"I hope in the credit side of the account I have done no injustice, and if I have omitted any item which anyone may think of importance, I shall have the greatest pleasure in inserting it."
"Repeated breach of pledges to give the natives a fair and reasonable share in the higher administration of their own country, which has much shaken confidence in the good faith of the British word."
"It is futile to tell me that we must wait till all the people are ready. The British people did not wait for their parliament."
He had the informal title of "Grand Old Man of India", which suggests a patriarchal man of command whose word settled things. The actual Dadabhai Naoroji (1825-1917), however, was not that effective in imposing his will on another. Handed executive office in a princely state, he was outmanoeuvred inside a year by a British colonel who simply declined to acknowledge that the appointment had happened. What he did have was a set of columns of figures and ninety-one years of refusing to be embarrassed out of them. He was an LII, maybe with a slight ESI accent — visible not in how he argued, which was uniformly cool, but in what he found impossible to let pass. This authority was what eventually led to his election to the British Parliament — In July 1892, aged sixty-six, four years after the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had publicly doubted that any British constituency would elect a "black man," meaning him (quite an ironic epithet for a Parsi), a working-class London seat elected him.
The decisive exhibit is a lecture of 1871 titled The Benefits of British Rule. The credit column comes first and is filled out generously and in detail: peace, freedom from the caprice and greed of despotic rulers, equal justice between man and man, railways, telegraphs, irrigation, highly educated administrators, good intentions. Then he adds — quite an important sentence, typologically — that he hopes he has done the credit side no injustice, and that if anyone thinks he has omitted an item, he will have the greatest pleasure in inserting it. Only after that does he turn to the other column and enter the political drain of above £500,000,000 in principal, continuing at some £12,000,000 a year and rising. A man is indicting the largest empire in history, and his anxiety is that he may have been unfair to it in the first half of the ledger! He built it out of the administration's own published returns while complaining that those returns were insufficient and misleading, and then spent forty years refining and re-arguing the identical finding: to the East India Association, to the Congress, from the floor of the Commons, before the Welby Commission in 1895, and at book length in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India in 1901.
His greatest accusation to Britain was not cruelty or even ineffectiveness as such (as more Fi or Te focused types might have done), but its breach of promise. He quoted the Charter Act of 1833 and the Proclamation of 1858, demonstrating, in a compare-to-logical-standard manner, item by item that they had not been kept. He had come to England in 1855 as a partner in Cama & Co., the first Indian firm in Britain. Within three years he resigned the partnership, because the house traded in opium and liquor and he was a temperance man — quite Qi-ish moral purity. He was never securely solvent again, and leaned at points on subsidies from the Gaekwad of Baroda. At twenty-five, before any of it, he had founded a society to strip Zoroastrism back to what he took to be its original purity and simplicity. He spent fifty years keeping the empire's accounts more honestly than the empire kept them, on the assumption that a sum correctly done and openly published would be acknowledged and, in time, paid.
In Baroda in 1874 he was made diwan with real executive power over a corrupt court. He drew up his terms — abolish the payments to judges, dismiss the following officials, let me make my own appointments — and when the Gaekwad interfered regardless, Naoroji's response was to eventually resign. In the other direction, and for much longer, he over-trusted the instrument he did have. He believed from 1867 well into the 1890s that a demonstration this thorough and this scrupulously fair would eventually have to be conceded — that Parliament, once shown the arithmetic, would act on it. Only after he lost his seat in 1895 he told the Calcutta Congress that self-government was the only and chief remedy, and that being told to wait until the people were ready was futile, since the British had not waited.
In the Commons he tabled a bill to hold the civil service examinations simultaneously in India and England — dry, specific, institutional, exactly what he was good at. For four decades, he was the one man in Indian politics against whom no charge would stick, so that when the Congress began to come apart in 1906 and neither wing would tolerate a president drawn from the other, both wings accepted him.
Some Socionics schools would look at his ideological leadership and conclude EIE (indeed also relatively frequent among ideological people, especially if there's a static Ti or Se accent), but Naoroji isn't a particularly convincing EIE in my book. He wrote an length, but with quite limited emotional suggestion. The most EIE thing he did was the 1906 swaraj declaration, but Bal Gangadhar Tilak ("Swaraj is my birthright, and I shall have it"), who was in the same room, is the far better candidate among Indian indepdence activists for the "politized EIE inverted to statics" role. Also compare his public presence to strongly accented EIE's like Edward Said and Emmeline Pankhurst (notably, par Dinyar Patel's timeline, Naoroji spoke at an international women's conference in London organised by the Woman's Franchise League co-founded by Pankhurst).
At the near end he mentored Indian students in London for decades: the young Gandhi wrote from South Africa in 1894 asking to be directed and guided "as from a father to his child," and afterwards called him the father of the nation and a mahatma, titles India has since transferred to Gandhi himself. Gokhale treated him as a political father. Jinnah served as his secretary. These read less like Fe-born enthusiasms than institutional and dutiful obligation.
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