How Chidambaram Pillai Single-Handedly Took on the British Maritime Empire

“Swadeshi ideology in Bengal, like Minerva’s owl, began its flight only after dusk,’’ Sumit Sarkar wrote in the chapter on Swadeshi enterprise in his pioneering and magisterial book on the Swadeshi movement in Bengal.

Sarkar was drawing attention to the fact that the idea of Swadeshi enterprise caught the imagination of Bengalis only after indigenous manufacturing had declined under the process called deindustrialisation in the 19th century. When the Swadeshi movement erupted in the first decade of the 20th century and Rabindranath Tagore, in the moving words of Ezra Pound, “sang Bengal into a nation”, it was already too late for Swadeshi enterprise to even waddle like penguins, let alone fly.

But in what was then the Madras Presidency, Swadeshi enterprise flew at day time during the course of the Swadeshi movement. At the helm of that Swadeshi project was V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, the subject of A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s detailed and poignant narrative. To label this book only as a “narrative” is to somewhat underestimate Venkatachalapathy’s achievement. This book is an act of historical retrieval. It rescues Pillai and the Swadeshi movement in areas outside Bengal from (to use E.P. Thompson’s unforgettable phrase) the “condescension of posterity”. The act of retrieval is grounded on assiduous research in various different archives and a range of documentation.

The book is an articulation of a rare passion and commitment since the subject occupied the author for four decades. I couldn’t help thinking, if a trifle tangentially, that Fernand Braudel took 40 years to write his magnum opus which was also concerned with the sea and the maritime world.

The book operates at two interrelated narrative levels. It is the tragic and heroic story of Pillai’s valiant efforts to float and keep afloat an Indian shipping company in the early years of the 20th century. It is also the story of the Swadeshi movement in Madras. The tide of that movement carried Pillai’s ships, and the counter-tows of the same movement forced his ships to run aground and to incarcerate him. The British government in the Madras Presidency strangled Pillai’s efforts because he dared to challenge the monopoly of the British Indian Shipping Company.

Venkatachalapathy brings out with vividness the intertwining of the British private enterprise and the British administration. Private profit worked hand-in-hand with an administration that drained wealth out of India to Britain. Greed was the bond between individuals and the empire. Any challenge to this thinly veiled partnership was suppressed with violence, the ultimate imprimatur of British rule. The Raj was the mailed fist in a mailed glove.

The Swadeshi movement in Bengal began on October 16, 1905, the day Curzon’s partition of the province became a reality. The movement had an echo in the Madras Presidency in early 1906. A very significant feature of the movement was the emergence of “a cluster of extraordinarily gifted younger patriots” among whom was Pillai. Like in Bengal, but not quite on the same scale, the movement had a strong cultural dimension. The name of Subramania Bharati comes immediately to mind. New journals began to be published and some of these had Swadeshi prefixed to their names. Many of these publications were in the local languages, but even English newspapers with strong nationalist leanings saw a spike in circulation. The circulation of The Hindu, for example, rose from 1,700 (in 1905) to 4,000 in the course of the Swadeshi movement. The CID believed that this increase in circulation was caused “undoubtedly” by its anti-British tone and content.

In this context of the emerging Swadeshi movement, Pillai registered in October 1906 the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company as a joint-stock company and raised a capital of Rs 8 lakh. He purchased two steamers which began to operate between Tuticorin and Colombo. This run was the virtual monopoly of the British India Steam Navigation Company. Pillai’s ships were directly challenging this monopoly.

The British Company responded with a rate-war. Beyond the realms of shipping and commerce, Pillai’s venture captured the spirit of the Swadeshi movement which aimed to build Swadeshi enterprise and boycott British commodities. Swadeshi leaders believed that by hitting at the economic operations of the Raj, it could end the rule of the nation of shopkeepers.

The Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company thus gathered considerable nationalist economic and political support. The company was not only a direct threat to British imperial economic interests but also part of a large and looming political threat. Indian nationalism was coming of age. It was no longer confined to a group of westernised Indians meeting annually over cucumber sandwiches and tea to petition the British government for a few crumbs from the empire’s high table – “Her Majesty’s loyal Opposition”, as one historian called this group.

It is an irony that apart from the British efforts to torpedo the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, the latter fell a victim to the internal dissensions within the nationalist movement. In December 1907, in the Surat session, the Indian National Congress split between the Moderates and the Extremists. The Moderates were apprehensive that boycott, one of the principal instruments of the Swadeshi movement, was gathering momentum outside Bengal while the Extremists wanted boycott to become a pan-Indian phenomenon. Pillai was firmly on the Extremist side of the divide. Most of the directors of the company were, however, on the Moderate side and they began the process of trying to marginalise Pillai within the company.

Pillai, in his turn, intensified his political position by addressing public meetings to campaign for Swadeshi and boycott. Thus, in a bizarre way, the anti-Pillai actions of the moderate directors and the interests and aims of the British government and the British Indian Steam Navigation Company converged.

From this point onwards, the fate of Pillai was a chronicle foretold. Within the company that he had established, he was relegated to the position of a salaried employee and then was forced to resign. While he was still associated with the company, albeit somewhat tenuously, he continued his political activity, especially as a strong supporter and organiser of the striking workers of the British-owned Coral Mills. The British crackdown led to Pillai’s arrest on charges of sedition. He was sentenced to two life imprisonments and was kept in Coimbatore Central Jail. His shipping company, despite efforts to keep it afloat, sank; its ships had to be sold and the company liquidated. In 1912, Pillai was released from prison where he had served a rigorous sentence. He was a broken man reduced to utter penury.

Thus ended the life story of the man who had almost single-handedly taken on the British dominance of the Indian Ocean. Venkatachalapathy rescues him from obscurity and in so doing brings out the Swadeshi movement from the confines of Bengal and Bengalis.

In 1884, Jyotirindranath Tagore, an elder brother of Rabindranath, launched the Inland River Steam Navigation Service with five ships bought at an enormous cost. The company carried cargo and passengers between Calcutta and Khulna and Barisal. Tagore’s company competed with the British-owned Flotilla Company. The resultant rate-war led to passengers in Tagore’s company enjoying free rides. The company collapsed with a Bengali landlord family, a toady of the British, buying up the assets.

There are parallels here with what would happen to Pillai and his venture. But the differences are more significant. Tagore may have been financially ruined but he did not end up in prison doing hard labour. In Pillai’s case, the charged atmosphere of the Swadeshi movement brought upon him the wrath and the might of the Raj.

Venkatachalapathy has written a remarkable book about a remarkable man who he has salvaged from the unfathomed depths of the ocean of Indian nationalism.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee Is chancellor and professor of History at Ashoka University. The views expressed are personal.