- Lived:
- 4 September 1825, Bombay (Mumbai) → Elphinstone's classrooms, the counting-houses of London, the House of Commons, the Congress chair — died Bombay, 30 June 1917
- Field:
- economics and politics — the first great economic critic of British rule, thrice president of the Indian National Congress, first Indian elected to the British Parliament
- The Big Idea:
- Britain was not merely ruling India; it was draining her — tens of millions of pounds a year flowing out with nothing coming back — and he proved it patiently, from the government's own figures, then carried the proof into the Parliament that ruled him.
- In their words:
- "The present system of government is destructive and despotic to the Indians and un-British" — from Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901)
- If you remember one thing:
- A mathematics professor sat down with the empire's own statistics, worked out that India earned about twenty rupees per head per year — famine-ration poverty — worked out where the rest was going, and then got himself elected, by a handful of votes in a London slum district, to say so on the floor of the House of Commons.