ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the extent to which early nationalists, and particularly the purposeful first general secretary of the Congress, Allan Octavian Hume, believed and argued that the most advanced model of white colonial constitutional development should apply to India. It argues that Hume, the British radical organizer of the Congress, was a major proponent of the relevance of the Canadian constitutional model but that his views were widely shared by the Indian leadership of the early Congress. The high point of early Congress efforts to chart a constitutional course aimed decisively in the direction of the colonial Canadian model occurred during the session of 1889, held in Bombay and attended by a record number of some 1900 delegates. Congress experienced similar disappointments in the area of administrative reform both with respect to the Indianization of the upper levels of the civil service and to the opening of commissioned ranks in the military.
