The Landholders' Society was the first political association to be started in…

Before the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, political consciousness in colonial India first took organised shape through associations formed by the western-educated elite and prominent zamindars, who came together to formally petition and lobby the East India Company administration over land-revenue and governance grievances — the earliest organised step from scattered individual protest toward collective political representation.

This first such body was the Landholders' Society, also known as the Zamindari Sabha or Zamindari Association, founded in Calcutta in 1838 by Dwarkanath Tagore together with Raja Radhakanta Deb and other Bengal landholders. It represented zamindari interests — particularly over the Permanent Settlement and revenue policy — before the colonial government and is recognised by historians as the first organised political association in modern India.

None of the other given years mark a comparable founding: 1848 was the start of Lord Dalhousie's tenure as Governor-General, remembered for the Doctrine of Lapse; 1858 was instead the year the Government of India Act transferred rule from the East India Company to the British Crown, an administrative rather than an associational milestone; and 1868 fell within Lord Lawrence's viceroyalty, a period of post-1857 administrative consolidation. Only 1838 correctly dates the founding of the Landholders' Society.