wealth.
#
And now you quote now, Roji, if India is to be regenerated by England, India must make
#
up its mind to pay the price, stop quote.
#
But you know, as time goes by, this changes to, for example, at one point, you know, speaking
#
publicly, he says, quote, so far as my inquiries go at present, the conclusion I draw is that
#
wherever the East India Company acquired territory, impoverishment followed their steps, stop
#
And he's far more scathing in private, you quote something that he wrote to his friend
#
Behramji Malabari, where he says, quote, these Englishmen cannot understand that the
#
wealth they carry away from this country is the whole and sole cause of our misery.
#
They take away our bread and then turn around, asking us why we are not eating it, stop quote.
#
So you know, very biting in this private message.
#
Now one of the early economic analysis as you've spoken about is where he tries to calculate
#
what we would today call maybe the, you know, income per capita.
#
And he figures out that every Indian subject to the empire is getting 27 shillings, while
#
the average income in the United Kingdom is about 33 pounds per head, and between 27 to
#
40 shillings, depending on how you want to cut it.
#
And one of the things that I was fascinated in this chapter by is his incredibly sophisticated
#
And this also sort of evolves, like you've, you know, spoken about how, you know, by the
#
time he's finished the last of his papers on the subject, his economic analysis has
#
developed in three distinct stages.
#
I found this incredibly fascinating because each of these stages is one, using data generated
#
by the British, and B, the analysis is far more sophisticated than anything the British
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
So in this era, again, when you are trying to get proper data on India, you are in many
#
ways groping in the dark.
#
It's very hard to get data at all, leave alone reliable data.
#
So what the British would do is, at least for economic data, they would, you know, there'd
#
be different people around the country and each district would tabulate approximately,
#
you know, what was being grown, how much revenue was being collected, and then that data was
#
compiled at a national level.
#
But oftentimes it was done in a very sloppy way.
#
So if you wanted to, you know, get even the gross domestic product, you know, it was done
#
in a way where, you know, lots of inaccuracies were in place.
#
If you wanted to get, you know, the average earnings of particular places, oftentimes
#
you just take earnings figures for particular districts and divide by the number of districts.
#
And as Naroji pointed out, that's a flawed process because each district was different.
#
You cannot compare Delhi with, you know, say, Pana district or what have you.
#
It's a false comparison.
#
So there were many other people who were, again, critical of the data.
#
But only someone like Naroji, who, you know, by being in London, had access to all of this
#
data that was at the India office and also simultaneously had friends across the subcontinent
#
who could give him supplementary data.
#
Only someone like him was really able to, you know, kind of take a more holistic view.
#
So as you said, you know, he starts off with this original, you know, subset of official
#
data and the picture presented is quite rosy.
#
You know, there's a surplus of exports.
#
The economy is growing by X percentage.
#
The amount of money that is being generated through various goods being exported like
#
cotton or what have you is very large.
#
But ultimately, when you put all these different pieces together, you realize that, you know,
#
the big components of your economy aren't that big at all anywhere in the first place.
#
I mean, a lot of people by the 1870s and 1880s attacked Naroji's economic arguments by saying,
#
how can you say India is growing poorer, whereas in Bombay, you have this huge mill industry
#
And certainly, yes, in Bombay, there was a very large mill industry.
#
But ultimately, if you look at the whole economy of India, it wasn't that big, right?
#
I mean, you know, you had 30 or 40 mills.
#
And sure, it was, you know, creating a lot of wealth for a few Indians.
#
But the vast majority of the country was still agricultural, of course, right, and living
#
in rural areas of the country, which were being terribly impoverished.
#
So it was kind of that ability to kind of balance things out and look at the big picture
#
that helps Naroji interrogate this data.
#
And again, as he gains more friends around India, and as he himself goes on his own tours
#
throughout parts of Gujarat or Western India, he himself collects data, he revises it.
#
And he, by the end of his career as an economic thinker in the early 1880s, presents a picture
#
where he shows Punjab, which was thought to be the most prosperous province of British
#
It was also the part of British India which had British rule for the shortest period of
#
time, only since the 1840s.
#
He shows even that in Punjab, the average person is living at their subsistence levels.
#
I mean, if a famine came along, they would be dead.
#
So it's a really striking comparison that he makes between this rosy pronouncement and
#
official circles of moral and material progress.
#
There were reports that the British government would issue every year on the supposed moral
#
and material progress of India.
#
But the reality, as he discovered, was a very different picture.
#
I was kind of extremely struck by your description of the stages.
#
Again, I'll quote from the book, quote, it indicates how Naroji's economic analysis
#
developed in three distinct stages, approximations based on scanty data such as land revenue
#
as was undertaken in the wants and means of India, estimates based on rigorous analysis
#
of official raw data seen in poverty of India, and finally, Naroji's supplementation of
#
this raw data with his own collected statistics and observations, enabling even more nuanced
#
estimates and pointed refutation of government figures, stop quote.
#
And then you speak about how the Punjab study where you pointed out, where you said he,
#
quote, analyzed production in Punjab through 21 key agricultural commodities, 15 types
#
of manufactured goods, and other activities such as mining and livestock, even taking
#
into account marginal occupations such as fishing, stop quote.
#
And I can't imagine what he would have made of Indian data today.
#
In many ways, it is as confusing and obfuscatory and scattered as the data back then seems
#
And now, and here's one thing that I find so fascinating about Naroji, that he excels
#
in so many different areas, which he combines into one stream of action, but it's not necessarily
#
Number one, he is a numbers guy who's actually crunched all this raw data, figured out that
#
the British conclusions are wrong, and he's done the rigorous analysis, and he's come
#
to his own conclusions.
#
Two, he's skilled at rhetoric, so he can actually go out and talk about it and present it and
#
frame it in terms everyone can understand.
#
Three, even before he actively enters politics, he's actually a very good politician in terms
#
of making all the alliances he needs to make to get access to the data and to be able to
#
speak at all these places.
#
And four, he's enough of a policy wonk to now go from economic analysis to policy suggestion
#
and say that, okay, this is a problem, they are bleeding us dry, this is what we need
#
So, you know, do you have a comment on how remarkable it is that one man can combine
#
all of these different facets?
#
And also now, tell me about sort of what is, after that, tell me, what is the political
#
conclusion that he then reaches from his economic analysis?
#
It is quite remarkable that someone, again, this elite individual, this somewhat anglicized
#
individual, quite anglicized individual, I should say, also had such a deep knowledge
#
of Indian agriculture that he could identify different types of sugar, different types
#
of soil, and point out where British calculations were wrong because they identified a different
#
type of commodity than what existed in actuality.
#
So he definitely did his homework.
#
And I think at this point in time, again, he was a complete workaholic.
#
His central focus of his life was understanding this process of impoverishment in India.
#
So pretty much every activity he undertook was somehow connected with it.
#
Whenever he went back to India, he would obviously spend time with his family.
#
He didn't spend nearly enough, but he would immediately go and talk to officials and then
#
head out to the countryside and go and look and see what's going on on the ground.
#
Now, with regard to the political aspect of the drain theory, if you look at previous
#
scholarship, most scholars have been quite puzzled by Naroji's particular frame of mind
#
on the drain theory, because he ultimately talks about one source of the drain.
#
I mean, there were many sources of the drain, right, in terms of natural goods and natural
#
resources being taken out of the country, high land revenue, but he ultimately focuses
#
on one component that seems on the surface not terribly important, and that's the amount
#
of money that's paid for the civil service.
#
So he calculates that about 33 million pounds, which of course was a big amount in that day,
#
was taken out of India every year and was sent back to Great Britain.
#
That was the actual number in numerical terms of the drain of wealth.
#
And of that, initially, he says only a small portion of that is the salaries that are paid
#
to these British officers, because ultimately those British officers retire or even if they
#
stay in India, they send their earnings back to Great Britain to support family members.
#
But there's a reason for why Naroji focused on this, because again, as I said, politics
#
and economics are two sides of the same coin in Naroji's nationalism.
#
The civil service is this major political issue of this era.
#
It's kind of the linchpin of Indian grievances, because ultimately the civil servants are
#
the ones that are kind of enforcing these very draconian policies throughout India.
#
So Naroji and others had this idea that if you open up the civil service to more Indians
#
and if Indians themselves are working for their own government, those policies will
#
Indians would not be beholden to the same imperial principles.
#
They would understand the country better.
#
They of course spoke the languages.
#
So by focusing on that particular component, just the civil service, you could make your
#
political point very convincingly.
#
And this was something that I think a lot of early historians didn't really focus enough
#
They asked why fixate on this particular small component?
#
And you see throughout his writings that by the end of his career as an economic theorist,
#
he doesn't care anymore about what percentage of the drain of wealth comes from the civil
#
service, paying for the civil service.
#
No matter what it is, it is what needs to be solved.
#
It itself is the source of all other aspects of the drain of wealth, because once you had
#
Indians in power, those other forms of drain, the drain of wealth would also dry up.
#
You know, it struck even me while I was reading the book that, you know, I couldn't figure
#
out at first that, OK, I understand the point he's made with the data that we are losing
#
so much money, a quarter of our taxes are just going back to England and we are progressively
#
getting impoverished by this.
#
But why fixate on salaries of civil servants?
#
And then it struck me and tell me if this sort of interpretation is correct, that he
#
figures out that, OK, politically, what can I achieve?
#
This is a reform that I can achieve politically.
#
And therefore, I'm going to make this the focus.
#
And I'm not going to focus about all the other diffused things that could solve the problem.
#
And of course, the main thing that could solve the problem is the end of empire itself.
#
So this is the one achievable thing that he fixates on.
#
But what is then fascinating to me is that he fixates on this for the rest of his life,
#
basically, I mean, till the end of his career in England, that, you know, even when he is
#
in parliament, which we'll talk about later, this is the one thing that he wants to do.
#
It's like for 30, 40 years, he'll just fixated on getting Indians into the civil service.
#
And you could argue that now we have an Indian civil service full of Indians and it's not
#
that much of an improvement, but leaving that aside, you know, it's kind of a fascinating
#
What also I find really interesting here is this little detour he takes where he concludes
#
that, listen, you know, British India is not one monolithic mass.
#
There are places like Bombay and Madras and all which they govern themselves.
#
But there are all these princely states all around, some 300 around the area of Bombay
#
alone, and they have less interference and very often they don't have an English British
#
civil service sitting there.
#
And therefore there is a better scope for comparing what governance across these two
#
places are and figuring out if good governance can actually make a difference.
#
And rather than theorize about it, he actually takes that step and becomes a Diwan of Baroda,
#
you know, where for a couple of years he gets his fellow policy wonks from the young Bombay
#
days in and they try to do their own thing and there is crazy politics where the previous
#
cabinet still exists as a shadow cabinet while they are trying to do their things.
#
And there's a British guy there who's fighting with the King and the King tries to poison
#
the British guy and it's mad fun.
#
So tell me a little bit about that kind of period and what was he trying to do really?
#
I mean, was he trying to sort of prove a point that, hey, you know, A, we can govern well
#
and B, if you govern properly, you'll get far better outcomes, is that the whole thing
#
The princely states in this era are extremely interesting, you know, in terms of both the
#
intrigues that are going on and also the potential that they held for some sort of reform.
#
I mean, when we think of princely states nowadays, we think of reactionary old Rajas who are
#
holding on to power, anti-democratic.
#
But the perspective from the late 19th century was very different.
#
They were recognized as being the last vestiges of indigenous rule.
#
In many cases, the rulers who are on the thrones in places like, say, Baroda or Gondal were
#
They took tentative steps towards political reform.
#
So you know, Mysore, for example, set up a legislative assembly, so did Baroda.
#
States like Gondal were experimenting in things like compulsory education by the very
#
So these places were thought of as being almost political laboratories.
#
These were the only places you as an Indian could, in your country, exercise some real
#
administrative control.
#
And it's for that reason that so many early Indian nationalists gravitate towards a few
#
I mean, again, Dat, actually Dat served as a diwan, Naroti served as a diwan, other individuals
#
in the nationalist movement were constantly advising and were constantly in touch with
#
princely officials, you know, from Hyderabad, through states that are now in Gujarat, through,
#
you know, Rajputana states in Eastern India as well.
#
So they really kind of exercised the imagination of early nationalists.
#
I mean, when Naroti goes out to Baroda, it is in many ways his attempt and the attempt
#
of his young Bombay crowd, if you will, to kind of put ideas into practice.
#
There's an ability to actually implement the reforms and see whether we're right about,
#
first of all, a drain of wealth existing in British territories that didn't really exist
#
in the, quote unquote, native states, because they were under the control of, you know,
#
our own people, and whether or not government could be better when the people in charge
#
Now in any other era, in any other place, this might have been a pretty interesting
#
and potentially fruitful experience.
#
But Baroda in this period of time, 1873 through 1874, 1875, is the exact opposite of that
#
I mean, it was ruled by a man called Mala Rao.
#
And as you had mentioned, Mala Rao, the Gaikwad at this time, was in kind of a deadly battle
#
with the British resident, a man called Robert Fair, who was himself no angel.
#
He was kind of this very puritanical British officer who always tried to meddle in the
#
affairs of princely states.
#
He caused chaos when he was posted in Sindh by scheming behind the backs of various people.
#
And when he goes to Baroda, he makes it his life's mission to somehow take down the Gaikwad.
#
And when he learns that Naroji is coming to serve as Diwan, a prime minister, he's livid.
#
He regards Naroji as being kind of a seditious traitor who's saying all these terrible things
#
about British rule, and he actually says that he will not allow Naroji to enter Baroda.
#
I mean, think about this.
#
I mean, a native state, an Indian princely state where the British agent, who's not really
#
in power, still says, you know, I will not allow your Diwan to come into the territory
#
of the state he's supposed to rule.
#
And so for the next one and a half years, when Naroji serves as Diwan, he tries on one
#
level to implement these reforms that he has been talking about, and at one level, it's
#
I mean, he and his colleagues from Bombay clean up the judiciary.
#
They get rid of practices like Nazarana, where people basically pay for judicial verdicts
#
They come up with a proper civil and penal code.
#
They reform the economy of the imperial household.
#
They go through the country and revise the land rates, which were quite high.
#
But ultimately, none of this really sticks because the Maharaja, the Gaikwad, was not
#
fully committed to a program of reform.
#
He wanted to kind of keep his cronies in power and at the same time kind of play politics
#
against Robert Fair, the resident.
#
So Naroji gets trapped right in the middle.
#
And many people at this point in time criticize him rightly for not being politically very
#
I mean, here's someone who, again, has lived his life for the most part in an ivory tower.
#
And now he's thrown into a very real politic environment where you have these two kind
#
of implacable foes against each other fighting for political power.
#
And it gets so bad that in the, I think, November of 1874, Robert Fair, the resident, is actually
#
He's poisoned via some arsenic being slipped into his glass of pomelo juice.
#
And there were some glass shards also in here.
#
And eventually, it's discovered that the Gaikwad of Baroda might have been behind this, which
#
I mean, things have got that bad.
#
And luckily, Naroji resigns just before things go to the wall and the Gaikwad is removed.
#
But ultimately, it's quite a disappointing experience.
#
I mean, Naroji at one point kind of validates his idea that Indians, if they are in power,
#
can kind of implement their own reforms.
#
And he always had this idea that good government is no excuse for native government, indigenous
#
And so in that sense, it's validated.
#
But at the same time, he realizes that Indians, when they empower themselves, are not always
#
going to be these very selfless individuals who are out for helping the fellow countrymen.
#
They have their own motives when they're in power and their own power dynamics.
#
And the princely state system, there's a reason why nationalists eventually fall out of...
#
These princes fall out of favor with nationalists, especially by the time of Gandhi's and Naro's
#
generation, because ultimately, they are, at one element, they are unrepresentative
#
and undemocratic leaders.
#
I mean, it took a Saijirao to kind of take that step of reforming.
#
But ultimately, at the end of the day, Saijirao still wanted to stay in power.
#
And by Gandhi and Naro's time, Indian nationalism had moved beyond that stage where these princely
#
rulers were already real political use to them.
#
And it's also, like you pointed out, the timing is just crazy that he actually goes in there
#
and gets his great team together, makes a few changes.
#
But the optics are terrible because the Indian guy tried to kill the British guy.
#
So what are you going to talk about?
#
Now, the interesting thing after this is that at this point, he decides that he moves on
#
Like, he's done the theoretical phase.
#
And this is sort of a transition, I guess, between the theoretical phase and the second
#
phase, which is a political phase where he decides that, okay, I need to now get into
#
British parliament because it looks like that is the only way I'll be able to make a difference.
#
And there is sort of, for the concept of this, there is some precedent, like at one point
#
in your book, you write about Raja Ram Mohan Roy, quote, in 1828, Ram Mohan dispatched
#
petitions to both Houses of Parliament protesting the company's intention to restrict membership
#
in grand juries only to Christians, a matter that he vigilantly pursued in Westminster
#
after sailing to Great Britain in 1830.
#
Recognizing the broad public significance of his agitation against the Jury Act, Prasanna
#
Kumar Tagore, a prominent Calcutta lawyer, hailed Ram Mohan as India's unofficial MP.
#
And you talk about how Naroji decides that, okay, it's time, enough of theory, enough
#
of giving policy suggestions, and hey, the Baroda experiment didn't work.
#
So the only way to really change things is to get into British parliament.
#
How outlandish is this at the time?
#
At the time, how do people think about this and what is the sinking behind it and what
#
Just take me a little bit through his thinking because just to conceive of something like
#
this seems so audacious at one level.
#
It is quite outlandish.
#
But again, from the perspective of Indian nationalism at this moment, you are searching
#
for the weakest link, which is the reason why civil service and civil service reform
#
preoccupied Indians so much as well.
#
It was the weakest link in the edifice of British imperialism.
#
Now that there were civil service exams, there was a chance for Indians to compete as well.
#
Similarly, parliament, the British parliament, was regarded accurately by Indian nationalists
#
as being the ultimate source of power.
#
You had your viceroy, you had the various officials throughout India.
#
But ultimately, the people who they looked up to was the British parliament.
#
The parliament would vote on a budget every year.
#
The parliament would occasionally censure the Indian government if it did some things
#
The parliament had played a very important role under the company, under the East India
#
company of being a very vocal critic.
#
So yes, it was outlandish, but it was the best option you had.
#
There was a 99 out of 100 chance that you would fail, but at least it wasn't 100 out
#
of 100, which was the case in any other aspect.
#
So at this phase, early Indian nationalism and the Congress, the Congress having just
#
been established in 1885, looked to Great Britain as the only possible source of hope.
#
And if it meant that an Indian would have to stand to get into parliament, so be it.
#
And Naroji was in many ways the perfect candidate to try this venture because he had lived in
#
Great Britain for such a long period of time.
#
He spoke English fluently, maybe because he was a Pisces, he might have looked a little
#
bit more like Gaurav, he might have looked a little bit more fair than other Indians.
#
So he probably had the best chance.
#
And when he starts to campaign for parliament, or he starts to think about campaigning for
#
parliament, he says, look, again, I've lived in this country in Great Britain for two or
#
three decades, off and on, I know many of the important political leaders here, I've
#
talked to members of the Liberal Party, I've talked to members of the Conservative Party.
#
And since India is a big political hot button issue, maybe there's a chance.
#
Now Naroji is not the first Indian to run, to stand for parliament, that honor goes to
#
a man called Lalmohan Ghosh, and I spent the first month of lockdown researching his activities
#
for the next book I'm writing.
#
And Ghosh comes very close to winning.
#
He stands in a place called Deptford, close by to Greenwich, and comes within a few dozen
#
votes of winning, but ultimately doesn't win.
#
So the door is already open a little bit.
#
So there already are a few people who are starting to think about standing for parliament.
#
And the way that Naroji thinks that he would have an even better chance of standing for
#
parliament is if he made his parliamentary campaign not just about India.
#
If you're a Brit living in this era, your vote is not going to be swayed based on what
#
I mean, most people have no clue about what's going on in India.
#
They can maybe identify it on a map, maybe they can't.
#
But if you link Indian political issues with issues that resonated with the average British
#
individual, whether it was Irish Home Rule, the idea that Ireland should have some sort
#
of autonomy from Great Britain at this point in time, whether you were talking about labor
#
rights, the rights of people to unionize, the rights of women to vote, then you could
#
And so Naroji starts to do this during his first campaign, which takes place in 1886.
#
I should mention that he had started to think about standing for parliament many years beforehand
#
from at least 1877 onward.
#
But it's only in 1886 that he really gets the first opportunity to stand.
#
And the reason why he chooses that year is because parliamentary reform had just taken
#
place in Great Britain.
#
So Indians were very keenly observing how democratization was going on in Great Britain
#
and then using that democratization to their advantage.
#
So in 1885, 1886, there had been these reform bills that had been passed and automatically
#
now maybe 25% of men had the right to vote.
#
Maybe it was a little bit higher than that.
#
But now more people have the right to vote and you could be more popular in your attempts
#
to woo the British voter.
#
And so when he stood for parliament for the first time from Holborn close by to the British
#
Museum, he doesn't just talk about India.
#
He talks about the rights of Irishmen and Irish women.
#
He talks about labor rights, things like eventually stuff like the eight hour day.
#
He talks to a limited degree about the right of women to vote.
#
He talks about local municipal issues, problems with the London municipality, problems with
#
So he's very clearly linking together India to a whole myriad of other issues that will
#
capture the attention of the average British voter.
#
And this gives him a bit more of a fighting chance and eventually again, he does lose
#
He loses by quite a large margin, but he doesn't lose as badly as many people thought that
#
And I was kind of fascinated again by this period because before this, you mentioned
#
that earlier there was this, you know, when he goes to Baroda, there is a suspicion that,
#
oh, he's an ivory tar guy and he's going to Baroda and what does he know?
#
And what I find about his England years from your book is that his political skills are
#
remarkable because he realizes that India is not a cause.
#
You know, he knows a lot of people.
#
And he forges these three kinds of critical alliances, you know, one of course with the
#
Irish where, you know, he adopts Irish home rule as, you know, one of his pet causes.
#
And you point out how, in fact, by the time the election comes around, he's asking for
#
electors, votes, court on behalf of the five millions in Ireland and the two 50 millions
#
And the other two sort of constituencies who he woos are one is, of course, the communists
#
and you know, he gets more and more drawn to the communists.
#
And of course, and that obviously means a vote base of workers and so on.
#
And the third, interestingly, is women and women can't even vote at that time, right?
#
But he figures that getting the women on his side will have other knock on benefits, which
#
So tell me a little bit about the sense that we get like, you know, there's another quote
#
that kind of fascinated me is where he gives a speech at Holborn, which you could quote
#
from where he says during the first campaign, which he loses, where he says, quote, I have
#
lived in this country actually for 20 years.
#
And I say that if there is one thing more certain than another that I have learned,
#
it is that the English nation is incompatible with tyranny, stop quote.
#
And of course, he knows this is bullshit.
#
I mean, you know, so yeah, but but he says it because it's a means to an end.
#
Now my other deeper question, one is, I want to know a little bit more about your insights
#
about how he's his thinking at this time and how he's doing these alliances.
#
But the other sort of meta question I have is that one of the things that has always
#
struck me about politics is that politics corrodes character in the sense that you might
#
begin out with a certain set of principles, but then you compromise so much, so much,
#
so much, so much that you yourself change as a result of that.
#
And those principles, which you might have felt so deeply about don't matter anymore.
#
Now it's very clear from this biography that that didn't happen to Narochi, that he was
#
passionate about the cause right till the end.
#
In fact, when he loses his last election in the at the start of the century, it's almost
#
pitiful his reaction to it because he cares so deeply about getting in there and making
#
So it doesn't really happen to him.
#
But at the same time, it's like this is a point where his public persona and his private
#
persona seem so different, you know, so what's kind of going on?
#
And what is your sense of how can a person, you know, how is he remaining himself through
#
Because it all seems so calculated.
#
How can it not affect you like one of the things that you do point out and that does
#
seem to be a genuine shift is his drift towards communism, where in fact, in 1902, he attends
#
a second international like you point out, and he becomes more and more communist in
#
his rhetoric as the years go by.
#
And that seems to be a, you know, a genuine shift, whereas he would not have held those
#
views earlier necessarily.
#
But you know, what is that whole kind of process like?
#
Because the part that I'm sort of I mean, I know the question is a bit long winded.
#
But what I'm fascinated by is not just the events that he's so cannily putting together
#
these alliances and saying whatever he needs to and dressing differently for different
#
occasions, as you also point out.
#
But you know, what must be the turmoil in his mind as he goes through all of these processes?
#
Give me your sense of that.
#
So I'll just mention just at the outset.
#
So he was definitely much more attracted to he was definitely attracted to socialism,
#
communism, not not really, since communism as an idea was still evolving.
#
And, you know, the ideas of Marx had not really trickled into at least the Indian stream of
#
So I mean, I think it's correct to say that he drifted towards socialism rather than towards
#
I mean, you know, towards the end of his life, he was, you know, associating with these individuals
#
who eventually will play a role in kind of leading the groundwork for kind of a global,
#
you know, the growth of communism globally.
#
Now, with regard to your question about what's motivating him at this point in time, you
#
know, I think the really abiding passion of his life was this belief that so many people
#
in India were being affected by poverty.
#
Every year, you know, if it was a famine year, millions of people would lose their lives.
#
And so he felt kind of a heartfelt commitment to do all that he could to try to change the
#
He knew that, you know, everything he did could potentially save, you know, people from
#
And, you know, his ultimate goal was to reach a point whereby the drain of wealth would
#
be would be stopped and, you know, Indian impoverishment, the cycle of Indian impoverishment
#
So I think that was kind of the burning fire in him.
#
And that was the reason why he stayed so true to his core convictions.
#
If you look at all of his close political comrades, they were all people who had this
#
similar kind of inner fire and made sure that politics did not corrode that sense of, you
#
I mean, one of his good friends was Henry Hinman, who was the founder of the first British
#
And like Naroji, Hinman grows more radical as he grows older.
#
He grows far more radical than Naroji, of course, in his socialist views.
#
Another friend of his was Michael Davitt, who was an Irish home ruler who had gone to
#
jail because of his activities and political views.
#
He was someone who was committed towards pacifism.
#
You know, he ultimately was not there for the political glory or, you know, money.
#
He was there for a principle, you know, fighting on behalf of his fellow Irishmen and Irish
#
And so these people, you know, were ideologically motivated to such a degree to achieve some
#
concrete ends that I think they kind of, you know, immunize themselves from the corroding
#
influences of politics.
#
You can argue that Naroji was not a very good politician in this sense.
#
He did not compromise in many ways.
#
He, as far as I can tell, was not corrupt.
#
You know, he pursued a very honest and deliberate line in all his activities, and that nearly
#
cost him the election in 1892, which he won by five votes.
#
But he very nearly lost it because he refused to give in to certain tactics that might have,
#
you know, led to some sort of compromise that might have been politically remunerative,
#
but ultimately would compromise his core beliefs and his principles.
#
So in that sense, yeah, I mean, he wasn't necessarily a very good politician.
#
But you know, I think it's important to keep in mind that, you know, there were these people
#
in this era, just as there are today, of course, who are so committed to, you know, doing good
#
and achieving some concrete good that, you know, would have real consequences for lives
#
That kept them running.
#
There are people like that in this era, you said?
#
I know it's, you know, we live in such a cynical era, but I think there still are a few people
#
Okay, I won't ask you for names in this particular, let's keep talking about Navraj, you know,
#
and also when you talk about his obduracy, I'm struck by what happens during the second
#
election where which he finally wins, I think, 2953 to 2948 or something like that by five
#
And what's interesting there is that he gets a candidacy of the Liberal Party.
#
And then there is this internal rebellion and another liberal candidate says, no, I'm
#
And there is for a couple of years, tremendous pressure on him to back out of the race.
#
But he is so bullheaded that he just won't do it.
#
And he somehow gets through.
#
And he faces a bunch of racism at this time as well.
#
And one of the reasons that you pointed out might have helped him win is that Lord Salisbury
#
referred to him as a black man.
#
And this led to an outpouring of number one sympathy across England because, you know,
#
they could see that this is clearly a bit too racist and the racism of it must have
#
seemed starker because he was essentially like a British liberal, well-spoken, sophisticated,
#
And besides outrage, it also leads to a little bit of fact checking when people point out
#
that actually Lord Salisbury, who is quite swardy, is actually darker than him.
#
And this whole process was kind of fascinating.
#
Tell me about what happens when he finally wins.
#
Like one of the things that strikes me is that number one, when he's standing, it's
#
not as if he is standing as an individual.
#
It's like he's standing for all of India.
#
Across India, the people are raising money for him and sending it to him.
#
And it's saying he's India's guy, you know.
#
So it's almost as if this whole nation is at his back.
#
And then when he finally wins, you point out how when he comes to India, I think he goes
#
to the Lahore Congress.
#
And over there, across the way, he does this railway trip, which is, you know, pre-sages
#
Gandhi's trip on the railways and getting mob decades later where you have these massive
#
mobs everywhere coming to see him.
#
He, you know, he lands up at Lahore and there are tens of thousands of people at the railway
#
station or whatever, and it's just mad.
#
So on the one hand, he is a big hope of India.
#
He is their guy out there.
#
It's almost like he's been elected President of India when he gets that seat as an MP.
#
And yet within the British Parliament, he has a really tough time.
#
Tell me a bit about those years.
#
So two things struck me at least about Naoroji's election.
#
You know, his campaign rather, I should say.
#
The first thing was that his campaign took such a long time.
#
I mean, he's nominated, as you say, and eventually there's a challenge that takes place.
#
He's nominated in the year 1888, and the election doesn't take place until June of 1892.
#
So you have basically a four-year-long campaign.
#
And campaigns for Parliament in this era were in the span of days and weeks normally.
#
And yet here's someone, you know, going in every day for the large part of four years
#
and fighting internal rebellions, as you said, largely based on the question of race.
#
There are two people who challenge him.
#
And at least as far as I could tell from my research, those challenges are to a very large
#
degree based on the fact that here was, you know, a foreigner, someone who looked different,
#
someone who had a name that we can't pronounce, trying to represent us.
#
And the irony of this was that he was standing in an area called central Finsbury, which
#
was then and is still today a very radical area.
#
This is an area that still has, I think, a Lenin library, there was a statue of Lenin
#
until recently over there.
#
So it had this very long kind of radical political streak.
#
And yet he's facing this terrible racism throughout his campaign.
#
And it's so terrible that, you know, he nearly has to, you know, he's encouraged to quit
#
by many people, including many of his friends to quit.
#
And as you mentioned, the prime minister at this point in time, Lord Salisbury, does kind
#
of an indirect favor to him by calling him a black man, which sets up a huge debate about
#
racism in Great Britain.
#
Was it acceptable to call an Indian a black?
#
And of course, there was this whole side debate, as you said, about who actually was darker.
#
And that kind of reveals, I guess, a bit more about what racism was like in the Victorian
#
era than what we'd like to think of it.
#
So he becomes kind of a popular figure in this era.
#
But that still doesn't help him.
#
He still faces challenges after that moment to his campaign.
#
And as you mentioned, he wins by only five votes.
#
He becomes dubbed the other by a narrow majority.
#
And that leads me to the second kind of really interesting thing for me, at least about this
#
If you look at the total electoral figures, about 5,000 people are voting.
#
This sounds kind of like a small college election, right?
#
I mean, this is not what you think of as the exercise of democratic power in the beacon
#
of democracy in this era.
#
And that also shows you just how stunted democracy was in the supposedly democratic parts of
#
the world in this moment.
#
I mean, the franchise, the power to vote, was only extended to those men in Great Britain
#
who owned property and who could meet a certain threshold for earnings.
#
And oftentimes, the people who voted didn't even live in the particular district they
#
So you could be someone who lived in a completely different part of London, but because you
#
own property or you own the store in central Finsbury, you had the right to vote.
#
So it was a very weird and wacky system.
#
And I learned far too much about Victorian politics and kind of the intricacies of how
#
it worked in this era than I ever would have wanted to.
#
But the long and short of it is, yes, at the end of it, Naroji is elected.
#
He's elected narrowly, but he's nevertheless elected.
#
There's a brief recount effort that's put in place where the conservative candidate
#
tries to disqualify Naroji by saying that several of the people who voted for him were
#
immigrants, they were Italians, or they were French, and how dare they had the right to
#
The citizenship laws in this era were so vague that, again, even someone like Naroji had
#
the right to vote in elections almost from the moment that he stepped on show in Great
#
Britain, because there was no kind of law of citizenship at this point in time.
#
If you were there on the ground and you met your minimum qualifications for income and
#
such, you had the right to vote.
#
So getting to the second part of your question about how Naroji is kind of conceptualized,
#
yes, he is conceptualized as being the MP for India, the member for India.
#
And it creates a moment of jubilation across the country.
#
He's flooded with telegrams and letters from not just around the world, but all corners
#
I mean, when I was looking through Naroji's papers, I found letters from Kashmir, I found
#
letters from parts of Mysore province, the place where coffee is grown, from village
#
India, from urban India, from Indians living in Shanghai or Zanzibar or other parts of
#
the diaspora, South Africa.
#
So this really excites not just Indians in India, but Indians all across the world.
#
And all Indians, whether they are an individual living in Chikmagalur or an elite in Bombay
#
or an indentured worker in South Africa, recognize Naroji as being their representative.
#
Finally, they have a voice, right?
#
I mean, finally, there is an Indian in power who claims to speak for Indians.
#
And consequently, for the next two to three years, when Naroji is in parliament, he becomes
#
these people's representatives.
#
So he's dealing with everything from matters of high policy, the civil service and the
#
question of who is being appointed to watch in the government of India, to the complaints
#
of Indians living in the diaspora in Madagascar.
#
I mean, up into the spot in time, I didn't even know that there were many Indians in
#
But I found a Gujarati letter from Indians in Madagascar complaining about their treatment.
#
You find letters again from Indians living in Guyana, who are talking about their grievances
#
and how Naroji will hopefully be able to help them.
#
So it's a moment of kind of unificatory patriotism, not just across India, but across the Indian
#
And it creates this huge moment of hope.
#
And I think for Naroji, it really feeds into this idea that he's held so close to his heart
#
throughout his life, British justice.
#
He has tried this hard.
#
He's walked against the odds.
#
And finally, after four terrible years of campaigning, he overcame.
#
And now he would have a chance to make his point.
#
Maybe there was a glimmer of hope within this idea of British justice.
#
And ultimately, it all comes crashing down.
#
He loses election in 1895, and it's a moment of deep and dismal disappointment.
#
It's probably the lowest moment in his political career, and we can go on and talk about that
#
No, before we get to that, I mean, a couple of strands, which I was kind of fascinated
#
by, that what you're pointing out about him being treated as India's MP in parliament,
#
as India's man out there, is actually something, as you describe in your book, something that's
#
been happening over the couple of decades before this also, in the sense that he becomes
#
this sort of figurehead of the Indian community in London.
#
So whenever parents are sending kids to study there, they'll send him a letter, and they'll
#
say, please make sure he doesn't marry a British girl.
#
And you know, even Gandhi apparently is armed with a letter for Nauruji, or you know, person
#
X sends person Y there with a letter for Nauruji saying, listen, I don't know him, but it doesn't
#
He's Indian, and he'll, you know, so he is the dude there who's already this massive
#
The other thing that struck me is how late in his life all of this is happening.
#
You know, he's 67 at the time he wins that election, you know, he's born in 1825.
#
He's 70 at the time it's done, and he's not even nearly done, like his iconic Congress
#
speech of 1906 is when he's 81 years old, and we'll kind of come to that later, which
#
is pretty mind blowing.
#
And just reading about his years in parliament in your book was so impressive, because one,
#
you've described his schedule before that, where this is not the age of email.
#
So he's like getting up every day, he's devoting hours to writing letters by hand.
#
He's meeting people constantly, not just when he's in parliament, but, you know, for years
#
and years before that, he's giving speeches, he's doing all of this.
#
And in parliament, you point out about how he finally gets a victory that is not a victory.
#
He gets a bill passed, which will allow Indians into the civil service.
#
But the cabinet, which is from his own party, the Liberal Party, then blocks it and doesn't
#
Tell me a bit about that sort of process and how it affected him, because this is where
#
that other transition happens in his life, where he shifts from being a politician to
#
an agitator and this failure kind of radicalizes him.
#
Tell me a little bit about what this process was like.
#
Coming to the first part of your question, at least, with regard to the Indian diaspora
#
in Great Britain and what he was like to these students, you know, if I were to have written
#
a standalone book on this process, you could probably title it Indian Uncle.
#
You know, he served as kind of the uncle for all of these people who came to Great Britain
#
to study, to work, sightseeing.
#
You know, everyone and anyone who is coming to Great Britain from India is asking him
#
And this was one of the fun things that I was, you know, able to do when I was in the
#
archives, you know, since Naroji kept everything, he was a pack rat, he was very piracy in that
#
And I can sympathize being a piracy.
#
You read the letters that were written to him and they cover everything.
#
So family disputes, you know, my son has sailed to London, he has not paid us remittances,
#
My husband has left us, he is somewhere in London, can you help me?
#
All the way down to the most mundane of things.
#
Can you get me tickets to go see a session of Parliament?
#
Can you arrange for me to meet the Queen?
#
I mean, completely absurd things like that, you know, so everyone is asking him these
#
questions and most of the letters that I saw, there would be a small little note on top
#
of them indicating the date he replied.
#
So the incredible thing was, regardless of how absurd the question was, he still had
#
the time, he still made the time to reply.
#
It could have been a one line note saying, sorry, I can't help you meet the Queen.
#
But in many cases, it was a detailed response saying, you know, I'm trying to get in touch
#
with your long lost son and encouraging him to write to you, or I'm trying to find your
#
husband or, you know, your brother or your son passed away, I'm making arrangements for,
#
you know, the funeral and, you know, money to be sent back home.
#
So he was really involved in the nitty gritty of the lives of hundreds, if not thousands
#
of Indians during his time in Great Britain.
#
I mean, he really evolves as kind of this father figure or uncle, if you will, for the
#
And so as a consequence, you get a snapshot of what Indian life was like, all the troubles
#
that people faced, their complaints about the weather, the food, British people, and,
#
you know, whether they were friendly or not friendly, and also the good things that they
#
felt they experienced in British society, their friends, the fact that Britain was,
#
you know, much more educated society, that, you know, socially, it was much more liberal.
#
So you know, in that sense, Nehruji is important to us for understanding socially how the diaspora
#
develops in a place like Great Britain.
#
Now with regard to his time in parliament and, you know, kind of the effect that it has
#
on him, so as I said, yes, he begins in this moment of rosy optimism, and if you read the
#
speeches he gives in parliament during his first few years, they are very congratulatory
#
You know, he says great things about what British rule has done.
#
It's this force of progressivism, he's a loyal member of the empire, and a very strong
#
and distinct break takes place after he realizes that, you know, the goal of his time in parliament,
#
getting civil service reform, would ultimately be thwarted.
#
So as you said, you know, he succeeded in getting a non-binding resolution for civil
#
service reform passed in parliament, and he did this against great odds.
#
He did this at a time when most parliamentarians were at home asleep, very late at night.
#
There were only a few stragglers left in the house, but just enough.
#
He made sure that there were just enough so that you would have a quorum and a vote could
#
take place, and this was significant because it left Gladstone, the prime minister at the
#
time, completely red-faced.
#
His government was against it.
#
It was the first defeat the government had faced, and it was a defeat by a fellow liberal
#
So it's extremely embarrassing.
#
But you know, this was all part of Naroji's strategy, and when he goes back to India for
#
the first time after being elected to parliament, it's kind of like a victory lap, and he promises
#
that now, you know, having passed this non-binding resolution, the British people and the parliament
#
would be honor-bound to, you know, commit themselves to this reform, and ultimately
#
that's not what happened, and when he realizes that this would not happen, instantaneously
#
you see a tone, a change of tone.
#
So he starts talking about the evils of British rule again.
#
He starts comparing the fate of Indians to those of slaves in America.
#
He says that Indians were actually probably worse off than slaves in America, because
#
at least in America, there had been an incentive to keep those slaves alive.
#
In India, there was no incentive, you know, and therefore millions of people died.
#
So again, he becomes very bitter and very radical towards the end of his career, and
#
worse than that, he realizes that not many people are listening.
#
So ultimately, he would have thought that once you got to the stage of being an MP in
#
parliament, people would listen to you, but you had magazines like Punch making fun of
#
Naroji saying that he's, you know, giving this long speech and no one is listening and
#
people are just making fun of him.
#
So it's a moment of great despondency, and as you said, you know, he's 70 years old at
#
He could have thrown in the towel, retired back to India, given up, and, you know, been
#
a very bitter man, but given up, and he doubles down, if you will.
#
He decides to become more radical.
#
He decides to amplify his schedule, so he spends even more hours writing speeches or
#
responding to people's letters, kind of haranguing colleagues to become more radical.
#
And that sets up the last moment of his political career, where he kind of embarks on this much
#
more radical phase of politics.
#
Yeah, and that was almost kind of poignant that, and I guess it's a combination of the
#
two, but I was trying to figure out, was this radicalization because of the contingency
#
of his failure that he was just so frustrated that he lashed out and whatever, or was he
#
perhaps expressing the radicalism he felt all along because there was now no point in
#
putting a veneer on it that wasn't helping, or was it that simply at this point in his
#
intellectual journey, he realized that these kind of moderate methods, petitioning and
#
blah, blah, blah, are not going to work, and therefore you have to try something else.
#
But I also found these poignant because, of course, he misses the 1900 elections because
#
he's ill, and of course he's 75 at the time, but then he stands in the next elections,
#
loses badly, and then it's so sad because he writes to his Irish friends and almost
#
begs him for a safe seat there, and he's turned down because there are internal squabbles
#
And it's like he realizes that this is my last chance, I have to get into parliament
#
and do this, get this resolution passed, and eventually that's kind of not happening.
#
And the really interesting thing is you think at this point he's done and dusted, but 1906
#
when he's 81 years old is still almost a seminal moment for the Congress party because the
#
extremists are fighting with the moderates, and as a way of stopping Tilak, like you point
#
out, you know, Tilak is being intransigent and wants to be president of the Congress,
#
and as a way of stopping that, they call it naurogy, and even though the moderates think
#
he's too extremist and the extremists think he's too moderate, like you say, they all
#
agree to him and he goes out there and he gives a speech, which he makes his compadre
#
Gokhale read out, which is also an interesting tactic.
#
Tell me a little bit about that, and why is it so seminal, why is it such a remarkable
#
moment in Indian politics, what naurogy now says?
#
So going back as to why naurogy radicalized at this moment, I mean, I think it's a little
#
bit of the various reasons that you mentioned, you know, so at one point he realized that
#
now that he wasn't in parliament and he wasn't immediately standing for parliament, he could
#
afford to be more radical.
#
You know, he first talks about self-government for India publicly in the year 1884, and then
#
in the year 1885, all references to self-government disappear, and that's because this is, you
#
know, when he starts to talk about standing for parliament, and if you want to stand for
#
parliament in Great Britain, talking about getting self-government from Britain is probably
#
not your most effective strategy.
#
So he stops talking about it.
#
And also, no one's taken screenshots on Twitter, so it's okay.
#
Yeah, this is a much easier moment, I guess, for, you know, people's formal statements
#
to, you know, kind of pass by and not be commented upon.
#
So he doesn't talk about self-government, even though it's there in the back of his
#
mind, and if you look at his private correspondence, he's still talking about it with people like
#
And after 1895, well, the gloves are off, right?
#
I mean, you can start to talk about more radical views, and so he starts to talk again about
#
kind of the evil nature of British rule, a foreign government being, you know, terrible
#
He starts to talk about the possibility of a second mutiny because people were just so
#
sick and tired of, you know, the terrible effects of imperial rule, and ultimately he
#
starts talking again about self-government, and he makes this public even though he's
#
standing for parliament at the same time.
#
So now, you know, he just doesn't care that that contradiction might be there.
#
And I think one reason for why he's able to let the slide is because he realizes, you
#
know, the fact of mortality staring at him in the face.
#
As you said, he's, you know, in his 70s when he, you know, when he loses his re-election
#
bid in parliament and in his early 70s when he's kind of radicalizing, and he realizes
#
that these are his last chances to kind of make effective change.
#
He struggled all these decades on behalf of ameliorating the condition of India.
#
And during this period of time, again, it's, you know, the terrible things happening in
#
The government in power is more reactionary and conservative.
#
There's the plague epidemic in Western India coupled with a famine.
#
So the news coming out of India is awful, absolutely terrible.
#
And if you read letters written by people like Gokhale or Bairamji Malbari, you know,
#
You know, when I read them in the archives some 120 years after they were written, you're
#
really struck by just how awful things were.
#
You know, people's relatives dying from plague, famine camps being set up all around the country,
#
people leaving Bombay in masks to escape the plague, and this very kind of draconian effort
#
on part of the British government to kind of track down on health and sanitation in
#
order to alleviate the plague.
#
It was an awful moment.
#
And so I think Naroji felt all this more keenly because everything that he had struggled for
#
So you know, a part of it was trying to stand for parliament again, making a last-ditch
#
And as you mentioned, in 1900, he can't stand for parliament because he's too sick.
#
His doctor actually tells him, if you stand for parliament, there's a good chance you
#
will die because, you know, your respiratory problems that you're having could lead to,
#
you know, influenza and could lead to other diseases that, you know, could cause you to
#
I mean, you're 75 years old at this point in time.
#
He tries again in 1905, 1906, when he's 80 years old, and people around him are asking
#
him, good God, what are you doing?
#
Why are you, a man of 80, trying to get into parliament?
#
And you know, he still has that fitness of being to give multiple speeches a day, to
#
address multiple crowds, to write letters.
#
Maybe it's his diet of raw eggs.
#
I mean, maybe that keeps him ticking.
#
But you know, he still has the energy of someone who is 20 years younger.
#
And that kind of propels him in this more radical direction.
#
He knows that time is not on his side, yet he still has the energy.
#
He still has the drive.
#
And he still knows that whatever he's doing, you know, has a chance to help save people
#
in his country from even worse poverty and famine and, you know, the plague epidemic.
#
So there's still that drive.
#
And ultimately, you know, all of that collapses after his Congress speech in 1906.
#
And you know, all of a sudden, this man of 81 years of age who had been acting like a
#
man of 50 or something now is in his 80s.
#
I mean, he just cannot go any longer.
#
But it sustains him long enough to do what he needs to do, which is, again, give that
#
speech to the Congress in 1906, where he really kind of helps tilt the balance in favor of
#
You know, as you said, both the moderates and the extremists kind of saw Naroji as a
#
He kind of fell in between two stools in the sense that he was too moderate for the extremists,
#
but too radical for the moderates.
#
And the moderates really hope that he ultimately will help them preserve their basis of power
#
in the Congress through his leadership at the Congress.
#
And the few eyewitness reports that we have of what people like, say, Gokhale or Mehta
#
or others like Surendranath Banerjee and such are thinking after the Congress is a certain
#
feeling of being crestfallen.
#
They felt that Naroji has really passed on the baton to the extremists.
#
And we know that Tilak, after the Congress speech that Naroji gives, has taken place.
#
You know, again, he criticizes Naroji's moderacy, but he also says, look, you know, he has agreed
#
with us, us being the extremists, that Swaraj is the way to go for it.
#
We can disagree with him about methods, but he ultimately agrees with us for the end.
#
So the means are different that we have, but the ultimate end of Swaraj, and not necessarily
#
Swaraj under British rule, Naroji is on the same page with us.
#
And even fierce critics like Vipin Chandra Pal ultimately realize this as well, that
#
Naroji has done us more good than bad through his Congress speech of 1906.
#
You know, the wording of the speech is fascinating in the sense that before this, as you point
#
out, he's always, one, he uses the term Swaraj, which is Tilak's term, and very deliberately.
#
And the other thing that you point out is that before he has always spoken to self-rule
#
in the sense of, you know, like the Dominions, like Australia or Canada or whatever, which
#
are still part of the British Empire.
#
But now he says like Australia or Canada or the UK, which means, you know, completely
#
And he doesn't need to spell it out.
#
Just saying like the UK, as you point out, is, you know, a big seminal moment.
#
And, you know, you can imagine why, you know, you've spoken in your book about how Ferocious
#
Mehta was so upset and crestfallen and all of that, and one can sort of totally imagine
#
and this shift happens and he lives till 92, he dies in 1917.
#
He shows traces of activity in that time, but he doesn't really, he's not really too
#
Gandhi comes to India and meets him.
#
You know, one of the things which you mentioned you couldn't do much about during the book
#
because there isn't much written on it is, of course, his personal life.
#
He got married at the age of 11 when his wife was seven, of course, which is the kind of
#
classic child marriage thing that you have then.
#
He had kids with her, many, many grandchildren, all of that, you know, you gave us a sense
#
of his grief when his son, Ardheshir, dies at the age of 35 and all of that.
#
And one gets a sense of him as a father, even that moment when his daughter writes to him
#
and says, please come to India for my wedding, and he writes back saying, no, no, the nation
#
You want me to give this up.
#
So I got a kind of a sense of those conflicts, but there's no mention of his wife anywhere.
#
And obviously, as a biographer, you're looking for that.
#
So how do you sort of deal with that?
#
Do you feel like there's something incomplete there?
#
That was the most frustrating aspect of my research.
#
So as you mentioned, Naroji was married when he was 11 and his wife was, I believe, seven.
#
And they ultimately were married for 70 years.
#
And his wife apparently was not literate.
#
She apparently had limited interest in learning.
#
At least this is what we know from R.P. Masani's biography that he wrote in 1939.
#
Masani knew the Naroji family, so he would have known family stories and such.
#
There's no way for me to verify this because there's just no material.
#
So when I looked through the Naroji papers, there was a collection of family correspondence,
#
but there were no letters from Naroji's wife.
#
She didn't write or she wasn't able to write.
#
And his wife only comes up every once in a while in correspondence.
#
I mean, this was extremely striking for me because, you know, here's a man who talks
#
He's been consorting with some of the leading feminists in the world, you know, throughout
#
He's talked about female education and he's acted upon it.
#
And yet his own wife is such a distant and remote character for the biographer to understand.
#
I mean, you know, a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, found a picture of her
#
after having dug through a bunch of old and dusty newspapers in Baroda.
#
And I was shocked to find this picture because I'd never seen it before.
#
I mean, there are just no descriptions of her throughout his correspondence.
#
So, you know, I would have loved to have written much more about his family.
#
But ultimately, you know, two things constricted me.
#
One was, of course, word limit, you know, there's only so much you could write about
#
And the second was there just wasn't that much material about his wife and many of his
#
We know a lot more about his grandchildren.
#
In fact, you know, still to this day, I get emails from people every once in a while who
#
said, you know, they knew his grandchildren or, you know, they were related to him.
#
So I'm still kind of piecing together a few pictures of stories of his grandchildren.
#
So what I can tell you definitely is that even though his marital relationship, we don't
#
know much about and it doesn't seem like, you know, it was, you know, a marriage of
#
And on that ground, we can criticize Naroji for perhaps not spending more time with his
#
wife or not making more of an effort to kind of integrate him into his, you know, his social
#
But we do know that amongst his granddaughters, he was extremely supportive of their ambitions,
#
you know, with what they did.
#
And, you know, his granddaughters included people like the Captain Sisters, who are important
#
players in the nationalist movement under Gandhi.
#
They were, you know, radical extremists who worked with Madame Kama and even with Savarkar
#
and then ultimately gave this up in favor of Gandhi's political following.
#
My favorite character from his generation of grandchildren was a person called Khurshid
#
And I've written an essay separately on her.
#
She was Naroji's youngest granddaughter through his son.
#
So his son, as you mentioned, Adi, passed away in 1893.
#
And Khurshid Ben was born after the son passed away.
#
And she was trained as a classical singer.
#
She was trained in French and she goes and studies in Paris and eventually even spends
#
a bit of time in Greece, where she meets a very important figure involved in reviving
#
the Delphic games in Greece in the early 20th century.
#
And she comes back to India and she gives all of this up in order to join Gandhi and
#
not just join Gandhi in terms of temperance activities and walking in Sabarmati ashram
#
She does a completely amazing and courageous thing by deciding in the 1930s to go out to
#
the Northwest Frontier Province and preach nonviolence to dacoits.
#
So she learns Pashto and she goes around to camps of dacoits.
#
And imagine this, you know, petite anglicized Parsi woman who was a classical singer, living
#
in Paris up until recently, her house is on Nepean Sea Road in Bombay, and now she's
#
traipsing through Waziristan, talking to dacoits and saying, please, you know, stop kidnapping
#
Hindus in order to restore Hindu-Muslim unity.
#
Instead, why don't you weave Khadar and, you know, learn about Gandhi?
#
It's a completely ballsy thing that she's doing.
#
She at several points in time is probably nearly killed.
#
I mean, she writes to Gandhi about bullets whizzing by her in the desert, the pretty
#
So you know, all of this is kind of, you know, comes from a political spirit that Naroji
#
helps inculcate in his children and grandchildren.
#
So you know, his family legacy, even though it might not have been very well reflected
#
in his relationship with his wife, it's reflected in the political activities of his children
#
This is so fascinating.
#
I can totally see this as a grand Bollywood film.
#
So you know, I've taken a lot of your time, two kind of final lines of inquiry.
#
One is, you know, towards the end of his life, one, he himself becomes very embittered with
#
his failure in parliament or what he sees as his failure in parliament and so on.
#
And you know, you point out how one of his constant enemies in London, Shyamjeev Krishna
#
Verma, who I promised was no relative of mine, Shyamjeev Krishna Verma then sort of criticizes
#
him and calls him a grand failure and says that he's achieved nothing through all these
#
And you know, when I kind of, for me, this, you know, looking at that period of Indian
#
history always seems to me really weird because everything seems coherent till the second
#
decade of the 20th century.
#
You have the moderates who are doing the petitioning, who are trying to work with government.
#
You have the extremists, on the other hand, who are gradually moving apart and all narratives
#
And then up comes this black swan event called Gandhi and he turns everything around.
#
And it's like nothing that happened before that was even required or made any sense or
#
So on the one hand, because, you know, that's also the decade when Gokhale dies, Feroz Shah
#
Mehta dies, you know, and of course, Navroji dies, but he's already so old anyway, he's
#
So the moderates are out.
#
But then again, it's just completely different stand, which is nothing, which is no continue,
#
which seems to have no continuity with what came before.
#
So one looking back at his legacy and the fact that, yes, you know, on the surface of
#
it, it seems like he didn't get much done.
#
Did he have a legacy beyond that?
#
And perhaps is that legacy his failure in a sense?
#
Because you know, Gandhi, at one point, you point out how Gandhi is telling one of his
#
colleagues in South Africa around 1909 or 1910 that, you know, we must not give up because
#
look at Dada Bhai, he's been at it for 40 years.
#
And if you look at all of, for example, you know, one thing people don't realize when
#
we think about Gandhi, such a mythological figure is that all of Gandhi's satyagrahas
#
basically failed, including the ones in South Africa.
#
But he just, you know, the last was sort of a half hearted, face saving semi success.
#
But Gandhi essentially kept failing, kept failing, kept failing, but he kept at it.
#
And then at some point that turned.
#
So is that Naroji's legacy or is there a legacy beyond the failure of it?
#
How do you how do we, you know, when we now look back at him, besides the mythology of
#
grand old man of India or the Indian uncle, as you point out, what what do we see?
#
Is it a frustratingly wasted life, you know, lived with the best intention, but going nowhere?
#
Or, you know, is it easy to say that in hindsight?
#
And did he actually move the needle in ways that are not so visible today?
#
That's an excellent question, because these are questions that I'm trying to wrestle with
#
Oftentimes, both from our perspective and from the perspective of someone in, say, the
#
1930s or the 1940s, you could look upon moderate nationalism, this kind of early phase of nationalism
#
as being a bit of a failure.
#
I mean, the Congress was this small party that was relatively elite and city based.
#
What reforms were really, you know, wrested from the British government?
#
And ultimately, only when Gandhi comes to the scene, do you really have a mass based
#
movement where there is significant, you know, change on the ground.
#
Now, the thing about this is that even people like Gandhi realized how wrong that perspective
#
Gandhi acknowledged himself.
#
He did not come out of any, you know, he didn't come out of nowhere.
#
I mean, he he came out of the particular heritage that India had accumulated in terms of its
#
nationalist history and its political trajectory.
#
And there's a passage in Hind Swaraj where Gandhi defends Naroji by saying, you know,
#
we stand on the shoulders of our, you know, those who come before us and, you know, that
#
You can see father because of what people have done beforehand.
#
And he says Naroji was the person who really kind of laid the foundations.
#
And I think that's what Naroji's greatest legacy was.
#
I mean, it was easy for people like Shyamji Krishnavarma to call him a failure because,
#
you know, ultimately, he did not achieve civil service reform.
#
He did not stop the drain of wealth.
#
I mean, India was poorer and more famine-ridden in the year 1900 than it had been when Naroji
#
started his political career in the 1860s.
#
And Swaraj, of course, was a was a very distant goal.
#
So, you know, on those three particular goals, of course, Naroji failed on on on in order
#
to achieve those things.
#
But ultimately, he laid the organizational and the philosophical and kind of political
#
economic foundations upon which Indian nationalism eventually did achieve success.
#
I mean, when we think of any aspect of Indian nationalism, whether it was the organization
#
in terms of the Indian National Congress, whether it was the particular message about
#
how poverty was the kind of the central feature of why British rule was so bad for India,
#
it was the international aspects of Indian nationalism.
#
I mean, this is something which I'm trying to talk more about in my next book about how
#
people like Naroji did not make Indian nationalism just about India.
#
It was about much more than just India.
#
It was it was a much more global campaign for emancipation.
#
Any of these aspects had Naroji at the very core.
#
Naroji was the people who laid the groundwork for many of these for many of these aspects
#
I mean, many of the people were were were part and parcel of this process.
#
But he was at the very center of all these various networks.
#
So it's it's really impossible to understand Indian nationalism without Naroji, because
#
you know, if if you were adopting Gandhi's or Tilak's methods in the 1860s, through pretty
#
much the 1880s and 1890s, you would have been cut off.
#
There was no way the British government would have would have countenance to your activities.
#
And Gokhale himself recognized this in regards to Alan Octavian Hume.
#
When when Hume dies in 1912, Gokhale delivers this eulogy for Hume saying no one else could
#
have founded the Congress.
#
It had to have been a British ex-official founding the Congress, because otherwise it
#
would have been shut down.
#
The government would have shut it down and dissolve the Congress.
#
And indeed, you know, the viceroys in power, Lansden and Dufferin, nearly did shut down
#
I mean, if you read their correspondence, they're this close to even charging someone
#
like Hume, a fellow British person, a fellow member of the civil service with sedition
#
So you can only imagine what they would have done to a Naroji or Gokhale and what they
#
did eventually do to a Tilak by acting out on these threats.
#
I mean, there would have been no question of the velvet glove being off and the metal
#
fist of imperialism quashing and crushing these individuals.
#
So in that regard, it's impossible to really think of us, think of Naroji as being a failure.
#
They did as much as they could do under the circumstances.
#
In fact, they went beyond it in many ways.
#
And you know, they prepared the ground for a later generation when it was much easier
#
to kind of go against the grain of British imperialism.
#
And finally, you know, I'll leave it to readers to read your book and to kind of discover
#
Dada Bhai Naroji's fascinating life for themselves.
#
But I'll shift back to the personal now.
#
You know, biographers sometimes say that by the time they finish a biography, they feel
#
bereaved when it's over.
#
It's like a sense of loss because you get so attached to the person that you're writing
#
Has it kind of been like that for you, especially as there'll be a lot of, I'm guessing, cultural
#
echoes because, you know, you're also Parsi, you're in Bombay right now.
#
You know, there would be sort of echoes of that also.
#
So you know, what was the relationship between you and Naroji through this book?
#
You know, how did it feel when it was over and in what ways did it sort of enrich your
#
I heard your conversation with Saman Subramaniam and I remember he mentioned that that feeling
#
Curiously, I have not felt it.
#
I mean, I remember when I did my undergraduate thesis, it wasn't even a biographical project.
#
It was on the construction of the city of Delhi.
#
I felt a tremendous amount of just kind of meaningless after it was turned in.
#
It was almost like depression, you know, after you turned it in and what do I do now?
#
And I haven't had that feeling with Naroji probably because he's not done for me.
#
You know, I'm sitting on thousands of his letters that I eventually want to publish.
#
So you know, there still is more work that I want to incorporate him into.
#
And secondly, the next book that I'm working on currently, you know, which has been a little
#
thrown a little bit asunder because of the whole pandemic, is on early Indian nationalism
#
And again, kind of trying to show about why it was relevant, not just in its era but in
#
Why the, you know, the principles and ideas that they fought for and enunciated are as
#
valid today as they were back then.
#
And Naroji, of course, has a big part to play in it.
#
I'm looking at other figures, I mean, like Lal Mohan Ghosh or Hume or eventually people
#
like Ranade or Feroz Shah Mehta, but Naroji is always there.
#
I mean, his correspondence figures there, his ideas are important and he's always hovering
#
So strangely, I haven't felt that feeling of mourning as yet.
#
You know, he'll be an important part of my life, whether I like it or not, you know,
#
for many years to come.
#
I can't wait to read your next book because that period of history also kind of fascinates
#
You know, I went to college in Ferguson College, Pune, and it was only years after I had graduated
#
and left that I realized what a rich history it has in terms of so many of the moderate
#
leaders of that era, in fact, being there.
#
And one of my favorite stories is, you know, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, who sadly died too young.
#
He was once teaching, I think, a biology class at Ferguson College.
#
And he asked him the question that if donkeys had a god, what would the god look like?
#
And then I don't know how I'll do this in a podcast, but he basically held both his
#
hands above his ears, you know, to imitate donkey ears.
#
And that is such a fantastic thing.
#
And you say that those leaders can have lessons for today.
#
I don't think Agarkar could have gotten away with it today for all you know.
#
But Dinyar, it's just been so amazing talking to you.
#
Thanks so much for your time and insights.
#
Thank you very much, Amit.
#
It's been a pleasure to be on this program.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, do hop on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up Nowruji, Pioneer of Indian Nationalism by Dinyar Patel.
#
You can follow Dinyar on Twitter at Dinyar Patel, one word.
#
You can follow me at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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