The Grand Old Man & his miscellanea
- Photo courtesy: National Archives of India
- Photo courtesy: National Archives of India
The paper trail leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji have left behind offers
a rich insight into the lives of early Indian nationalists and our
understanding of them
The spring of 1901 was a moment of despair for Dadabhai Naoroji, then in
residence in London. While struggling to secure a new constituency from
where he could attempt to re-enter the British Parliament, the Grand
Old Man had to contend with increasingly retrogressive Tory policies
toward India and flagging spirits within the Indian National Congress.
But on 24 April, Naoroji received news of a different yet equally
troubling variety: his toilet was malfunctioning. “The plumber has done
what he can to rectify the defects of the water waste preventer, &
we regret that it is not now satisfactory,” FW Ellis, builder and estate
agent in Upper Norwood, London, grimly informed him by post.
Detailed picture
Amidst the reams of important correspondence in the Dadabhai Naoroji
Papers — a collection of some 30,000 documents held at the National
Archives of India in Delhi — one regularly comes across unexpected
material such as Ellis’ note. The Naoroji Papers, which I have consulted
for over the past 20 months, provide stunning new insight into early
Indian nationalism. Additionally, they paint an extraordinarily detailed
picture of the life of one of India’s greatest leaders in the
pre-independence era. Naoroji, it appears, decided to keep all of his
correspondence for posterity. As a result, letters from Indian and
British political luminaries jostle alongside everyday receipts,
prescriptions, random newspaper clippings, and the 19th century
equivalent of junk mail. Such minutiae are easy to dismiss at first.
Yet, taken together, they help us reconstruct the careers of Naoroji and
other Indians who lived and worked in the United Kingdom, telling us
how they navigated life in a strange and foreign society.
From the Papers, we know a smattering of what is, on the surface,
completely trivial information about the Grand Old Man. A receipt, for
example, indicates that on 9 January 1897 he purchased hand-made boots
from a cobbler in southwest London that cost him precisely one pound and
one shilling. We know that his family servant in Bombay was named
Baloo. Naoroji might have invested in a company developing the tram
system in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as well as the first garden city in
England: I located share fliers for both ventures early in my research. A
newspaper cutting from the early 1900s suggests he took an interest in
the llama, the resourceful South American pack animal. And several
months ago, I stumbled across his eyeglass prescription from 1894 (a
friend of mine, a doctor at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary,
diagnoses Naoroji as being far-sighted).
Digging a little deeper, it is possible to piece together greater
significance from such random and bizarre information. Investments in
South America, the United Kingdom, and India show that Naoroji adopted a
very international outlook in his personal finances — finances that he
put to productive use by funding nationalist activity. Even his
malfunctioning toilet tells us that Naoroji was privy to some of the
latest available technology: the waste water preventer was a relatively
new invention that was revolutionising sanitation in Victorian England.
Since Naoroji was the senior-most Indian resident in the United Kingdom,
he was regularly consulted by his countrymen who travelled to the
imperial metropole for study, work, or pleasure. There are literally
thousands of letters in the Naoroji Papers from such Indians —
documenting incidents of racism, financial trouble, or plain
homesickness — and nearly all of them received a prompt and detailed
reply from the Grand Old Man. Naoroji functioned as a guardian of sorts
for many Indians in Britain. Around 1 am on 2 January 1891, for example,
he was awakened by a telegram from a London police constable informing
him that a ‘Mr. CK Desai’ was under arrest for public drunkenness and
wanted Naoroji to bail him out of jail. Aside from such correspondence,
there are reams of letters from concerned parents in India who asked
Naoroji to keep tabs on their sons (and, increasingly, daughters),
making sure that they were being financially prudent and not consorting
with Englishwomen.
The Papers also provide an insight into how Naoroji and his fellow
nationalists in London adapted and reacted to life abroad. In addition
to collaborating on the formulation of various economic critiques of the
Raj, Romesh Chunder Dutt used Naoroji as a character reference for
securing his flat in Forest Hill in 1898. While Dutt eventually returned
to India in 1903, his fellow Bengali, W.C. Bonnerji, the first
president of the Congress, took to London so much that he and his family
put down permanent roots there, purchasing a house in Croydon that they
christened Kidderpore. The extent of their Anglicisation was evident
when Naoroji in January 1893 invited the Bonnerjis to attend, in Indian
attire, a function held in Central Finsbury to celebrate his election to
the House of Commons. “I am extremely sorry to say that we have not an
Indian dress in the house,” a family member responded.
Others dearly missed the staples of Indian life while in England. In
January 1906, the radical nationalist Madame Bhikaiji Cama — staying
with a family member in North Kensington — invited Naoroji and his
grandchildren over for a Sunday ‘Parsee lunch,’ an offer the Grand Old
Man must have leapt at given the boiled and bland fare otherwise on
offer in London. Some cultural adjustments were easier. Although in his
sixties and seventies, Naoroji appears to have taken a fancy to English
sports. He was the president of the football club in his parliamentary
constituency, Central Finsbury, and the vice-president of a north London
cricket club. A tantalising clue about Naoroji’s affinity for the
gentleman’s game is offered by his campaign secretary, who in 1895 wrote
to Naoroji that, “One would really imagine you to be a God of Cricket.”
But there was one great cultural challenge in Britain that Naoroji had
great difficulty in surmounting: people just could not spell his name
correctly. In newspapers, posters, and his incoming mail, the Grand Old
Man was addressed by creative variants such as Dedabhan Naorji, Devan
Novoriji, and Dadabhai Nowraggie. Matters improved slightly once his
campaign secretary suggested that he simply go by ‘D. Naoroji.’ After he
won election to Parliament by a mere five votes, he was frequently
referred to as ‘Dadabhai Narrow-Majority,’ which was presumably easier
to remember and spell.
Naoroji and his fellow nationalists, however, were guilty of their own
spelling bloopers. The Grand Old Man regularly ended his letters with
the valediction “Your’s truly,” adding an unnecessary apostrophe. When
the Bengali painter, Sasi Kumar Hesh, visited London in 1899, Romesh
Chunder Dutt wrote excitedly of the various ‘pourtraits’ the artist
intended to undertake. Madame Cama loved semi-colons; her letters to
Naoroji are simply replete with them. What is particularly striking is
how so many of Naoroji’s correspondents chose to communicate in broken
English rather than in languages where they had a shared greater
proficiency, such as Gujarati or Hindustani. But English, even bad
English, was a status symbol then, as it remains today. The surprisingly
few Gujarati letters in the Naoroji Papers are mostly from his family
members.
Common headache
While mastery of English was a challenge to some upwardly-mobile
Indians, deciphering one another’s handwriting was a headache shared by
all. I have probably done serious damage to my own eyesight by trying to
make sense of the scribbles found in the Naoroji Papers. Understanding
them was evidently a challenge to the original recipients over a century
ago. Naoroji occasionally admonished Behramji Malabari, the prominent
Parsi journalist and social reformer, to write neatly. William
Wedderburn, one of the British stalwarts in the early Congress, grumbled
to Naoroji in August 1891 that he could not read letters from Dinsha
Wacha, the longtime Congress general secretary (“But you must not tell
him this,” he added). And Allan Octavian Hume, while attempting to go
through a draft of Naoroji’s presidential address to the 1893 Lahore
Congress, confessed to Naoroji that “your handwriting is rather hard to
read.” Perhaps it is appropriate that, toward the end of his life,
Naoroji helped fund a bright Maharashtrian inventor, Shankar Abaji
Bhise, who was working on new models of typewriters.
Encountering such unexpected miscellanea is a treat to the historian,
providing a moment of levity while sifting through otherwise heavy and
complex matter. But these miscellanea also perform an important role in
our understanding of early Indian nationalists. Individuals such as
Naoroji, Dutt, Ranade, and Gokhale have — in both scholarship and our
popular conceptions of history — too often been cast as staid,
unapproachable, and even downright dull people. The paper trail they
left behind tells us quite a different story: it exposes us to the
particularities of their lives, their complex characters, their foibles,
habits, and everyday routines. It humanises these leaders. Maybe this
is one reason why Dadabhai Naoroji, while organising his personal papers
during his retirement in Versova, chose to preserve his prescriptions,
receipts, and correspondence with his London plumber.
(Dinyar Patel is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Harvard
University. Some of the material quoted here will be published in the
forthcoming volume, The Grand Old Man of India: Selections from the
Dadabhai Naoroji Papers (Oxford University Press), which he is
co-editing with S.R. Mehrotra.)
Keywords: Dadabhai Naoroji, Congress
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