The British bird collector who helped found the Indian National Congress
Allan Octavian Hume spent decades as a colonial official in India, amassed the largest collection of Indian bird skins anywhere, and then helped found the Indian National Congress, the body that would push for self-rule. He gave up birds altogether after losing the manuscripts for his great book.
Hume came into the world in Westminster on 4 June 1829, the eighth of nine children of the Radical Scottish MP Joseph Hume and Maria Burnley, and was privately tutored until eleven. He sailed for India in 1849 and joined the Bengal Civil Service at Etawah, in today's Uttar Pradesh, the following year. Exam results let him leap ahead of seniors, so when rebellion broke out in 1857 he was acting district collector. He spent six months sheltering in Agra fort, took part in several military actions, and was made a Companion of the Bath in 1860.
He read the uprising as a symptom of misgovernment. Afterwards he introduced free primary education, separated judicial work from policing, founded scholarships and, in 1863, pushed for reformatory schools for young offenders instead of flogging and prison. Etawah became a model district, with 181 schools and 5186 pupils at one count, and a high school he funded himself still stands. Later, as Commissioner of Customs from 1867 and then a senior figure in revenue and agriculture, he compared feeble wheat yields with records from Emperor Akbar's time and with farms in Norfolk. The assassination of his patron Lord Mayo in 1872 cost him support, but he still streamlined farm statistics and, on 27 September 1875, signed the order creating the meteorological department.
Birds were his other passion. From his home in Shimla he ran collecting expeditions and a network of correspondents, and founded the journal Stray Feathers for observations from across India. When his long-planned manuscripts were lost, he quit ornithology and handed everything to London's Natural History Museum; it remains the biggest single holding of Indian bird skins.
He dabbled briefly in Madame Blavatsky's theosophical movement, backed the idea of Indians governing themselves, and died on 31 July 1912.
Source: Allan Octavian Hume
