At the 1906 Congress in Calcutta, Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917) declared that the goal of the Indian National Congress must be swaraj or self-rule. Naoroji’s endorsement of swaraj was not a sudden epiphany: it was theresult of nearly six decades of experience and evolving thought on the reasons behind India’s desperate political and economic circumstances. This talk will trace the genesis of Naoroji's political philosophy withrespect to swaraj. It evaluates how Naoroji’s opinion on the subject matured during three distinct phases of his political career: his articulation of the drain theory, his attempts to win a seat in the British Parliament, and finally, a period of radicalization in which he engaged with global networks of socialists and anti-imperialists, concluding that colonialism was inherently economically exploitative.

         Dinyar Patel is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at the University of South Carolina. He received his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2015. He is the coeditor, with S.R. Mehrotra, of Dadabhai Naoroji: Selected Private Papers (Oxford University Press, 2016) and, with Mushirul Hasan, From Ghalib’s Dilli to Lutyens’ New Delhi: A Documentary Record (Oxford University Press, 2013). In addition to turning hisdissertation into a biography of Naoroji, he is also working on future volumes of Naoroji correspondence and the papers of Allan Octavian Hume.