72 Registered Representatives Opened the First Indian National Congress in a Bombay Sanskrit College on 28 December 1885 and Passed Nine Resolutions, the First Asking for a Royal Commission

At noon on Monday 28 December 1885, in the great hall of the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay, Allan Octavian Hume proposed that Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister, be invited to take the chair. The motion carried unanimously, and the first Indian National Congress was under way. Over three days its members passed nine resolutions, and the first asked for a Royal Commission to inquire into how India was governed.

The printed proceedings register 72 representatives from 27 towns. Close to 100 people attended the first sitting, the report says, because government servants and scholars came as listeners and took no part in the debates.

A conference meant for Poona

A circular issued in March 1885 and reprinted at the head of the report announced a Conference of the Indian National Union at Poona, from 25 to 31 December. It asked for leading politicians who knew English, from the Bengal, Bombay and Madras presidencies. Delegates were to lodge in the Peshwa’s Garden near Parvati Hill. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, a public association, offered the garden and formed the reception committee, and food and lodging were to come from a Poona fund. The circular gave two aims: to let the most earnest workers in the national cause meet one another, and to settle the political work of the coming year. It described the conference as the germ of a native parliament.

A few days before the opening, cholera cases appeared in Poona, and the organisers moved the meeting to Bombay. The Bombay Presidency Association took charge. The managers of the Gokuldas Tejpal charity trust lent their college buildings above the Gowalia Tank and had them furnished and lit. The representatives began arriving on the morning of 27 December, and by then, the report says, it had been decided to call the conference the Congress. William Wedderburn’s 1913 life of Hume gives the Poona dates as 25 to 30 December, where the circular as printed has 25 to 31.

Who the 72 were

By the register’s tally, Bombay sent 18, Madras 8, Poona 8 and Surat 6, with one to three each from places as far apart as Karachi, Lahore, Agra, Lucknow, Tanjore and Bellary. The report counts lawyers of several ranks, merchants, landowners, bankers, doctors, newspaper editors, college principals and religious teachers among them, and Hindus of many castes alongside Christians and Muslims. Fewer Muslims came than the organisers had expected, the report says, because of what it calls unfortunate accidents.

Calcutta sent only three names. Bonnerjee told the hall that deaths, illness and other misfortunes explained it. Surendranath Banerjea, who helped found the Indian Association of Calcutta in 1876, gives the other half of the story in his 1925 memoir. Calcutta’s three leading associations had called their own National Conference for 25 to 27 December 1885, and Bonnerjee invited him to Bombay. Banerjea told him it was too late to suspend the Conference. He says the two meetings were prepared independently, each side learning of the other only on the eve. The political scientist Mark Bevir says Hume seems to have approached members of the Indian Association earlier in the year, and that many preferred their own conference under Banerjea. The 1886 session at Calcutta, Bevir adds, secured their adherence.

What the chairman said

Bonnerjee told the hall that the gathering had no formal elections behind it, but that associations and bodies had chosen the representatives, and that shared sentiment and shared wants entitled them to speak for the country. He listed four aims: friendship among the workers in the national cause across India; the removal of race, creed and provincial prejudice and the growth of national unity; a recorded opinion of educated Indians on social questions; and a plan for the political work of the next twelve months.

He also answered critics who had called the Congress “a nest of conspirators and disloyalists”. Everyone present, he said, was as loyal a well-wisher of British rule as anyone in India. He credited Britain with giving India order, railways and Western education, and said all the delegates wanted was that “the basis of the Government should be widened” so that Indians had a proper share in it.

Hume, the Theosophists and the Dufferin question

Hume (1829 to 1912) joined the Indian civil service in Bengal in 1849 and served from 1870 to 1879 as secretary in the revenue and agriculture department. Britannica says the Viceroy, Lord Bulwer-Lytton, disapproved of his support for Indian participation in government and removed him from that post. After he retired in 1882, he wrote an open letter in 1883 to the educated men of Calcutta University, asking them to “make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country”. Wedderburn, his friend and biographer, says the letter proposed a body of fifty founders and that the Indian National Union followed from it. Britannica adds that Hume was the Congress’s general secretary for its first 22 years.

Bevir’s article places Hume inside a Theosophical circle. Hume belonged to the Theosophical Society’s Simla branch and, in Bevir’s account, supposedly exchanged letters with the “Mahatmas”, the Society’s hidden teachers, through its founder Helena Blavatsky. He broke with her in 1883 and resigned his post, but kept his belief in the teachers. Bevir lists Narendranath Sen, K. T. Telang, Subramania Aiyar and B. M. Malabari among the Society’s Indian supporters, and Sen and Telang both sat in the Bombay hall. At the Society’s 1884 convention in Madras, he writes, Raghunath Rao argued that it should discuss politics. Rao lost that argument but gathered sympathisers at his home, and they formed the Madras Mahajana Sabha. Bevir says the inspiration for Sen’s early 1885 proposal of an all-India body “might well” have come from Madras. His conclusion is that Theosophy gave western-educated Hindus a way of talking about their political aims and brought them together with liberal Britons in an all-India framework.

The safety-valve theory comes from the same period. Britannica records that the radical nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai believed Hume helped create the Congress as a safety valve, a way to draw off revolutionary feeling and win approval for British rule through mild reforms. Bipan Chandra and his co-authors call this a myth with little basis in historical fact. They write that Hume’s “seven volumes” of reports, which later writers took to be secret police files, were shown to him by the teachers he believed in, and that the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, cooled toward Hume by the end of May 1885 and later attacked the Congress. Wedderburn, Hume’s friend and biographer, says instead that Hume took counsel with Dufferin and that Dufferin advised him to start with political organisation. Chandra and his co-authors quote Bonnerjee as saying in 1898 that the Congress was in reality Dufferin’s work, and suggest his memory or his caution explains it. Their own reading is that Hume’s standing as a retired official shielded the founders. They quote Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1913: “No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress.”

The nine resolutions

The summary at the head of the report lists nine resolutions, with their movers.

1. A Royal Commission on Indian administration, with Indians adequately represented on it and evidence taken in India and in England. G. Subramania Iyer of Madras moved it, P. M. Mehta seconded and Norendronath Sen supported.
2. Abolition, as then constituted, of the Council of the Secretary of State for India, the London body attached to the minister who ran Indian affairs, which the resolution calls “the necessary preliminary to all other reforms”. S. H. Chiplonkar of Poona moved it.
3. Reform and expansion of the Supreme (Viceroy’s) and provincial legislative councils, with a considerable share of elected members, new councils for the North-Western Provinces, Oudh and the Punjab, a right to question the executive, and a House of Commons committee to hear protests. K. T. Telang moved it, S. Subramania Iyer seconded and Dadabhai Naoroji supported.
4. Civil service examinations held at the same time in England and in India, with one merit list, successful Indian candidates sent to England for further study, other first appointments filled by competitive examination in India, and the maximum age of candidates raised to not less than 23. Naoroji moved it.
5. A declaration that the proposed increase in military spending was unnecessary and excessive. P. Rungiah Naidu of Madras moved it.
6. If more military money was needed, it should come from restoring customs duties and widening the license tax, and Britain should guarantee the Indian debt. J. U. Yajnik of Bombay moved it.
7. An objection to the annexation of Upper Burma, and a demand that if it went ahead, Burma be separated from the Indian Viceroyalty and made a Crown colony like Ceylon. Mehta moved it.
8. A request that the resolutions go to each province’s political associations for action. Murlidhar of Umballa moved it.
9. A decision to meet again at Calcutta. Hume moved it, and the date fixed was Tuesday 28 December 1886.

The report records Resolutions 1, 2, 3, 7, 8 and 9 as carried unanimously. On Resolution 6, an amendment from the floor was voted down. The first resolution changed in the room: Dayaram Jethmal of Karachi called it lame because it did not say how the commission of inquiry should be made up or where it should take evidence, and the text that passed names a Royal Commission and hearings in both countries. Naoroji’s 1893 motion on the same examinations in the House of Commons is in our Naoroji article.

The Congress closed on the third day with a vote of thanks to the chairman and three cheers for Hume. He answered by calling for cheers for the Queen-Empress, “three times three” and then more, and the report says they were given over and over. A note in the report’s summary adds that more than 100 political associations and public meetings in nearly every town took up the resolutions during 1886, though its Appendix A says a few places differed over abolishing the India Council.

The moderates and the road to Surat

Three men from the first hall became the best-known of the early moderates, the leaders who relied on petitions, speeches and constitutional pressure. Naoroji, who supported the third resolution and moved the fourth, presided at Calcutta in 1886. Mehta, who chaired the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1884 to 1885 and, Britannica says, co-founded the Bombay Presidency Association that year, presided in 1890. Banerjea missed the first session and later presided at Poona in 1895 and Ahmedabad in 1902. The Congress’s own synopsis of its sessions gives 406 delegates for Calcutta in 1886 and 756 for Benares in 1905, where Gokhale took the chair during the agitation over Curzon’s partition of Bengal.

The moderates and a younger group around Bal Gangadhar Tilak split at Surat in December 1907. The Congress’s synopsis says the Nagpur reception committee wanted Tilak as president, the moderates refused, and the venue was moved to Surat. Banerjea writes that as a past president he rose to propose Rash Behari Ghose for the chair, that a strong party wanted Tilak instead, and that chairs and shoes were thrown before the police cleared the pandal. The Congress’s own synopsis records the outcome in a sentence: “Congress became a moderate body for a number of years.”