The book ‘Poverty and Un-British Rule in India’ was written by _______.

Correct — C. 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India' (1901) is Dadabhai Naoroji's book, and it carries his drain of wealth argument.

His case: Britain steadily transferred India's wealth home — salaries and pensions for British officials, home charges met from Indian revenue, trade on terms India did not set — so Indian poverty was a policy outcome, not a fact of nature.

The title's 'un-British' is the sting: Britain breaking its own professed standards of government. Book and argument belong to option (c).

Why the others are wrong

• (a)
  Bipin Chandra Pal — Bipin Chandra Pal belongs to the Lal-Bal-Pal trio of extremist politics — a journalist and orator of the Swadeshi years, not the author of this economic study.
• (b)
  MN Roy — MN Roy was a communist thinker of a later generation and a founder of the Communist Party of India at Tashkent in 1920. His writing is Marxist theory, not a nineteenth-century audit of colonial finance.
• (d)
  Lala Lajpat Rai — Lala Lajpat Rai, the Punjab Kesari, wrote widely — 'Unhappy India' among them — and led the Punjab agitation, but the drain-of-wealth study offered here is not his.

Dadabhai Naoroji, the Grand Old Man of India, made the economic case against colonial rule before the political one was widely pressed.

His drain theory held that a large part of India's annual product left the country every year as remittances, home charges and interest, and never returned as investment. Poverty, on that reading, was manufactured.

He presided over the Indian National Congress three times, and in 1892 became the first Indian elected to the British House of Commons.

Key facts

• Dadabhai Naoroji published 'Poverty and Un-British Rule in India' in 1901.
• His drain of wealth theory argued that India's wealth was being transferred to Britain without return.
• Naoroji was elected to the British House of Commons in 1892, the first Indian to sit there.
• He was president of the Indian National Congress three times.

Common traps

• Attaching the book to a Lal-Bal-Pal leader because the title reads like a nationalist tract of that period.
• Dating it to the Swadeshi years — it came out in 1901, four years before the partition of Bengal.

No directly related past PYQ was found.