This is a 1913 photograph of the Indian members of the first Bengal Legislative Council elected (in 1912) after the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms; the members apparently were being greeted by gentlemen of the sub-urban areas south of Calcutta. The Englishman sitting at the centre seems to be Sir Henry Cotton (1845-1915), the 1904 President of the Indian National Congress and a great political friend of India. To his right sits Surendranath Roy, who may have been the Council’s first President.
Academic studies include notably those by JH Broomfield, “The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study of the Bengal Election 1912-1913” Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1962, his book Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: 20th Century Bengal (Berkeley 1968); and Rajat Kanta Ray, Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal 1875-1927 (Oxford 1984). Professor Ray writes about the 1912 election: “Only a few candidates of the “Popular Party” — Surendranath Banerjea, Abul Kasim, Byomkesh Chakravarti and Surendranath Ray — scraped through…. (A) sympathetic moderate wrote in 1919: ‘The Popular Party is a bundle of disjoined units which cannot resist the slightest pressure from without.’ This charge was eventually disproved by the stand taken by (the Popular Party) in the Bengal Legislative Council. It showed no sign of wilting under the pressure exerted by the European group…”
Other studies of the period include John R McLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress (Princeton 1977), Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Cambridge 1971), Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism (Cambridge 1973) etc.
By way of incidental reference, the young Jawaharlal Nehru had returned from his studies in England in 1912; MK Gandhi was still in South Africa and would not be returning until 1915. The Tilak-Gokhale clash though had been in full swing since 1907.
Subroto Roy
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Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 
May 26, 2010 at 4:23 am
I thank Dr Roy for such an informative article. I am very much interested to look up especially the article mentioned by him “The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study of the Bengal Election 1912-1913″ by JH Broomfield in Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1962″.