Allan Octavian Hume

Founder of the Indian National Congress

It was very rarely, if ever, that a country’s leading political organisation and the main instrument of its freedom, was the handiwork of a foreigner. It was the singular privilege and supreme triumph of a retired British Member of the Indian Civil Service to have brought the Indian National Congress into being­–at one end to organise the scattered elements of public life and focus them into an institution for political articulation, and at the other, to enable the British Government to be in touch with popular feeling and profit by the increasing association of the people’s representatives with the management of affairs. Allan Octavian Hume was the man. As subsequent events indubitably established, he sowed the seeds of a larger growth and passed into history as one of Britain’s noblest sons and India’s greatest benefactors.

The Humes hailed from the hardy sea-faring race on the north-east coast of Scotland. Allan Octavian Hume was not the first of the Humes to have had links with India; His father, Joseph Hume (1777-1855), was in the service of the East India Company, before he entered parliament where he distinguished himself as “a Radical of the deepest dye” and for thirty years the recognised leader of the Radical group. He retained his interest in India and on occasions eloquently championed her cause.

Allan Hume was born in 1829. His earliest ambition was to enter the Royal Navy; at 13 he was a junior midshipman, cruising in the Mediterranean. Next he was at Haileybury for training. Later, he studied medicine and surgery at University College Hospital.

He was 20 when he came to India and joined the Bengal Civil Service. From 1849 to 1867 he worked as a district officer, for the next three years as the head of a centralised department and from 1870 to 1879 as a Secretary to the Government of India. It was towards the middle of 1879, when he was fifty, that he came into conflict with the ruling authorities while within three years he resigned.

Before his retirement he declined the Lieutenant-Governorship of the Punjab as he thought it meant a great deal of entertaining, for which neither he nor his wife cared much. Lord Lytton then recommended him for Home Membership and a K. C. S. I., but Lord Salisbury turned down the suggestion on the ground that Hume was “stiffening Lord Northbrook” against the repeal of cotton duties.

From a wider point of view, Allan Hume’s stay in India was ever memorable for his unparalleled work as an Orithologist. In 1872 he started at his own expense in Calcutta an orinthological quarterly journal, expressively entitled Stray Feathers; in 1873 he brought out a standard work, Nests and eggs of Indian Birds; in 1879 he emerged as the author of The Game Birds of India, in three volumes and 140 coloured plates; in 1891 he made a magnificent gift of the heads and horns of Indian big game animals and subsequently of 82,000 birds and eggs, to the British Museum. Allan Hume, appropriately came to be recognised, and enthusiastic­ally hailed, as The Pope of Orinthology.

Greater than what he bequeathed to the British Museum was his legacy to the British people–his example of selfless and dedicated service to India. Within hardly three years of his retirement, “combining political insight with dauntless courage and untiring industry”, he laboured hard for the advent of India’s greatest organisation, the National Congress.

As an official Hume confronted the Government with the proposition that “assert its supremacy as it may, at the bayonets’ point, a free and civilized Government must look for its stability and permanence to the enlightenment of the people and their moral and intellectual capacities, to appreciate its blessings.” During his whole official career, he held, and expressed, strongviews in favour of India’s Self-Government. Within a year of his retirement from the I. C. S., Hume issued his famous circular to the Graduates of the Calcutta University, as he thought that, as a large body of the most highly educated Indians, they should “constitute also the most important source of all mental, moral, social and political progress in India.” He argued that however much “aliens” like himself might “love India and her children” and give their time, money and thought for her good and even struggle and sacrifice in her cause, they lacked “the essentials of nationality” and that “the real work must ever be done by the people of the country themselves.” It was out of this fervent appeal that there sprang the “Indian National Union” which was subsequently renamed “Indian National Congress.’

In 1887, after the third session of the Congress at Madras, he issued a pamphlet entitled “An Old Man’s Hope”, in which he made a direct and passionate appeal to the Englishmen at home, to take a tender view of the “dull misery of countless myriads” in India, for,

Toil, toil, toil; hunger, hunger, hunger; sickness, suffer­ing, sorrow, these, alas, are the keynotes of their short and sad existence.

The speech he made a year later at Allahabad advocating mass propaganda on the lines of the Anti-Corn League in England, created such a furore that officials desired to suppress the Congress and even deport Hume. And something more serious happened when in 1892, out of the fear that the existing system of administration in India was, apart frommaking people des­perately poor, preparing the way for “one of the most terrible cataclysms in the history of the world”, Hume hit out thus:

Do not fancy that Government will be able, to protect you or itself. No earthly power can stem a universal agrarian rising in a country like this. My countrymen will be as men in the desert, vainly struggling for a brief space, against the simoom. Thousands of the rioters may be killed, but to what avail, when there are millions on millions who have nothing to look forward to but death – nothing to hope for but vengeance; as forleaders–with the hour comes the man be sure, there will be no lack of leaders. This is no hypothesis. It is a certainty.

This circular leaked out in the press when the hostile section sought to interpret Hume’s outburst as an open incitement to violence. Some Indian leaders, Dadabhai Naoroji not excluded, were obliged to write to the Times, a letter explaining it away. “I am distressed to have had to sign that letter after what Hume has done forus”, wrote Dadabhai to Wacha.

Though it was he who emerged as the founder of the Congress, it had somehow never happened to Hume to preside over a plenary session even once. However, forover twenty years, though during the first four by implication and only later by regular appointment, he was General Secretary of the Congress. Thus, right from 1885 till 1906, his was the guiding hand, indeed “the kindly light”, that the Congress had. Six years later, on July 31, 1912, in his 84th year, Allan Octavian Hume had a peaceful end. As he passed away his was the consoling thought that, so far as India’s future lay, “though sorrow may endure for a night, joy will come in the morning.”

In him, while England lost a man of far-sighted wisdom and vision, India lost a true benefactor and an unfailing friend. The national sentiment of grief at his passing, was eloquently expressed by Mudholkar from the presidential chair at the annual session of the Congress at Rankipur (1912):

The father, the founder of the Congress – he who worked for it day and night, winter and summer, through good repute and ill, to tend, to nourish the child of his affection, he who in the most critical and difficult period of its existence laboured for it as no other man did, has gone, and we all mourn his loss as that of a parent.

–From The Congress Cyclopaedia – Volume I.