Dadabhai Naoroji was a pioneering Indian intellectual, political leader and economic thinker who spent over three decades in Britain agitating for India’s independence. Son of a Parsi priest, Naoroji was born in Bombay in 1825 and began his career as a mathematics professor before moving to Britain in 1855 to join Cama & Co., the first Indian commercial firm in the country. Alongside his business ventures, he was appointed professor of Gujarati at University College London and soon became a key advocate for Indian voices in Britain.

In the early 1860s, Naoroji co-founded several organisations that were dedicated to supporting expatriate Indians and the campaign for India’s self-governance: the London Zoroastrian Association (1861), the London Indian Society (1865) and the East India Association (1866) though this last was eventually taken over by a faction opposed to Naoroji’s aim of ‘India for the Indians’.

A fierce critic of British imperial economics, he developed the influential “Drain Theory,” arguing that Britain systematically extracted wealth from India under colonial rule. This argument reached its fullest expression in his landmark 1901 publication Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, written at his home in Anerley in south London, which also served as a hub for the Indian community.

Naoroji’s political influence extended to Westminster. After an unsuccessful 1886 campaign marred by racist opposition, he was elected Liberal MP for Central Finsbury in 1892 – the first Indian to sit in the British Parliament. There, he championed Indian civil rights, Irish home rule, and women’s political representation. Naoroji also played a foundational role in the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, sitting as its president in 1886, 1893 and 1906, helping to transform moderate calls for reform into a broader movement for independence.

Respected by contemporaries in Britain and India, Naoroji retired to Bombay in 1907 and died in 1917. He is fondly remembered as the ‘Grand Old Man of India’. Naoroji’s legacy endures in his transnational solidarity, political courage, and long struggle for justice under empire.

The present system of government is destructive and despotic to the Indians and un-British and suicidal to Britain. -- Dadabhai Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India