The British rule in India started in 1858 and continued until 1947. In the 89 years, the British established widespread dominance in all sectors of the country. While independent India today celebrates its freedom fighters with great pride, some names are often lost in the pages of history.
While Mahatma Gandhi called for a boycott of foreign goods in India, kickstarting the Swadeshi Movement, a patriotic Indian in the south had plans to make the country capable of running its independent trade shipping business.
A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s latest book is a biographic tribute to V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and his battle against the British Maritime Empire.
Published by Penguin India, ‘Swadeshi Steam’ by A.R. Venkatachalapathy will be released on 27 February on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online venue to launch non-fiction books.
The author, a historian and Tamil writer, put in years of research to unearth the struggles of Pillai and his revolutionary idea of setting up the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company in 1906, a venture that would compete head-on with the British India Steam Navigation Company, the shipping giant that controlled the region.
Pillai, often known as VOC, was a lawyer in the small port town of Tuticorin, Tamil Nadu. He took help from the native traders and citizens to raise capital for his venture. His objective was not to earn profit but to make a statement about India’s resistance to British rule.
“Swadeshi Steam is a superb book by one of our finest historians. Written with panache and grounded in painstaking research in Tamil sources, A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s riveting account of V.O. Chidambaram Pillai’s anti-colonial shipping line sheds new light on how commerce and politics combined in the struggle for a free India,” says Sunil Amrith, MacArthur Prize Fellow in praise of the book.
Renowned historian and author Ramchandra Guha too praises Venkatachalapathy’s work saying, “This is a superb work of historical scholarship, which can be read for its intrinsic interest and for the profound resonances it has for our own times. It is a dual biography, of a remarkable individual and of a daring commercial enterprise he founded.”
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