Founding of the Indian National Congress

A recurring trap in this chapter is flattening the Indian National Congress's founding into a single loose fact, "founded by A.O. Hume in 1885", and stopping there. The checkable details are more precise and more testable: the exact date is 28 December 1885, not just "1885"; the man who actually presided over that first session was W.C. Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister, not the more famous Dadabhai Naoroji; and Hume's own role, on the Congress's own account and on Encyclopaedia Britannica's, was organisational and facilitating rather than sole authorship, since the founding leadership was genuinely Indian from the first day. A second, subtler trap sits under the first: calling the Congress "moderate" in its early decades is often read as passive or toothless, when the verified record shows a body that built a serious, sustained economic critique of colonial rule while confining itself to petition and constitutional argument rather than mass confrontation, a distinction the next generation of leaders would deliberately break from. Getting the date, the president, Hume's real role, and what "Moderate" meant in practice right is what this chapter is built to test.

The Socio-Religious Reform Movements note on this site covers the reformers of the same broad period, Raja Rammohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj among them, none of whom founded a national political party; the Partition of Bengal and Swadeshi Movement note covers the Swadeshi-era organisations, including the National Council of Education; and the Non-Cooperation Movement note picks up the Congress's own organisational history from 1920. This note stays inside the gap those three leave open: the founding of the Indian National Congress itself in December 1885, its early Moderate leadership's actual goals and methods, and the smaller political associations that came immediately before it, without re-covering the Moderate-Extremist split or the 1907 Surat session in depth, that belongs to a separate chapter.

The founding of the Indian National Congress, 1885

Allan Octavian Hume entered the Indian Civil Service in Bengal in 1849, served as a magistrate in Etawah through the 1857 revolt, and later worked as secretary in the Government of India's revenue and agriculture department from 1870 to 1879. His outspoken support for greater Indian participation in administration drew the disapproval of Viceroy Lord Lytton, who had him removed from that post. Hume retired from the civil service in 1882 and threw himself into political organising. A letter he wrote in 1883, urging graduates of the University of Calcutta to take charge of their own political future, survives as a genuine statement of his thinking at the time: "If you, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong and our adversaries right."

In 1885 Hume helped establish the Congress alongside Indian leaders, Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjea prominent among them, and was himself one of the 72 founding members at the first session. NCERT's own account is careful on this point too: it describes Hume, "a retired British official", as someone who "played a part in bringing Indians from various regions together", language that credits him with an organising role rather than sole authorship. He went on to serve as the Congress's general secretary for its first 22 years.

That first session met over four days, 28 to 31 December 1885, at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College near Gowalia Tank in Bombay. According to Pattabhi Sitaramayya's early history of the Congress, the meeting had originally been planned for Poona and was shifted to Bombay only shortly before it convened, over fears of a disease outbreak in Poona. Seventy-two delegates attended, NCERT, the Congress's own historical account, and Britannica all agree on this figure, drawn mostly from Bombay, Madras, Bengal, and the North-Western Provinces, and mostly lawyers, educators, and other professionals. No women were present, and none of the men later known as the Congress's "Extremist" wing, Bal Gangadhar Tilak among them, attended either; this was, from its first day, a gathering of moderate, constitutionally minded professionals.

Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister, presided as the first president. His opening address on 28 December pledged continued loyalty to the British Crown while laying out India's real administrative grievances, exclusion from the higher civil service, the drain of India's fiscal resources, and restrictions on arms ownership among them, and called for "loyal and constitutional agitation" rather than confrontation. The session passed a set of resolutions covering the same ground the moderates would keep raising for the next two decades: expanding the Imperial Legislative Council, holding Indian Civil Service examinations simultaneously in India and England, reducing military expenditure, and organising famine relief.

The early leadership, as NCERT records it, was Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, W.C. Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerji, Romesh Chandra Dutt, and S. Subramania Iyer, among others, drawn largely from Bombay and Calcutta. Naoroji, a businessman and publicist who had settled in London and for a time sat in the British Parliament, guided the younger nationalists in this group. Growth was rapid by the standards of the day: the second session, held in Calcutta in 1886 with Naoroji presiding, drew 434 delegates, more than six times the first session's attendance, and Provincial Congress Committees were set up across the country soon after.

Hume's motives have remained one of this period's genuinely contested questions rather than a settled fact, and the chapter is better served by naming the debate than flattening it. Early Congress leaders read his involvement differently. Gopal Krishna Gokhale viewed Hume's presence as protective, useful precisely because it made the colonial government less likely to suppress the organisation outright. The more radical Lajpat Rai, writing later, viewed Hume with suspicion, arguing that he had helped build the Congress as a "safety valve" to let off revolutionary pressure and win Indians over to moderate reform instead of confrontation. Both readings come from the historical record; neither should be presented as the settled last word.

The early moderates: goals and methods

NCERT's own assessment of the Congress's first twenty years is precise and worth quoting in substance: the party was "moderate" in both its objectives and its methods across this period. It sought a greater Indian voice in government and administration, wanted the Legislative Councils made genuinely more representative and given real power, and demanded they be introduced in provinces that still had none. It pushed for Indians to be placed in senior government positions, and, since the Indian Civil Service examination was then held only in London, demanded it be held in India as well.

The demand for Indianising the administration was not a narrow careerist grievance; it was tied explicitly to two larger arguments. First, an anti-racism argument: senior posts were monopolised by white officials on the general assumption that Indians could not be trusted with real responsibility. Second, an economic argument: British officers sent a large share of their substantial salaries home to England, so Indianisation was expected to reduce this "drain of wealth" as well. Naoroji, alongside Romesh Chandra Dutt and Dinshaw Wacha, developed this drain-of-wealth critique into a sustained body of economic writing that argued British rule had structurally impoverished India rather than merely governed it inefficiently. Beyond Indianisation, the early Congress also called for separating the judiciary from the executive, repealing the Arms Act, and securing freedom of speech and expression.

The moderates raised a genuinely wide economic agenda alongside these administrative demands, evidence that this was not a body speaking only for its own professional class. They argued that rising land revenue had impoverished peasants and zamindars alike, and that grain exports to Europe had created domestic food shortages; they called for reduced land revenue, cuts to military spending, and greater funding for irrigation. Congress sessions in this period passed resolutions on the salt tax, on the treatment of Indian indentured labourers abroad, and on the hardships forest administration imposed on forest-dwelling communities.

Their method matched their theory of how change would actually happen. The moderates worked to build public awareness of British rule's real costs: publishing newspapers, writing articles, giving speeches, and sending representatives across the country to mobilise opinion. Their underlying assumption, as NCERT frames it, was that the British government genuinely respected the ideals of freedom and justice, and would therefore accept India's demands once those demands, and the feelings behind them, were properly placed before it. Petition and persuasion were not, on this reading, a failure of nerve; they were the chosen strategy, given that assumption about how the coloniser would respond.

It is worth noting, too, that the moderate leadership was not free of internal friction over its own commitment. In a letter to Naoroji in 1887, Dinshaw Wacha, himself a moderate leader, complained that Pherozeshah Mehta was "too busy with his personal work" and wondered how, "if all remain busy in the pursuit of gold, can the progress of the country be advanced." This kind of internal, contemporary criticism is a useful corrective to treating the Moderates as either uniformly devoted or uniformly complacent.

By the 1890s, a rising current of leaders in Bengal, Maharashtra, and Punjab, Bipin Chandra Pal, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Lala Lajpat Rai among them, began openly questioning this approach, criticising the Moderates for what they called the "politics of prayers" and arguing that Indians needed to rely on their own strength rather than the government's good intentions. That internal debate, and the split it eventually produced at Surat in 1907, is a distinct episode in its own right and is not developed further here.

Other early political associations

NCERT groups the Congress with several other political associations formed in the 1870s and 1880s, mostly led by English-educated professionals such as lawyers: the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the Indian Association, the Madras Mahajan Sabha, and the Bombay Presidency Association. The name of the first is itself instructive: "sarvajanik" literally means "of or for all the people" (sarva, all, plus janik, of the people), and NCERT notes that these bodies, though each rooted in a specific region, stated their goals as the goals of all Indians rather than of any one region, community, or class, working from the idea that Indians should be sovereign, empowered to decide their own affairs.

The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was founded in the 1870s in the Bombay Presidency by Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge, social reformer, and scholar who had topped the first Bachelor of Arts class at the University of Bombay. Ranade went on to mentor Gopal Krishna Gokhale, who later became a central figure in the Congress itself, an early, verifiable example of how these regional associations fed directly into the national movement's later leadership.

The Indian Association has the fuller, more precisely dated record. Sisir Kumar Ghosh and Sambhu Charan Mukherjee had founded a forerunner, the India League, in Calcutta on 25 September 1875; when that body faltered, Surendranath Banerjea founded the Indian Association together with his friend Anandamohan Bose on 26 September 1876, also in Calcutta. Its stated objects included building a strong body of Indian public opinion, uniting Indians across regions around shared political interests, promoting friendly feeling between Hindus and Muslims, and drawing the masses into the wider public movement of the time. Under Banerjea's leadership, the Association ran an all-India campaign against an 1877 decision to lower the age limit for Indian Civil Service candidates from 21 to 19, sending Banerjea on a tour of the country that built genuine national awareness; it also demanded simultaneous Civil Service examinations in India and England, campaigned against the Arms Act (1878) and the Vernacular Press Act (1878), and pressed for Indianisation of the higher administration, the same demands the Congress itself would soon adopt nationally. In 1883 the Association convened the first Indian National Conference in Calcutta, anticipating the Congress's own founding by two years; its second National Conference, also in Calcutta, met in December 1885, the same month as the Congress's first Bombay session. The Association formally merged into the Congress at the latter's second session in Calcutta in December 1886.

The Madras Mahajan Sabha and the Bombay Presidency Association appear in NCERT's list of the same generation of associations, but a comparably detailed, independently verifiable founding record for either did not surface in this research, so they are named here rather than described further.

Quick revision points

• The Indian National Congress's first session met 28 to 31 December 1885 at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay, with 72 delegates; the meeting had originally been planned for Poona.
• The first president was W.C. Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister, not Dadabhai Naoroji (a common mix-up, since Naoroji is the more widely remembered name).
• A.O. Hume, a retired ICS official (retired 1882), helped organise the Congress and was one of its 72 founding members; he served as general secretary for its first 22 years. His motives remain debated: Gokhale saw his role as protective, Lajpat Rai later called the Congress a British-encouraged "safety valve".
• Early leadership named by NCERT: Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, W.C. Bonnerjee, Surendranath Banerji, Romesh Chandra Dutt, S. Subramania Iyer.
• The Congress's first twenty years were Moderate in objectives and method: representative Legislative Councils, Indianisation of the civil service, judiciary-executive separation, repeal of the Arms Act, and a substantive economic critique (drain of wealth: Naoroji, Dutt, Wacha; resolutions on land revenue, famine, salt tax, forest administration). Method: petitions, press, speeches, and representatives sent to mobilise opinion, not mass confrontation.
• The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (Mahadev Govind Ranade, 1870s, Bombay Presidency) and the Indian Association (Surendranath Banerjea and Anandamohan Bose, 26 September 1876, Calcutta) both predate the Congress; the Indian Association convened the first Indian National Conference in 1883 and formally merged into the Congress in December 1886.

Once the date, the president, Hume's real (organisational, not sole) role, and the Moderates' actual demands are solid, the statement-based traps this chapter is built around stop being traps at all.