ALLAN OCTAVIAN HUME
K. ISWARA DUTT
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, strong views 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 from making 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 for leaders–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 for us”, 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, for over 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.