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Unit 9: Establishment of the Indian National Congress: Home Rule Movement, Moderates and Extremists

foundation of the Congress. He quoted at length from this document. To keep the mystery alive so Notes
that the reader may go along with the writer step by step towards its solution, I will withhold an
account of Wedderburn’s writing, initially giving only those paragraphs which were quoted by
the subsequent writers. According to Lajpat Rai, despite the fact that Hume was ‘a lover of liberty
and wanted political liberty for India under the aegis of the British crown,’ he was above all ‘an
English patriot.’ Once he saw that British rule was threatened with ‘an impending calamity,’ he
decided to create a safety valve for the discontent.
As decisive proof of this Lajpat Rai provided a long quotation from Hume’s memorandum that
Wedderburn had mentioned along with his own comments in his book. Since this passage is
quoted or cited by all subsequent authors, it is necessary to reproduce it here at length.
“I was shown,” wrote Hume, “several large volumes containing a vast number of entries; English
abstracts or translations — longer or shorter — of vernacular reports or communications of one
kind or another, all arranged according to districts (not identical with ours) . . . The number of
these entries was enormous; there were said, at the time to be communications from over 30,000
different reporters.” He (Hume) mentions that he had the volumes in his possession only for a
week . . . Many of the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest classes, “all going
to show that these poor men were pervaded with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state
of affairs; that they were convinced that they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do
something, and stand by each other, and that something meant violence . . . a certain small number of
the educated classes, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, bitter against the Government,
would join the movement, assume here and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct
it as a national revolt.”
Very soon, the seven volumes, whose character, origin, etc., were left undefined in Lajpat Rai’s
quotation, started undergoing a metamorphosis. In 1933, in Gurmukh Nihal Singh’s hands, they
became ‘government reports.’ Andrews and Mukerji. transformed them into ‘several volumes of
secret reports from the CID’ which came into Hume’s possession ‘in his official capacity.’ The
classical and most influential statement came from R. Palme Dutt. After quoting the passage
quoted by Lajpat Rai from Wedderburn, Dutt wrote: ‘Hume in his official capacity had received
possession of the voluminous secret police reports. Numerous other historians of the national
movement including recent ones such as R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, were to accept this
product of he creative imagination of these writers as historical fact.
So deeply rooted had become the belief in Hume’s volumes as official documents that in the 1950s
a large number of historians and would-be historians, including the present writer, devoted a
great deal of time and energy searching for them in the National Archives. And when their search
proved futile, they consoled themselves with the thought that the British had destroyed them
before their departure in 1947. Yet only if the historians had applied a minimum of their
historiographic sense to the question and looked at the professed evidence a bit more carefully,
they would not have been taken for a ride. Three levels of historical evidence and logic were
available to them even before the private papers of Ripon and Dufferin became available.
A perusal of Dufferin’s private papers thrown open to scholars in the late 1950s, should have put
an end to the myth of Dufferin’s sponsorship of or support to the Congress. It was only after
Hume had sent him a copy of the letter to the Indian Spectator with a covering note deprecating
Malabari’s views on social reform that Dufferin expressed agreement with Hume and asked him to
meet him. Definite confirmation of the fact that Hume never proposed a social gathering but
rather a political one comes in Dufferin’s letter to Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, after his first
meeting with Hume in May 1885: “At his last interview he told me that he and his friends were
going to assemble a political convention of delegates, as far as I understood, on the lines adopted
by O’Connell previous to Catholic emancipation.”
Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of Bombay and Madras nor his conservative
officials like Alfred and J.B. Lyall, D.M. Wallace, A. Colvin and S.C. Bayley were sympathetic to
the Congress.

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