Chennai :
Whether or not she’s got Chennai in her sights, it’s highly improbable that Sonia Gandhi will drop by Mylapore even if she does stop by the city. Would she be interested in scoping out the birthplace of the Indian National Congress? Probably not, but for those who would, a building called Vishwakamal Apartments on RK Mutt Road pinpoints the site where constructive plans to establish a pan-Indian nationalist party were first laid out, in 1884. “Seventeen eminent men from the South had earlier that year met in the Mylapore house of Diwan Bahadur Raghunath Rao (where Vishwakamal now stands) and resolved that a ‘national movement for political ends’ be formed, spreading the message through provincial committees… What emerged from this was the Indian National Congress, formally founded at its inaugural session held from December 28-30, 1885, in Bombay.” This extract is from an essay by Dr S Subramanian in the anthology edited by S Muthiah titled “Madras Chennai: The Land, The People & Their Governance”.
The essay hails Madras as the birthplace of the Indian National Congress. “The political party system was born in Madras,” Dr S Subramanian, head of Madras Presidency, writes. He goes on to say that the idea to establish a country-wide nationalist party was anticipated “at the Theosophical Society’s annual convention held in Adyar in 1884, where retired English civil servant Allan Octavian Hume suggested that an all-India organisation be formed to present the cause of the Indian people”. It’s a piece of history absent from popular political lore.
Ramu Manivannan, professor of political science at University of Madras, acknowledges the tendency of historians to overlook certain contributions of the south to India’s political history. “Many groundbreaking issues and concepts originated in Madras Presidency,” he states.
“These include the fact that India’s ‘first war of independence’ took place in 1806 in Vellore, much before the 1857 mutiny in Meerut.” Gandhi’s adoption of the loincloth as a sartorial political statement is said to have taken place in Madurai, he adds.
“It is the responsibility of political elites of the south to highlight these facts of southern political history,” he maintains.
Dr Bernard D’Sami, associate professor of history at Loyola College, points out that INC was not the first organised manifestation of the country’s nationalist efforts, but the culmination of several regional nationalisms unified under Gandhi. Indeed, Dr Subramanian writes that the Madras Mahajana Sabha (1884) was the forerunner of the INC. He calls it the first political organisation of the ’emerging elite’ of Madras city; the provincial precursor of the INC whose associates included P Rungaiah Naidu, T Madhava Rao, Diwan Bahadur Raghunatha Rao, T Rangachari, Justice Sankaran Nair, and Dr Subramania Iyer.
If this list reads like the roll-call of an upper crust club, it is because politics in late 19th-early 20th century Madras was peopled largely by highly educated, landed Brahmins, many of whom established the provincial branch of the Congress. This group was called the Mylapore Group; comprising lawyers and journalists, they kept the Congress in the Moderate camp with regards to its political demands and manifesto. Their clout in the Congress led to the rise of a retaliatory faction – the Egmore Group – which took a more extremist stand on constitutional reforms. Kasturi Ranga Iyengar and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari counted themselves among the Egmore lot, also called the Nationalists. Both groups wrangled for control of the provincial Congress, but by the time the constitutional Reform Bill was passed in 1919, post-world war-I, it was Egmore that got the better of Mylapore with the Gandhian non-cooperation line of engagement.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Lok Sabha Election 2014> News / by Joeanna Rebello Fernandes, TNN / April 20th, 2014