December 28, 1885: Congress holds first meeting, sparks India’s quest for freedom

On December 28, 1885, Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit Pathshala in Bombay hosted the inaugural meeting of the Indian National Congress – a modest assembly of 72 delegates that ignited the subcontinent’s quest for self-rule.

Held from for four days in the hall near Gowalia Tank, the meeting drew delegates who were mostly lawyers, educators and professionals. They came primarily from Bombay, Madras, Bengal and the North-Western Provinces.

Allan Octavian Hume, the retired British civil servant pivotal in organising the gathering, envisioned the Congress as a “safety valve” to peacefully channel the grievances of educated Indians in order to prevent unrest of the kind experienced during the 1857 Revolt.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s seminal History of the Indian National Congress describes how Hume circulated invitations in mid-1885, recruiting luminary even as fears of an outbreak of the plague prompted the venue to be shifted from Poona to Bombay.

Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi economic thinker and political leader, later called the “Grand Old Man of India,” proposed the name Indian National Congress, supplanting the bland National Indian Association.

Prominent delegates included Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, Surendranath Banerjee, and S Subramania Iyer, whose diverse regional backgrounds symbolised nascent unity. No avowed radicals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak participated, underscoring the moderate character of the enterprise. Neither did any women.

Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister and the first president, delivered a concise opening address on 28 December, setting a tone of constitutional loyalty. He urged delegates to deliberate on India’s administrative woes – being excluded from the civil service, the drain of India’s fiscal resources and arms import bans – while pledging allegiance to the British Crown.

Bonnerjee emphasised not confrontation but “loyal and constitutional agitation” to secure reforms.

The speech, brief and indirect per archival records, highlighted nine resolutions: expanding the Imperial Legislative Council, simultaneous exams for the Indian Civil Service in India and England, reducing military spending, and fostering famine relief. These pragmatic demands were rooted in Hume’s gradualist blueprint.

Delegates like Tyabji, who became president in 1887, echoed calls for the Indianisation of the services, while Mehta pushed for Bombay’s commercial interests. Rafiq Zakaria’s edited volumes on Congress history portray this as a forum for deliberation, not protest, where views coalesced around petitions to Viceroy Lord Dufferin.

Hume’s role, as Sitaramayya and Zakaria describe it, blended altruism with imperial strategy: he claimed divine inspiration from a theosophical “storm warning”, though critics later decried it as viceregal sanction to monitor nationalists. Zakaria, in 100 Glorious Years (1885-1985), credits Hume for the logistical arrangements – drafting the rules for the meeting, funding it via his wife’s dowry. But Naoroji and Banerjee, he said, shaped the organisation’s ideology.

The interventions of the delegates reflected optimism tempered by realism. Banerjee advocated press freedoms; Iyer demanded judicial reforms. Discussions spanned three days, culminating in a 1,200-word address to Dufferin. Sitaramayya notes the session’s success in fostering elite consensus, with no major rifts.The Congress would galvanise millions en route to Independence. The Moderate era (1885-1905), led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Naoroji, pursued petitions and swaraj. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, extremists such as Tilak, Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal surged, demanding swadeshi and boycotts.

Gandhi’s entry in 1915 transformed the Congress into a mass-based organisation. The Non-Cooperation movement (1920-’22), Civil Disobedience mvement (1930) and Quit India movement (1942) mobilised peasants, workers and women.

By 1947, the moderate seeds sown in Bombay in 1885 had burst into a rich harvest.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai.