Opposite the Kapaleeswarar Temple tank, on Ramakrishna Mutt Road at Mylapore in Chennai, stands an apartment named ‘Vishwakamal’. The building is now a landmark, occasionally featured in heritage walks organised in the city, as the place of an epoch-making meeting that led to the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885. In 1884, the place, where the apartment stands, had the house of renowned civil servant Diwan Bahadur R. Raghunath Rao. Soon after the annual convention of the Theosophical Society at Adyar in December 1884, 17 men from different parts of the country met at Rao’s residence. Allan Octavian Hume, the ‘Father of the Congress’, was not among them.
‘Delegates from convention’
In her book, How India Wrought for Freedom, published in 1915, Annie Besant says, “Seventeen good men and true, who out of their love and their hope conceived the idea of a political national movement for the saving of the Motherland”. According to her, the majority of them were delegates at the Theosophical Society convention. She goes on to indicate how this meeting led to the first Congress in Bombay in December 1885.
Besant was not the first to make this argument. Owing to many such accounts made ever since the formation of the Congress, it has become a popularly held belief, at least in Chennai, that this building was the birthplace of the Congress or the idea of it. In the Madras-A 400-year record of the first city of modern India, a collection of essays edited by writer and the city’s renowned chronicler late S. Muthiah, author S. Subramanian provides a similar account in his essay on political parties. Muthiah himself, in his column in The Hindu in 2015, credits the ‘Mylapore 17’ with sowing the seeds for what became the Indian National Congress.
A report in The Hindu on August 10, 1967, titled ‘House where the Congress was born’, laments the missing of a commemorative tablet that was earlier present near the building’s entrance. The apartment had not come up then, but the old building had been fully remodelled. Upon enquiries with the house owner, the report says The Hindu’s photographer managed to take a picture of the tablet, which was removed during the remodelling.
Overstatement
The tablet read, “The Indian National Congress organised here December 1884”. While this was obviously a false claim as the first Congress was officially convened only a year later, multiple other accounts show that the importance accorded to the 1884 meeting at Rao’s residence as being a foundational event of the Indian National Congress may also be an overstatement.
Freedom fighter and Congress leader B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, in his book, The History of the Indian National Congress (1885-1935), mentions the meeting at Rao’s house as one of the many theories on the Congress’s origin, without being conclusive.
Historian S.R. Mehrotra in his book, A History of the Indian National Congress 1885-1918, says, “Like the seven cities of Greece claiming to be the birthplace of Homer, various persons and organisations have claimed, or been credited with, the parentage of the Indian National Congress.” Albeit having some element of truth, he says none of these claims from places like Madras, Bombay and Calcutta takes away from Hume the credit of being ‘the father of the Indian National Congress’. A centenary history of the Indian National Congress, brought out by the Congress in 1985, agrees with Mehrotra.
No follow-up to the meeting
According to Mehrotra, H.S. Olcott, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, claimed as early as 1886 that the society was the parent of the Indian National Congress as it first showed the possibility of bringing men from different parts of the country together. Rao, a member of the society, reiterated this claim and stated that the Congress’s origin should be traced to the meeting at his house.
Mehrotra, however, says the idea of holding annual conferences with representatives from across the country to promote national objectives existed long before theosophy arrived in India. Moreover, the meeting at Rao’s house was not followed up with any action, he adds.
Besant in her book also says, “There seems to be no record of the work done in their own towns and provinces on their return home [after the meeting]...” The proceedings of the first Congress, regarding its origin, merely say, “In March 1885 it was decided to hold a meeting of representatives from all parts of India at the then coming Christmas” without any reference to the 1884 meeting in Madras. It is noteworthy that Rao was among the delegates at the first Congress, but did not participate in the discussions as he was a government servant.
A war of words
The most compelling and contemporaneous evidence that the importance accorded to the Mylapore meeting was exaggerated comes from The Hindu as part of what appeared to be a brief war of words it had with Rao in 1888 regarding his criticism of the Congress and claims on its origin. In its editorial dated March 16, 1888, the newspaper, whose editor G. Subramania Iyer was a delegate at the first Congress, says, “We do not believe that the National Congress had its origin in anything connected with Theosophy, nor is Ragoonath Row [sic] ‘the very originator’.”
Acknowledging that a meeting did take place at Rao’s house, the editorial says, “...the committees appointed at that meeting never met after their appointment”. It further says that to attribute the origin of “this great movement” to one particular individual or meeting was “as foolish as to attribute the great French cataclysm of 1787 to the famine that immediately preceded it”.
It is, however, important not to undermine the role of Madras in the formation of the Congress. For instance, the Madras Mahajana Sabha, formed in 1884, was not only a provincial forerunner of the Indian National Congress but was pivotal in organising the first Congress in Bombay. The account of the correspondent of the Calcutta-based weekly Reis and Rayyet on the first Congress, quoted by Mehrotra in his book, best illustrates the impact that Madras had: “But by far the most striking figures in this assembly of Delegates were those from Madras…her representatives brought a flood of light before which those of all the other Provinces and Presidencies actually paled!”.
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