Indian politician, born at Nasik on the 4th of September 1825, the son of a Parsi priest. During a long and active life, he played many parts: professor of mathematics at the Elphinstone College (1854); founder of the Rast Goftar newspaper; partner in a Parsi business firm in London (1855); prime minister of Baroda (1874); member of the Bombay legislative council (1885); M.P. for Central Finsbury (1892–1895), being the first Indian to be elected to the House of Commons; three times president of the Indian National Congress. He had been indefatigable in proclaiming the long since discredited doctrine that the British connection with India, with its concomitant of home charges without economic equivalent, constituted a drain upon India which kept her poor; and this, with the demand for increased Indian agency, was the keynote of his collection of writings and speeches Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). While he kept firmly to constitutional agitation, condemning violent methods when they arose, his constant assertions of “the drain” and that Great Britain was breaking her pledges did much to generate beliefs from which sprang the extremist school of Indian political thought. In the moral strength given by the simplicity and purity of his manner of life, and his unselfish inflexibility of patriotic aim, rather than in exceptional intellectual or constructive power, lay the secret of the unrivalled position “the Grand Old Man of India,” as he was called for a generation, held in the affections of his fellow countrymen of all classes. He finally left England early in 1907, and the last ten years of his life were spent in retirement, from which he emerged only to receive the hon. LL.D of Bombay University in 1916. He died at Versova, near Bombay, on the 30th of June 1917.
