A.O. Hume, Wayanad and a gold rush in 1878

Wayanad saved the Congress party and Rahul Gandhi in 2019, when its voters exercised their franchise overwhelmingly in favour of the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha election; he lost his family borough, Amethi—ensuring that he stayed in Parliament.

- KA Shaji

WAYANAD (KERALA): He won from the constituency again in 2024 and also from Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh, his mother's former constituency—but decided he would retain Rae Bareli and vacated the seat. Now, his sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, is contesting the by-election, her first tryst with electoral politics.

But Wayanad, a Western Ghat district, and the only plateau in Kerala, has another connection with the Congress, one that was discovered on October 28, 2024, by Dr MC Vasisht, the former head of the history department at Malabar Christian College in Kozhikode—back in 1878, around three decades after the California Gold Rush began. A.O. Hume, the man who founded the Congress (and who is also considered the father of Indian ornithology), who was then an officer in the Indian Civil Service, is believed to have played a part in sparking a similar rush, albeit one that didn't pan out, in this corner of Kerala, then part of the extended Madras province.

File no. 195 from the Selected Records of the Calicut Regional Archives (CRA) in Kozhikode reveals that Hume, then a secretary of the Government of India, based in Shimla and responsible for revenue, agriculture, and commerce, wrote a letter on June 20, 1878, to CG Master, the secretary to the Government of Madras, directing him to appoint a qualified mining engineer to investigate the potential gold deposits in the area.

Hume had never been to Kerala, but his curiosity is believed to have been piqued by accounts from British surveyors and prospectors in the region, some of whom spoke of potentially large gold deposits in the region.