Hume sailed to India in 1849 and on reaching Calcutta, he stayed with his cousin James Hume, The following year, he joined the Bengal Civil Service at Etawah in the North-Western Provinces, in what is now Uttar Pradesh. He briefly served as a junior midshipman aboard a navy vessel in the Mediterranean in 1842. Early influences included his friend John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. He was educated at University College Hospital, where he studied medicine and surgery and was then nominated to the Indian Civil Services which led him to study at the East India Company College, Haileybury. Until the age of eleven he was privately tutored growing up at the town house at 6 Bryanston Square in London and at their country estate, Burnley Hall in Norfolk. Hume was born in Westminster, London and baptized at St Mary's, Bryanston Square, a younger son (and the eighth child in a family of nine) of Joseph Hume, the Radical Scottish member of parliament, by his marriage to Maria Burnley. He maintained an interest in English botany and founded the South London Botanical Institute towards the end of his life. He left India in 1894 to live in London from where he continued to take an interest in the Indian National Congress. He worked for Indian self-governance through the Indian National Congress that he founded. He was briefly a follower of the theosophical movement founded by Madame Blavatsky. He built up a vast collection of bird specimens at his home in Shimla by making collection expeditions and obtaining specimens through his network of correspondents.įollowing the loss of manuscripts that he had long worked on in the hope of producing a magnum opus on the birds of India, he abandoned ornithology and gifted his collection to the Natural History Museum in London, where it continues to be the single largest collection of Indian bird skins. He founded the journal Stray Feathers in which he and his subscribers recorded notes on birds from across India. He did not get along as well with subsequent viceroys, and his criticism of Lord Lytton's policies led to his removal from the Secretariat in 1879. He rose in 1871 to the position of secretary to the Department of Revenue, Agriculture, and Commerce under Lord Mayo who was assassinated a year later. Hume rose in the ranks of the Indian Civil Service but like his father Joseph Hume, a radical member of parliament, he was bold and outspoken in questioning British policies in India. The district of Etawah was among the first to be returned to normalcy and over the next few years Hume's reforms led to the district being considered a model of development. Īs an administrator of Etawah, he saw the Indian Rebellion of 1857 as a result of misgovernance and made great efforts to improve the lives of the common people. A notable ornithologist, Hume has been called "the Father of Indian Ornithology" and, by those who found him dogmatic, "the Pope of Indian Ornithology". He supported the idea of self-governance by Indians and founded the Indian National Congress. Allan Octavian Hume, CB ICS (4 June 1829 – 31 July 1912 ) was a British political reformer, ornithologist, civil servant and botanist who worked in British India.
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