About this stamp
The Grand Old Man of India
India Post issued this ₹5 stamp on 29 December 2017 for the death centenary of Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917), the “Grand Old Man of India”. He was born on 4 September 1825 in Bombay into a Parsi family, studied at the Elphinstone Institution and in 1855 became Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Elphinstone College. He founded the paper Rast Goftar to restore the Zoroastrian faith to its original purity, and in 1874 became Dewan of Baroda under Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III.
Congress and Parliament
With A. O. Hume and Dinshaw Wacha he is credited with founding the Indian National Congress, of which he was elected president in 1886, and again later. Elected as a Liberal for Finsbury Central in 1892, he sat in the House of Commons until 1895, the first Asian member of the British Parliament. A moderate, he was a mentor to Tilak, Gokhale and Gandhi; Gandhi wrote to him in 1894 that Indians looked up to him as children to a father.
The Drain of Wealth
His book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901) set out the “drain” of India’s wealth to Britain, which he put at 200–300 million pounds. He died in Bombay on 30 June 1917, aged 91. The stamp also shows the Atash Behram fire temple at Udvada, among the oldest fire temples in India.
The stamp was designed by Sankha Samanta; Security Printing Press, Hyderabad printed 0.5 million.
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