The late 19th century marked a decisive turn in the political awakening of colonial India. While earlier decades witnessed sporadic peasant uprisings and localized resistance, it was the gathering intellectual and organizational energy of the 1870s and 1880s that gave shape to a nationwide political platform. The Indian National Congress (INC), formed in 1885, emerged from this crucible of economic strain, racial humiliation, and cultural assertion. Its colonial roots ran deep, and the movement that began as a moderate constitutional lobby eventually transformed into the spearhead of India’s freedom struggle.

The Colonial Backdrop: India Under British Rule

After the suppression of the revolt of 1857, the British Crown assumed direct governance of India, dismantling the East India Company’s control. The subsequent decades exposed Indians to increasingly systematic forms of economic exploitation. The colonial state reengineered land revenue systems—such as the Permanent Settlement in Bengal and the Ryotwari in the south—to maximize extraction, often at the cost of peasant subsistence. Heavy cash taxes pushed small cultivators into deepening debt, and a series of catastrophic famines, most notably the Great Famine of 1876–78 and the 1896–97 famine, killed millions while the government remained largely indifferent. These famines became a symbol of colonial callousness and ignited profound moral outrage.

Alongside agrarian distress, the British policy of free trade dismantled India’s textile and handicraft industries, destroying the livelihoods of weavers and artisans. The export of raw cotton and the import of machine-made cloth from Manchester epitomized a one-sided economic relationship that drained India’s wealth. These material conditions were compounded by racial discrimination: Indians were systematically excluded from the higher echelons of the civil service and the army, and even those with impeccable English education faced contemptuous treatment. The Ilbert Bill controversy of 1883, which sought to grant Indian magistrates the authority to try European offenders, triggered a furious backlash from the British community and revealed the rigid racial hierarchies embedded in colonial governance. The organized protests against the bill, led by European associations, galvanized a section of educated Indians to recognize the need for a unified political voice.

The Birth of the Indian National Congress

The idea of an all-India political organization was fertilized by the interactions of Indian reformers with liberal British opinion and by the growing network of regional associations, such as the Indian Association of Calcutta founded by Surendranath Banerjee in 1876 and the Madras Mahajana Sabha. The most direct catalyst, however, was the retired British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume. Disturbed by the disaffection he perceived among educated Indians and perhaps convinced that a safety valve was necessary to prevent another large-scale uprising, Hume actively consulted Indian leaders and drafted an open letter calling for a national political assembly. In March 1885, he convened a meeting in Bombay that led to the first formal session of the Indian National Congress in December of the same year.

The inaugural session of the Indian National Congress took place from 28 to 31 December 1885 at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay. Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a respected barrister, was elected president, and seventy-two delegates attended, drawn from all corners of British India, including prominent figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, and Dinshaw Wacha. The assembly was not yet a mass movement; its delegates were largely English-educated professionals—lawyers, journalists, doctors, and landlords—but its symbolic import was enormous. For the first time, Indians from Bengal, Bombay, Madras, the United Provinces, and the Punjab came together on a common political platform, transcending regional and religious lines, to articulate their shared grievances before the colonial government.

The Moderate Phase: Petitions, Prayers, and Constitutional Agitation

During the first two decades of its existence, the Congress adhered to a strategy of constitutional agitation often summarized as “prayer, petition, and protest.” The moderate leaders—among them Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjee, and Dadabhai Naoroji—believed in the fundamental justice of British political principles and hoped to persuade the colonial administration to grant Indians greater participation in governance. Their methods included drafting long memorials, petitioning the Secretary of State for India, and sending deputations to London to lobby Parliament and public opinion. They did not seek immediate self-government; rather, they demanded the Indianization of the Indian Civil Service, the expansion and reform of legislative councils, the separation of the judiciary from the executive, the reduction of military expenditure, and the repeal of repressive laws such as the Arms Act and the Vernacular Press Act.

A central pillar of the moderate campaign was the economic critique of colonialism, which crystallized into the famous “drain theory.” Dadabhai Naoroji, in his landmark work Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, meticulously argued that Britain was draining India of a significant portion of its national income—through Home Charges, interest payments on railway loans, and the export of surplus remittances—without any commensurate return. He calculated that the drain, amounting to at least £12 million annually at the time, left India impoverished and starved of capital. This economic nationalism, articulated by Naoroji and subsequently by Romesh Chunder Dutt, who documented the impact of colonial land revenue and trade policies, provided the Congress with an intellectually powerful and emotionally resonant critique that united disparate regions under a common grievance.

Through their patient and scholarly work, the moderates succeeded in laying the ideological foundation for a pan-Indian public sphere. The annual sessions of the Congress became forums for debating the nation’s condition, and the resolutions passed there were widely reported in the nascent Indian press. The moderates’ demands for simultaneous civil service examinations in India and England, for greater representation in the legislative councils, and for a standing committee of the House of Commons to consider Indian affairs all reflected a constitutional imagination that, while limited by today’s standards, represented a radical assertion of Indian agency in the late nineteenth century.

Colonial Exploitation and the Rise of Economic Nationalism

The economic exploitation that the moderates denounced so meticulously was not an abstract debating point but a lived reality for millions. The transformation of India into a supplier of raw materials and a captive market for British manufactured goods devastated the traditional textile industry, which in the early nineteenth century had supplied a quarter of the world’s textiles. Artisans were thrown into agrarian labour, increasing pressure on an already overburdened land. The government’s fiscal policies, including the salt tax—a burden that fell heavily on the poorest—and the burden of financing the British Indian Army, which consumed nearly half of all central revenues, intensified rural misery. Famines, often exacerbated by the failure of the colonial apparatus to provide timely relief, became a searing indictment of British rule.

In this context, the economic nationalism articulated by the early Congress was not merely an intellectual exercise but a potent political tool. By arguing that India’s poverty was a direct consequence of colonial policies rather than a natural condition, leaders like Naoroji and Dutt delegitimized the very moral basis of the British Raj. Their writings, widely disseminated in English and vernacular translations, nurtured a sense of collective victimhood that transcended caste and regional boundaries. The sessions of the Congress frequently passed resolutions condemning the salt tax, the opium trade, and the heavy burden of military finance, thereby politicizing everyday economic hardships and connecting them to the demand for political representation. This seamless fusion of economic analysis and political activism became a hallmark of the nationalist movement.

The Wind of Change: Partition, Swadeshi, and the Extremist Challenge

The moderate dominance of the Congress was gradually challenged by a younger generation impatient with the slow pace of constitutional reform. The decisive turning point came in 1905, when Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, announced the partition of Bengal. Ostensibly an administrative measure to manage the large province, the partition was widely perceived as a deliberate attempt to divide Bengali-speaking Hindus and Muslims and weaken the growing nationalist movement. The decision ignited a furious reaction that quickly transformed the political landscape. Mass protests, public meetings, and a highly effective boycott movement swept across Bengal and beyond. The Swadeshi movement—the boycott of British goods and the promotion of indigenous products—became the first large-scale mass campaign in modern Indian history.

Within the Congress, the agitation brought to the fore a new brand of leader—the Extremists or “Garam Dal.” Figures such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal (collectively known as Lal-Bal-Pal), and Aurobindo Ghosh argued that the time had come to move beyond polite petitions and demand swaraj (self-rule) as the immediate goal. They advocated a programme of passive resistance, national education, and the use of traditional symbols and festivals, such as the Ganapati festival and Shivaji Jayanti, to mobilize the masses. Tilak’s defiant assertion—“Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it”—captured the changing mood. By 1907, the ideological gulf between the Moderates, who sought constitutional progress within the British empire, and the Extremists, who wanted to break free entirely, led to the Surat Split, which paralysed the Congress for nearly a decade. Yet the split ultimately proved productive: it forced a national conversation about the ends and means of political struggle and expanded the horizon of what the national movement could aspire to achieve.

Key Figures Who Shaped the Early Congress

The formative decades of the Indian National Congress were dominated by a constellation of remarkable individuals who blended Western education with a deep commitment to Indian regeneration. Dadabhai Naoroji, the “Grand Old Man of India,” served as president of the Congress three times and, in 1892, became the first Indian to be elected to the British House of Commons. His tireless exposé of the drain of wealth remains a foundational text of nationalist economics. Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a mentor to Mahatma Gandhi, embodied the highest ideals of moderate politics—discipline, moral integrity, and a painstaking attention to public finance and education. Through his Servants of India Society, he prepared a corps of dedicated public workers who would later contribute to the freedom movement and post-independence nation-building.

Other figures, while less celebrated in popular memory, were no less vital. Surendranath Banerjee, who famously observed that India’s salvation would come through “sufferings and sacrifices,” pioneered political organization in Bengal and electrified audiences with his oratory. Pherozeshah Mehta, a Bombay lawyer and municipal statesman, provided tactical brilliance in the legislative council and was instrumental in shaping Congress resolutions on constitutional reform. The presence of prominent Muslims such as Badruddin Tyabji, who presided over the Congress session in 1887, signalled the early movement’s inclusive character. These leaders, drawn from diverse regions and faiths, collectively forged a political tradition that valued reasoned argument, painstaking documentation, and a commitment to constitutional propriety even as they challenged the might of the empire.

The Colonial Roots of Nationalist Organisation

It would be a mistake, however, to see the early Congress simply as a product of Indian initiative. The very infrastructure of the British Indian state—its railways, postal system, printing presses, and English-language education—created the conditions for a pan-Indian political consciousness. The spread of English-medium education, envisioned by Thomas Babington Macaulay as a means of creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” inadvertently produced a generation of Indians who turned the master’s tools against him. The newspaper culture that flourished in the late nineteenth century, though often harassed by the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, nurtured a critical public sphere where the activities of the colonial government could be questioned and debated.

Even the repressive aspects of colonial rule contributed to the radicalization of the national movement. The Arms Act of 1878, which prohibited Indians from possessing weapons without a licence, and the persistent refusal to allow Indians to enter the commissioned ranks of the army conveyed a powerful message of racial inferiority. The heavy-handed censorship, the denial of trial by jury for political offences, and the periodic arrests of nationalist editors convinced many that constitutional agitation alone was insufficient. Thus, the seeds of the extremist challenge after 1905 were already planted in the bitter soil of colonial humiliation. The shift from reform to self-rule was not a sudden leap but a gradual accretion of resentment and frustration under the relentless pressure of colonial rule.

The Legacy of the Late 19th Century Congress

By the time Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned to India in 1915, the Congress had already completed a critical phase of its evolution. The moderate leaders had painstakingly built the institutional memory and the intellectual arguments that would define the nationalist critique of imperialism for decades. The extremists, meanwhile, had demonstrated that the masses could be mobilized around explicitly political symbols and that swaraj was a goal worthy of sacrifice. The Congress after World War I inherited both traditions: the constitutional sophistication of the moderates and the mass-oriented, assertive nationalism of the extremists. Gandhi’s genius lay in synthesizing these strands into a movement that was at once deeply rooted in Indian morality and capable of challenging the empire through mass non-violent action.

Reflecting on the colonial roots of the Indian National Congress, it becomes clear that the organization did not spring from a void but grew organically out of the structural contradictions of British rule. The economic drain, racial discrimination, and cultural suppression that formed the daily experience of colonial subjugation provided the raw material for nationalist ideology. The annual Congress sessions, initially a loyalist assembly of English-educated elites, gradually became the principal vehicle for imagining the Indian nation. The late 19th century, far from being a mere prologue, established the foundational grammar of Indian nationalism—its arguments, its symbols, and its enduring commitment to the idea that a subjugated people could, through collective will and peaceful organization, reclaim their right to self-governance.

The formation and early growth of the INC, therefore, are not just a chapter in India's political history but a powerful illustration of how colonial domination, in its manifold cruelties, ultimately generated the antibodies of resistance that would bring about its own dissolution. The road from Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in 1885 to the transfer of power in 1947 was long and arduous, but every step on that journey was paved by the arguments, the sacrifices, and the relentless organizational work of the men and women who built the Congress in those early, anxious years.