Dadabhai Naoroji, an Indian Nationalist and the first Indian to win a popular election to Parliament in the UK, is commemorated with a blue plaque at 72 Anerley Park, Penge, where he lived around the turn of the twentieth century. Dubbed the ‘grand old man of India’ and described in his Times obituary as ‘the father of Indian nationalism’, Naoroji made seven trips to England and spent over three decades of his long life in London.

Education and early career

Born on 4 September 1825 in Khadak, a suburb of Bombay (now Mumbai), Dadabhai (sometimes spelt Dadabhoy) Naoroji was the son of Naoroji Palanji Dordi, a poor Parsi priest, and his wife Manekbai.

Naoroji was educated at the recently established Elphinstone College in Mumbai and became the first Indian to be made a professor there in 1854. He founded a reforming newspaper, Rast Goftar, in 1851; the following year he was among the founder-members of the Bombay Association, which was a focus for grievances against British rule.

Life in England

In 1855 Naoroji travelled to England for the first time to set up a branch of the mercantile house of Cama, the first Indian firm to have a base in the country. He was then appointed to a professorship of Gujarati at University College, London (1856–65).

For much of his life he lived a peripatetic existence between England and India. In London, he belonged to several groups dedicated to providing expatriate assistance and advancing the cause of Indian self-determination, including the London India Society, the East India Association and, later, the British Congress Committee and the Indian Political Agency, which he established with WC Bonnerjee.

Naoroji was an influential political and intellectual force in both India and Britain. Much of his work was underpinned by his ‘drain theory’ of British colonial rule, contending that India was impoverished by an expensive foreign bureaucracy for which it had to pay, and that any benefits from the British presence there were incidental. Drain theory formed the basis of the classic Indian nationalist interpretation of British colonialism, and it is a view that continues to resonate.

In 1886, after a string of political roles in India, Naoroji returned to London to stand for Parliament in the general election as Liberal candidate for Holborn. Despite the endorsement of Florence Nightingale, among others, he was defeated in this strongly Tory constituency. He was propelled into the national spotlight nearly two years later, however, when Prime Minister Lord Salisbury referred to this contest as evidence that the time had not come when ‘a British constituency would elect a black man’.

In defiance of this – and in spite of hostile propaganda that described him as a fire-worshipper – Naoroji was elected on a Liberal ticket for the north London constituency of Finsbury Central at the general election of July 1892. Among the causes he advocated were the right of women to sit in Parliament, home rule for Ireland and reform of the British governance of India. With a campaign anthem based on the contemporary music hall song ‘Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’, Naoroji won by just five votes, earning him the nickname ‘Narrow-majority’. Although his seat fell to a national swing against the Liberals at the election of 1895, he persevered with his campaign efforts.

Naoroji spent seven spells in England, five of them in London, and over three decades in the capital all told, living at and working from a succession of addresses. He also travelled widely within the UK to air his views about British rule in India.

He made an unsuccessful attempt at a parliamentary comeback in 1906, when – aged 80 – he stood against the official Liberal candidate in Lambeth North. By this time his politics had shifted leftwards – he had attended an international socialist conference in 1904, and contributed to the support fund for the Labour MP Keir Hardie.

Naoroji returned to India in 1907 and died in Mumbai in on 30 June 1917.

Anerley Park

In August 1897 Naoroji moved to Washington House, 72 Anerley Park, Penge, at a time when his thoughts were turning increasingly towards full independence for India. Much of his time here would have been occupied by his work as a member of the Welby Commission, set up by the British government to investigate wasteful spending in India. His key text on drain theory – Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) – was published while he was living here.

Washington House functioned as an important centre for the Indian community in London – a place where many Indians were invited and where Indians travelled to if they were in distress or in trouble. One visitor noted the ‘loaded bookshelves’ and ‘piles of books arranged against the walls of almost every room'. Fellow Indian nationalists Romesh Chunder Dutt and Sister Nivedita are known to have been guests at the house.

Naoroji left the address in 1904 or 1905, making it his longest-standing London residence.