In 1885, Hume “informed the Governor General (Lord Dufferin) that the bureaucracy was demoralised” and the colonial administration was perpetrating “gross injustice”, Mishra wrote in his book, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress.Īccording to Mishra, Hume fought against the racial bias of the officers and was a severe critic of “pure absolutism of a foreign official rule”. We may have to wait but we are on the winning side,” Hume is believed to have said about the Congress, according to academic J.P. “The days of despotism and bureaucracies are drawing to a close. Hume’s criticism of the British Rule for its treatment of the natives only grew after the mutiny - he retired from the services in 1882 and formed the Indian National Congress in 1885. The atrocities committed in war - not least from the British side - demonstrated that a gulf existed between the Indians and the British,” said a piece in digital magazine Madras Courier. “Hume never recovered from the shake-up of the revolution - the Indian people had clearly found their rulers lacking. “God help the poor cowed villagers I can’t…and nobody else seems inclined to do so,” Hume is said to have written after the revolt. Hume was born on 6 June 1829 in Scotland’s Montrose. He came to India in 1849 as an Indian Civil Service employee and quickly rose up the ladder.Īs the Sepoy mutiny - known as India’s First War of Independence - broke out in 1857, Hume commanded an irregular force of 650 troops in the Etawah region of modern-day Uttar Pradesh.
Malabari, and served as the first general secretary of the party. Hume, a member of the Theosophical Society, formed the party because of the influence of the “mystic gurus of the Himalayas”, believe some historians.īut Hume was also a staunch social reformer and worked with leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and B.M. Two years later, those chosen men of India came together under the aegis of Hume to form India’s first political party - the Indian National Congress. “If you, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong and our adversaries right,” wrote Hume in 1883, according to Revival: The Rise and Growth of the Congress in India by C.F. New Delhi: Almost 136 years ago, Allan Octavian Hume, a British civil servant working in India, wrote a provocative letter to the graduates of the University of Calcutta.
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