At the 1906 Congress in Calcutta, Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) declared that the goal of the Indian National Congress must be swaraj or self-rule. Naoroji’s endorsement of swaraj was not a sudden epiphany: it was the result of nearly six decades of experience and evolving thought on the reasons behind India’s desperate political and economic circumstances. This talk will trace the genesis of Naoroji's political philosophy with respect to swaraj. It evaluates how Naoroji’s opinion on the subject matured during three distinct phases of his political career: his articulation of the drain theory, his attempts to win a seat in the British Parliament, and, finally, a period of radicalization in which he engaged with global networks of socialists and anti-imperialists, concluding that colonialism was inherently economically exploitative. At the heart of this talk are two simple but important questions. What made Dadabhai Naoroji a pioneering nationalist? How did he shape the emerging Indian nationalist movement as well as the broader global struggle against colonialism?

Dinyar Patel is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2015. His book, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, will be published by Harvard University Press in spring 2020. He is the co-editor, with S.R. Mehrotra, of Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers (Oxford University Press, 2016) and, with Mushirul Hasan, From Ghalib’s Dilli to Lutyens’ New Delhi: A Documentary Record (Oxford University Press, 2013). During the 2019-2020 academic year, he is based in Mumbai on Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships.