The grand old man of India

Before India had found her voice, a mother in Bombay quietly raised one. Manekbai, mother of Dadabhai Naoroji, gave him not riches, but something far more powerful, a purpose. Years later, Naoroji would say, “She made me what I am.” And what he became was India’s first great voice on the global stage.

Born in 1825 into a modest Parsi priestly family, Naoroji was destined for greatness. At Elphinstone College, he won the prestigious Clare Scholarship and became the first Indian professor in a British-administered college. But education wasn’t just a ladder for him, it was a bridge. He championed women’s education and co-founded six girls’ schools by the age of 24.

In 1855, Naoroji sailed to London, wearing his proud Parsi phenta. When told to swap it for a European hat to win British approval, he didn’t. Later, he chose to go bare-headed, rejecting both colonial subjugation and cultural appeasement. His uncovered head said: I belong to no empire. I bow to no crown.

From the founding of Rast Goftar, a Gujarati journal pledging service to all Indians “irrespective of caste or creed,” to the Voice of India newspaper, Naoroji’s words became movements.

In London, he launched a powerful intellectual offensive against Empire. In 1867, he founded the East India Association, laying groundwork for the Indian National Congress. With cold facts and hotter conviction, he developed the “Drain of Wealth” theory, exposing how Britain had turned India into “the poorest country in the world” through economic exploitation disguised as governance.

In 1892, Naoroji did the impossible: he became the first Indian elected to the British Parliament. He took his oath not on the Bible but on the Khordeh Avesta. Each time, he spoke with the same spirit: not division, but unity. “Whether I am a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Parsi, a Christian, or any other creed, I am above all an Indian.”

He belonged to no single movement—he was the movement: economist, educator, editor, Member of Parliament, reformer, and relentless voice for justice.

Dadabhai Naoroji died in 1917. The nation he loved would take three more decades to win its freedom, but it would do so standing on the shoulders of this quiet revolutionary.

In his cap—sometimes worn, sometimes set aside—was a metaphor. Naoroji did not need a symbol to speak for him. His life was the symbol: of principle over power, reason over rage, and hope over helplessness. And if you listen closely, you can still hear his mother’s words in every corner of the country he so loved: “Make something of yourself, for your people, your land.” And he did.

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