Allan Octavian Hume

Allan Octavian Hume (born June 6, 1829, Montrose, Forfarshire, Scotland—died July 31, 1912, London, England) was a British administrator in colonial India and one of the key figures in the founding of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), which led the Indian Independence Movement.

Life and political career

Hume was the son of the radical politician Joseph Hume. He entered the Indian civil service in Bengal in 1849. After serving as magistrate in the district of Etawah at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, he was assigned to the board of revenue in the North-Western Provinces. In 1870–79 he worked for the central government of India as secretary in the revenue and agriculture department. His views favoring greater participation for Indians in governmental affairs created difficulties, drawing little favor from the colonial government. His liberal stance and outspoken support for Indian participation in administration earned the disapproval of Viceroy Robert Bulwer-Lytton, who removed him from his position as secretary in the revenue and agriculture department, after which Hume returned to provincial administration. On his retirement from the civil service in 1882, he involved himself in political activities aimed at giving Indians a more democratic, representational government. In a letter written in 1883 he urged students of the University of Calcutta to take charge of their political destiny:

If you, the picked men, the most highly educated of the nation, cannot, scorning personal ease and selfish objects, make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for yourselves and your country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of your own affairs, then we, your friends, are wrong and our adversaries right.

In 1885 Hume helped establish the Congress Party with Indian leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjee. That same year he was one of the 72 founding members at the first session of the Congress Party held in Bombay (now Mumbai). He served as general secretary of the Congress Party for its first 22 years.

Early Congress Party leaders such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale viewed Hume’s involvement as beneficial in preventing the colonial government from suppressing the organization. Even so, Hume was viewed with suspicion by such Indian leaders as the radical nationalist leader Lajpat Rai, who believed that Hume had helped create the Congress Party as a “safety valve” to dissipate revolutionary potential in India and win approval for the British government through moderate reforms.

Hume left India in 1894, increasingly alienated from the nationalist movement as distrust grew over his role in the Congress Party and ideas more radical than his gathered traction in the political landscape. He retired to the Dulwich district of London, where he participated in and financed local political reform and advocated for causes such as land reform, equal taxation, and electoral equality as a member of the Liberal party. He served as president of the Dulwich Liberal Association from 1894 until his death.

Ornithology and botany

Hume made notable contributions to fields other than politics. While in the North-Western Provinces, he produced several works on ornithology, including, as coauthor, The Game Birds of India, Burmah and Ceylon (1879–81). He later presented his collection of 60,000 bird skins and 20,000 eggs to the British Museum. He described 37 species and 111 subspecies of birds from the subcontinent. He also founded and edited the journal Stray Feathers (1872–88), which became an important forum for ornithological research in India. For his contributions to the field, he had birds such as Hume’s groundpecker and Hume’s warbler named for him.

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After returning to Britain, Hume also took an interest in botany and, in 1910, founded the South London Botanical Institute as part of his efforts to make botany more accessible to working-class enthusiasts in the area. A herbarium he established at the institute came to house more than 100,000 plant specimens from various botanists.

Death

Hume died of a heart attack after six years of declining health in south London. His death inspired many of his old political contemporaries in India and the empire to eulogize him. One such tribute was by Gokhale in Westminster:

[Hume was] one of those men who appeared from time to time in this world…under the dispensation of a wise Providence, to help forward the onward march of humanity, whose voice sounded like a trumpet-call, waking up whole peoples from the slumber of ages, and whose title to an honoured place in the history of nations no man could possibly challenge.