Founding of the Indian National Congress (1885) in Bombay

The Indian National Congress was founded at a meeting of 72 delegates in Bombay (now Mumbai) from 28 to 31 December 1885. Organised by the retired British official Allan Octavian Hume together with Western-educated Indian leaders, it began as a moderate, loyal forum asking for a larger Indian voice in government. Within decades it became the main vehicle of the Indian independence movement and, after 1947, India’s dominant political party.

Background

By the 1880s British India had produced a new class of Indians educated in English at universities founded in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857. Lawyers, journalists, teachers and businessmen read European political thought and resented their exclusion from real power. The memory of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 also shaped both British caution and Indian strategy.

Several grievances sharpened political feeling. The Vernacular Press Act of 1878 restricted the Indian-language press. In 1876 the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service examination, held only in London, was lowered to 19, making it even harder for Indians to compete. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883, when British residents furiously opposed a proposal allowing Indian judges to try Europeans in some cases, showed how strongly racial privilege was defended.

Regional associations already existed: the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (1870), the Indian Association of Calcutta (1876), the Madras Mahajana Sabha (1884) and the Bombay Presidency Association (founded in January 1885). In Calcutta, Surendranath Banerjea organised an Indian National Conference in 1883. What was missing was a single all-India body.

Hume and the founders

Allan Octavian Hume (1829-1912) had served in the Indian Civil Service for over three decades, including during the 1857 uprising, before retiring in 1882. In 1883 he wrote an open letter to the graduates of Calcutta University urging educated Indians to organise for national progress. He corresponded widely, travelled to consult leaders and, in 1885, discussed his plans with the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin.

Hume worked alongside a circle of Indian leaders. They included Dadabhai Naoroji, the Bombay merchant and economist; the lawyers Pherozeshah Mehta, Kashinath Trimbak Telang and Badruddin Tyabji; Dinshaw Wacha; and, from Madras, figures such as Subramania Iyer, editor of The Hindu. Another British sympathiser, Sir William Wedderburn, also supported the movement.

The meeting was first called the Indian National Union and planned for Poona in December 1885. A cholera outbreak there led the organisers to move it to Bombay, and the name Indian National Congress was adopted.

The first session

The session opened on 28 December 1885 in the hall of the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College. Seventy-two delegates attended, together with a number of official and unofficial observers. Most came from the Bombay and Madras presidencies; Bengal was less well represented because Banerjea’s National Conference met in Calcutta at the same time.

The Calcutta barrister Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee was elected president. In his address he set out the aims: to promote friendship among workers for the national cause across India, to remove prejudices of race, creed and province, to consolidate national unity, and to present Indian opinion to the government. Speakers on the following days, including Pherozeshah Mehta, Kashinath Trimbak Telang and Dadabhai Naoroji, moved and seconded the resolutions in long speeches that were later printed and circulated.

The delegates passed nine resolutions. They asked for:

• a Royal Commission to inquire into the working of Indian administration;
• abolition of the Council of the Secretary of State for India in London;
• expansion of the central and provincial legislative councils, with elected members;
• simultaneous civil service examinations in England and India, and a higher age limit;
• reduction of military expenditure.

The session also objected to the annexation of Upper Burma following the Third Anglo-Burmese War, then under way.

Who the delegates were

The delegates were drawn almost entirely from the new professional classes. Lawyers formed the largest group, alongside journalists, teachers, merchants and landowners. Most were Hindus, with a number of Parsis from Bombay and only a couple of Muslims. Proceedings were conducted in English, the one language the educated elite of different provinces shared.

This narrow base was both a strength and a weakness. It gave the Congress articulate spokesmen who could argue with British officials in their own terms. But critics, including the Viceroy Lord Dufferin in a speech of 1888, dismissed the Congress as representing only a “microscopic minority” of India’s people.

Hume served as the general secretary, handling correspondence and organising future sessions. The Congress met each year in late December in a different city, a practice that helped make it a national rather than a provincial body.

The early Congress: moderates and methods

For its first two decades the Congress was dominated by leaders later called the Moderates. They believed British rule could be reformed through petitions, speeches, resolutions and reasoned argument, and they professed loyalty to the Crown. Their method was sometimes mocked as “mendicancy”, but it built a national platform.

The Moderates also developed an influential economic critique. Dadabhai Naoroji’s “drain theory”, set out in works culminating in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901), argued that Britain was draining India’s wealth through salaries, pensions and payments sent abroad.

The Congress grew quickly. Its second session, at Calcutta in 1886 under Naoroji, had more than 400 delegates. In 1887 Badruddin Tyabji became its first Muslim president. The influential reformer Sayyid Ahmad Khan, however, urged Muslims to keep away, arguing that representative institutions would leave them dominated by the Hindu majority.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Congress was a British plot. The “safety valve” theory holds that Hume and Dufferin created the Congress to defuse discontent. It comes mostly from Wedderburn’s 1913 biography of Hume. Historians now stress that Indian leaders were already organising and used Hume as a well-connected ally, while Dufferin soon grew hostile to the Congress.

Myth: the Congress demanded independence from the start. The founders sought reform and representation within the empire. Self-government (swaraj) became the goal only in the early 20th century, and complete independence (purna swaraj) was formally adopted in 1929.

Consequences and legacy

From 1905 a younger, more radical wing, led by figures such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, challenged the Moderates, especially after the Partition of Bengal. The two groups split at the Surat session of 1907 before reuniting in 1916. After 1920 Mohandas Gandhi turned the Congress into a mass movement.

Over time the Congress broadened its base far beyond the lawyers and journalists of 1885, drawing in peasants, workers and women, although tensions with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, deepened in the following decades. The meeting of 72 delegates in 1885 thus founded an organisation that led India to independence in 1947 and governed the country for most of its first half-century.

Timeline

• 1883: Hume’s open letter to Calcutta University graduates; Indian National Conference in Calcutta.
• 1885, January: Bombay Presidency Association founded.
• 1885, December: Cholera in Poona forces the planned meeting to move to Bombay.
• 1885, 28 December: First session opens under Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee.
• 1885, 31 December: Session closes after passing nine resolutions.
• 1886, December: Second session in Calcutta under Dadabhai Naoroji.
• 1887: Badruddin Tyabji presides over the Madras session.
• 1907, December: Moderates and Extremists split at Surat.

Why it matters

The founding of the Indian National Congress gave India its first lasting nationwide political organisation. Its cautious early demands established habits of debate, representation and all-India cooperation that later carried the independence struggle.