Political Associations before the Congress: Years and Founders

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885, but organised political activity in India is half a century older. Between 1836 and 1885 a chain of associations grew in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and Poona, each a little broader than the last, and together they built the habit of public meetings, petitions, memorials to Parliament and a press that argued with the government. Examiners like this chapter because it is a dense list of names, years, cities and founders, and a single question can ask any one of them. Read it as a sequence: the first associations spoke for landlords, the middle ones for the English-educated professional class, and the last ones for a nation that was about to acquire a single platform.

The first stirrings in Bengal

The Bangabhasha Prakasika Sabha, formed in Calcutta in 1836 by associates of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, is usually counted as the first political association in India; it discussed matters of public interest and sent representations to the government. The Landholders' Society, also called the Zamindari Association, was founded in Calcutta in 1838 by Dwarkanath Tagore, Prasanna Kumar Tagore and Radhakanta Deb to protect the interests of landlords, and it was the first organisation to use constitutional agitation as a method. The Bengal British India Society came next in 1843, founded with the help of the English radical George Thompson, with the stated object of collecting and publishing information about the actual condition of the people of India. In 1851 these two merged to form the British Indian Association, with Radhakanta Deb as its first president and Debendranath Tagore as its secretary. The Association sent a petition to Parliament before the Charter Act of 1853 asking for a separate legislature, and it survived as a landlord body long after politics had moved past it.

Bombay and Madras follow

The year 1852 saw two associations founded in the other presidencies. The Bombay Association was started by Jagannath Shankarseth, and the Madras Native Association by Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty. Both sent petitions to the British Parliament on the renewal of the East India Company's charter. Neither lasted, but they established that the complaint of one presidency could be argued in the language of all India.

The associations of the educated middle class

From the eighteen sixties the leadership passed to lawyers, teachers and journalists educated in the new universities. Dadabhai Naoroji formed the London Indian Society in 1865 and then the East India Association in London in 1866, with branches in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, to place Indian questions before the British public and influence opinion in England. The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was founded in 1870 by Mahadev Govind Ranade and Ganesh Vasudeo Joshi as a bridge between the government and the people; its members held a brief from the villages around Poona, and it campaigned during the famine of 1876 and 1877. The Indian League was founded in Calcutta in 1875 by Sisir Kumar Ghosh, the editor of the Amrita Bazar Patrika, with the aim of stimulating a sense of nationalism among the people.

The Indian Association, 1876

The most important of all the pre-Congress bodies was the Indian Association, founded in Calcutta on 26 July 1876 by Surendranath Banerjee and Anand Mohan Bose. It set out to create a strong body of public opinion, to unify Indians on common political questions, to promote friendly feeling between Hindus and Muslims and to bring the masses into public movements, and it kept its subscription low so that poorer members could join. It led the agitation of 1877 against the lowering of the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service examination, and Surendranath Banerjee toured the country to build support for it. It took up the Arms Act and the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 and supported the Ilbert Bill in 1883. In December 1883 it organised the first National Conference in Calcutta, and a second in December 1885, which makes it the direct forerunner of the Congress.

The last two, and then the Congress

The Madras Mahajana Sabha was founded in 1884 by M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramania Iyer and P. Anandacharlu, and the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885 by Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta and Kashinath Trimbak Telang, the three men Bombay called its three statues. Within a year the retired civil servant A. O. Hume had gathered the strands together, and the Indian National Congress held its first session at the Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay on 28 December 1885 with seventy-two delegates and Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee in the chair.

Associations at a glance

What they achieved and where they fell short

These bodies trained a generation in constitutional methods, created a vocabulary of rights and representation, and showed that an Indian grievance could be argued before the British Parliament. Their weaknesses are equally examinable. Membership was confined to the English-educated and the propertied, the reach rarely went past the presidency towns, and the method was the petition, which later nationalists dismissed as political mendicancy. None of them could claim to speak for all of India, and that gap is exactly what the Congress was created to fill.