Dadabhai Naoroji, who belonged to the Parsi community of Gujarat was a great Indian civic nationalist. For some time, he also served as a member of the British House of Commons, on the ticket of the Liberal Party. In politics, Naoroji began as Moderate who believed that British rule could prove to be useful for India. But he also believed that the colonial state did not easily respond to the needs of the Indian people. He believed that it impoverished them. The mathematician in him made him calculate the contemporary drain of wealth from India to the United Kingdom. And, therefore, by 1906, Naoroji's economic critique of British rule led him to make demands for Indian self-government.

Dadabhai Naoroji was born in 1825 just six years after the Anglo-Maratha war in which the British East India Company established control over the Maratha territories. He died in 1917 when India was just three decades away from Independence. During the 1840s and 1850s he was a professor of mathematics, a journalist and a socio-religious reformer. In 1885 he helped to establish the Indian National Congress, of which he was a leading member. As founder of the Congress and early Indian nationalism, he is sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of the Indian nation". He is still widely regarded as the Grand Old Man of India. In 1892, he was elected as a member of the British Parliament from the constituency of Central Finsbury in England.

Dadabhai Naoroji's life and work can be divided into three stages. First stage of his life was from the mid 1860s to 1885. In this period he developed his drain theory. He calculated the drain of wealth from India to Britain. According to him, the Indian Civil Service was the main source of the drain of wealth. He noticed that the princely states were more prosperous and stable than the regions under British rule. This observation and the drain theory made him demand self-government for India towards the closing years of the first stage of his career.

In the second stage that lasted from 1886 to 1895, Naoroji became a member of parliament from Central Finsbury (in the United Kingdom). This victory led him to contact leaders of various progressive movements- organied labour, socialists, feminists, the suffragete movements, and the Irish Home Rule supporters. Using his political position as an MP he tried to directly influence British policy. He desired that the British rulers should not exploit India any more. He urged them to hold the Indian Civil Service entrance examination in not just London but Calcutta as well. He travelled across Britain and India to create support for his reform although this did not yield any immediate results. The second stage of his life ended in 1895 when he lost his Central Finsbury Seat in Parliament.

In the third stage of his life, Naoroji became embittered and disillusioned as he failed to influence the British to let India be a self-government under their paramountacy. He had especially pushed for this as a President of the Congress in 1906. During these years, he seemed to have become more radical than before. He constantly criticized British rule not only for the drain of wealth but also for the horrors of famines, pestilences and other sources of impoverishment. From now on, therefore, he began to demand swaraj. Most students and teachers of history think of Naoroji as a "Moderate" leader who did not want the British to leave India but rather to build a liberal democracy here. If, however, we look at the details of Naoroji's thinking, we realise that at a certain stage of his career he could see the futility of British rule.

Dinyar Patel has written a detailed biography of Naoroji because of various reasons. Firstly, before Gandhiji launched his mass movements, it was Naoroji who was seen as the father of the emerging Indian nation. Nonetheless, he remains peculiarly forgotten today. Infact, only a few people know about the enormous effort he made to represent the Indian people, including the poor, to the British. Naoroji is also a forgotten figure in Finsbury, London and England. The British society and polity are so multicultural today, yet they do not realise that the roots of this multiculturalism live in nineteenth-century lives such as that of Naoroji.

Naoroji identified Gopal Krishna Gokhale as a torch bearer for his ideas and politics. Gokhale wanted to write a biography of Naoroji but he died in 1915 before he could do so. Masani, a neighbour and a close acquaintance of Naoroji, and a fellow-Parsi, published a lengthy biographical time about Naoroji. But that biography is scarlcely available today. The ravages of time have damaged and destroyed it.

Only a few historians have examined Naoroji's ideas and achievements. Most of them have worked on his drain theory instead of his biography because they do not give much importance to the genre of biography as a means of understanding history. Furthermore, our knowledge of early Indian Nationalism is pretty imprecise. Early Indian nationalists are considered as collaborators of the empire or proto-nationalists and over anglisized. It is also true that the system of maintaining archieval records in India is unsystematic, pre-modern and poor. Hence, several early nationalists recieved little attention from historians of India.

The private papers of most nineteenth-century Indian nationalists are not available. Naoroji's personal papers exists even though. Dinyar Patel found these to be in damaged and unsystematic state. Patel had used this vast body of papers to write a rich life-story. For Patel, Naoroji was not a collaborator or proto-nationalist but a complex figure who could be fairly radical. Patel believes biography to be an important way of establishing and examining Naoroji's life, work and ideas. Modern Indian politics came to be rooted in many of these ideas. For both Dinyar Patel and us, revisiting Dadabhai Naoroji can pave the way for understanding the very foundation of the Indian Republic.