Dadabhai Naoroji
✓ Source-basedrisingIndian politician leader, scholar and writer (1825-1917)
The man who named the robbery. Naoroji sat in the House of Commons in the 1890s and used economics to prove what others only suspected: that British rule was draining India's wealth westward by design. The "drain theory" became the intellectual backbone of early Indian nationalism.
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About this person
Born in 1825, Naoroji moved between Bombay and London as merchant and scholar, serving briefly as Diwan of Baroda in 1874 before settling in England to press the case for India. In 1892 he won a seat in Parliament for Finsbury Central as a Liberal - the second Asian ever elected to Westminster - and held it until 1895. He was already a founding member of the Indian National Congress, serving as its President three times between 1886 and 1907. His 1901 book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India laid out the drain theory in full: not incompetence but extraction, wealth siphoned by policy. He joined the Second International alongside Kautsky and Plekhanov, linking the colonial question to global labour politics while keeping his own stance moderate. He died in 1917, decades before independence, but the arithmetic he published outlasted the empire.
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