But through her writings, actions, and politics, Besant groomed an elite and created, in skeletal form, a much wider basis for political mobilization of those elites than had existed previously. More subtly, but a strategic legacy nonetheless, she helped perpetuate a global idea of India as the “mother of spirituality”—essentially gentle and altruistic, with a message for the world.
The image wasn’t even consistent with Besant’s own experience; one of her frustrations, at the schools and colleges she opened, was that her students were more concerned with material and worldly gains than with spirituality and education. And it would certainly be complicated by the reckless slaughter of Partition. But the perceived moral goodness of Indians promulgated by Annie Besant was that thing we call today soft power. In the next, crucial stage of the freedom movement, Gandhi would use the image instrumentally to draw worldwide support. In time, Nehru would also exploit it, giving a fledgling independent nation, poor and internally riven, an outsize voice in the world.
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CHIDAMBARAM PILLAI
Swadeshi Steam
1872–1936
“Long before the World War, all politically conscious people lived as on a volcano,” the Russo-German historian and philosopher Fedor Stepun wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. In the decade before the war, the volcanos had started to seethe. Revolution broke out in Russia in 1905, the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, and the revolution ending imperial rule in China took place the following year. In Ireland, the Home Rule bill of 1912 inched the country closer to the free state that would be secured a decade later. And in India during these years, a British attempt to divide the province of Bengal launched a movement that would become more destabilizing to the Raj, economically and politically, than the uprising of 1857.
In 1905 the viceroy, George Nathaniel Curzon, partitioned Bengal on the stated grounds that it was too big for the British to administer. But there was a political objective, too: to isolate the mainly Muslim eastern districts of the province from the irritating political activism of Calcutta’s Hindu intellectuals. As Herbert Risley, Curzon’s home secretary and architect of the Indian Census put it, “Bengal united is a power, Bengal divided will pull in several directions.” Division, it was hoped, would also weaken an increasingly contentious Congress party, which was seeking greater representation in government.
Popular reaction to the Partition was well in excess of the demands the British had wanted to stifle. In the following years, Bengali radicals tried to blow up a train carrying their governor; later, they tried to shoot him. A tossed bomb missed a notoriously harsh judge, killing a barrister’s wife and daughter instead. If the radicals lacked precision in their terror techniques, they didn’t lack supporters. Extremism began to spread beyond Bengal. In Ahmedabad, the new viceroy, the Earl of Minto, survived a bomb attack. A revolutionary movement emerged from the Punjab, with outposts in the United States and Canada. In London, an Indian student radical murdered a British official at South Kensington’s Imperial Institute—an assassination on home soil, rare in the history of the empire, that shocked and scandalized the British public.
From headlines in Britain, it was hard to make out that violent struggle was only a small part of the uprising. The emphasis was on winning control from the British, and stemming the drain of economic and cultural wealth, by recapturing India’s productive powers. Many Indians were losing faith in moderate members of the Congress, an association of upper-caste educated men who wanted to persuade the British to be more open-handed and true to their professed principles. A new crop of Indian leaders called instead for a boycott of British goods, arguing that Indians must consume only what they produced themselves, and make colonization so profitless that the British would leave. Swadeshi, or “self-made”—the name of Jamsetji Tata’s Bombay cotton mill—was now the name of a sweeping political action. Between 1905 and 1908, imports plummeted by 20 percent.
The southern front of this early struggle for freedom was Tuticorin, in today’s Tamil Nadu. Here, a feisty, boyish lawyer named V. O. Chidambaram Pillai was chasing the dream of swadeshi—with ships. Challenging a fabled name in imperial shipping, he tried to regain control of the seas that the South Indians had historically mastered. For a brief time the steamship company he created was one of the Swadeshi movement’s greatest practical achievements, and served as a symbol for the agitation as a whole. His followers called him “Swadeshi Pillai,” and he was celebrated for his patriotism across the nation. But Pillai’s audacious career would be brief and would ultimately founder—like the Swadeshi movement itself.
To read about India’s history in the years immediately following 1905 is to feel the possibility that a free India was soon to be formed. Unlike in Russia or China or Mexico, however, the Indian volcano would be capped; independence would not be secured for four more decades. Pillai was only one of the failures littering the long path toward a free India. Many of these stories are now forgotten. Yet his is worth recovering not least because of what it reveals about the ultimate disappointment of the Swadeshi movement.
Its decline had multiple factors: the variegation of Indian culture; movement infighting; detachment from the concerns of low-wage workers and peasants; and the lack, thankfully, of an Indian Lenin. But great fault lines of Indian society, such as caste hierarchy, also helped keep independence out of reach. Pillai came closer than most leaders to bridging those faults—until he encountered the other element that ensured the movement’s failure: the retaliatory hand of the British.
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From the British point of view, southern India in the early twentieth century was pleasingly resistant to nationalist politics. As the historian David Washbrook has written, “Between 1895 and 1916, scarcely a single anti-British dog barked in the streets of Madras.” Tuticorin, on India’s eastern coast, would be the southern exception.
The center of the Indian pearl fishing industry, and a major port, Tuticorin was prospering when Pillai moved there around the turn of the century. Born in 1872, about thirty kilometers inland, he had come to practice law. He belonged to the Vellalar caste (rich, landowning non-Brahmins), and several men in his family were vakils, or “local lawyers.” Serving the English-administered courts, they sometimes found themselves in competition. Once, representing a poor man against a wealthy one, young Pillai gleefully destroyed the opposing counsel: his father. But he was restless.
In India, the path to radicalism often runs through religion. Still in his twenties, Pillai became active in organizations centered on Tamil Shaivite teachings. These “Shaiva Sabhas” connected Pillai to a politically active circle of writers and intellectuals, who in turn linked him to the work of a man he would soon call his political guru: the legendary Maharashtrian radical and religious popularizer Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Tilak’s writings, Pillai later said, “made me feel that India was my country, that the British were wrongfully retaining it, and that it must be got back from them.”
Tilak emerged as a leader after the Bengal Partition, along with Lala Lajpat Rai and Bipin Chandra Pal, of a radical wing of the Congress party. Lal, Bal, and Pal, as the trio were known, took up the cry of Swadeshi, then redefined it as a sacred battle against the British for India’s cultural unity as a Hindu nation. The political goal of this struggle was swaraj, or “self-rule.” To achieve it, they argued, the Congress had to switch from polite constitutional arguments to direct action, even violence. Pillai’s deep attachment to Tilak’s ideas would soon make Tuticorin the single place in the far south where the protest in Bengal would be replicated.
In British intelligence files, there are glimpses of Pillai before 1905: attending a political meeting, running a short-lived monthly publication on social reform. Yet after the Partition, the colonial files grew quickly, for he and other immoderate nationalists in the port district acted fast. They embarked on a Swadeshi program well before Congress, at its December 1906 annual gathering in Calcutta, resolved on a policy of boycotting for
eign-made goods and companies. There were Swadeshi emporia and Swadeshi bodybuilding gyms in Tuticorin, just as there were in Calcutta.
Swadeshi employed many agitational techniques that we now associate with Gandhian politics, among them passive resistance and noncooperation. If these techniques sound anodyne from a distance, they could be rigorous, even intimidating, in practice. For instance, Pillai asked followers to avoid not just British goods, but institutions such as schools and the courts. He told them to affirm their commitment to boycott by immersing themselves in a sacred river, and by making pledges in the name of the goddess Kali. If they broke their word, he coolly threatened, they should expect to be “shunned.”
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As often as Pillai’s movement mirrored Bengal’s, freedom fighting in a place such as Tuticorin meant something that it couldn’t mean in riverine Calcutta: control of the seas. In 1906, perhaps stirred, as many were, by the Japanese defeat of the Russian naval fleet at Tsushima shortly before the Partition, Pillai turned his thoughts to ships.
The Coromandel coast had been a hub of Indian shipping since the Chola times of Rajaraja (9). Well into the nineteenth century, Indians were plying wooden sailing boats from its ports. Yet from the 1870s, British steamers had effectively captured the important Indian routes. Out of Tuticorin alone, the British India Steam Navigation Company was transporting, in addition to cotton and other cargo, some one hundred thousand people a year, most of them Tamil workers bound for hard labor in Ceylon, South Africa, and Malaya.
By 1906, BI, as the company was known, was a Goliath of colonial shipping, with a fleet of more than one hundred ships. It was run by James Lyle Mackay, the most prominent figure in British shipping of the age and a man with such political power in India that he was once informally offered the viceroyalty. Fed up with Tuticorin’s nationalist stirrings, he and British officials were already working to develop a new port in a location with more compliant citizens.
Pillai no doubt sensed the dimensions of the corporate-governmental complex he’d be taking on. Still, through British intelligence, we can see how little he hesitated in setting up a line to compete with Mackay’s operations. In April 1906 he met with local merchants to discuss the possibility, and six months later, a joint stock company was on the books. His plan was to raise one million rupees by offering forty thousand shares at twenty-five rupees each, a comparatively low price intended to attract a broad base of investors. The only stipulation was that shares were “to be held exclusively by the Indians, Ceylonese and other nations of the East.” Calcutta and Bombay activists responded enthusiastically. Funds were also raised in Ceylon. Finding local backers was a trickier business, though.
One British report says some local businessmen were reluctant to participate, on account of Pillai’s unnamed “dissolute habits.” So Pillai and his men went door-to-door to help quell the doubts. His wasn’t a chauvinistically Hindu approach, as his mentor Tilak would have preferred. Muslim and Christian merchants worked alongside Hindus at the port, and valued cheap, reliable shipping. He needed them to buy in, too, and some did. The next month, the first steamer launched from Tuticorin.
Named the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, it was as irritating to the British as it was celebrated by nationalists across the country. By December, South India’s leading newspaper, The Hindu, reported keen competition between Pillai’s company and BI: “each company lowering its tariff and fare day after day.” The British firm offered promotions such as free umbrellas, and hung a board using the word swadeshi to confuse Indians into buying tickets for the wrong line. It allied itself with the British-owned Southern India Railway, and only ticket officials for British steamers were permitted to lure port-bound passengers descending onto the platforms. When a Swadeshi Company official violated the railway ban, he was arrested. The local British administration, under direction from the governor in Madras, was soon in the fray, delaying medical and customs clearances for Swadeshi line passengers.
Pillai remained defiant. Giving up his first ship, which was leased, he ordered two reconditioned mail steamers, one each from Britain and France, better equipped than the British boats in use. In April and June 1907, those ships sailed into port. They had room for forty-two first-class, twenty-four second-class, and thirteen hundred other passengers, as well as four thousand gunny bags of cargo. But more significant in British eyes were the ships’ colors, the “Swadeshi flag”: green, yellow, and red horizontal stripes, emblazoned with the words Vande Mataram (“Hail to the Motherland”), a nationalist slogan taken from a famous Bengali poem of the same name. To the British, the slogan—in fact the whole enterprise—was seditious.
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As the Swadeshi movement gained traction across India, British administrators scrambled to react and repress. Between the summers of 1906 and 1907, the British prosecuted nine newspapers, and deported several Swadeshi leaders without trial. Yet this didn’t dampen the movement, so in November 1907 a new antisedition law banned meetings of more than twenty people. It would be applied widely to protests considered nonconstitutional (as Pillai’s localized movement was) and place many of Swadeshi’s most important agitators in jail.
Around the same time, Pillai finally met his guru, Tilak, at the annual Congress meeting. There, in Surat, a fight broke out between moderates and extremists that descended into haranguing and shoe throwing, and formally split the party. The extremists, led by Tilak, emerged victorious, and Pillai was given official charge of the South.
Pillai had become a hero of the elite Indian National Congress before he was a local one; his oratory was a bit too lawyerly for popular appeal. Yet now he was joined in his peripatetic fund-raising and swaraj rallying by a charismatic, once-poor Madras Shaivite preacher and political activist named Subramania Sivam. By 1908 their joint speeches at public meetings were drawing thousands, and Pillai was becoming a genuine political force in the region. Calcutta’s radical press compared his deeds to the struggle in the Transvaal, which was led by another Indian lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi (38).
In Pillai’s analysis, the British—“despicable sinners”—had divided a once-unified India in order to subdue it. As for the religious and caste divisions that predated the British, he felt these should be set aside in the common cause of swaraj. Yet in the port area, caste divisions were harder to bridge than religious ones. And in South India, where religious observance ran deep, Brahmin power was considerable. By Pillai’s time, seven out of every ten university graduates were Brahmin, and they held most of the high posts in the Madras provincial administration. Pillai’s caste, though not Brahmin, was also a force in the local district administration. Low-caste Tamils were skeptical of an upper-caste movement dominated by Brahmins such as Tilak, and by Vellalars such as Pillai—a movement they guessed might mirror the social hierarchies they inhabited.
Pillai’s sharpest challenge on the subject came from low-caste Nadars. Upwardly mobile under the British, they feared a new Indian regime might relegate them to their original work, climbing Palmyra trees and tapping for toddy. According to the British files, one Nadar accused Pillai directly during a speech, “If you get swaraj, you will ask us to do menial things.” Pillai, who once fretted that Tilak would find him too low caste to dine with, seemed hesitant about any caste inclusion that didn’t redound to the benefit of his movement. Like many of the political radicals of the time, he was socially conservative at heart. “Union does not mean that we should dine together and embrace each other,” he said at another point. “It will be several years after swaraj is obtained that such things take place.”
Matters of both caste and class—a condescending indifference to the poor, and particularly peasants—hampered the movement nationwide. It took hold in few of the provinces around Bengal, and its epicenters remained in cities such as Calcutta and Bombay. Yet in Tirunelveli, the district that contained Tuticorin, Sivam’s passion about worker conditions helped Pillai conceive a broader movement.
In early 1908 the
two men trained their focus on low-paid, mixed-caste workers at a prominent cotton mill, Coral, which not incidentally was owned by the same British agency that ran the BI line. Sivam, who had closely followed the impact of worker strikes in Russia—“revolutions always brought good to the world,” he said—argued that an increase in Indian wages would do much to make India undesirable to the British. He and Pillai persuaded the millworkers to strike until they got better terms. It was one of India’s earliest labor agitations, and a successful one. Within a few days, Pillai had negotiated a settlement—news that traveled through working-class communities, increased his fame, and possibly sealed his doom. The British feared one labor agitation might become many. Within a week of the strike’s resolution, they ended their prolonged cat-and-mouse game and charged Pillai and Sivam with sedition.
The proximate cause was a march the two men had called to celebrate the release of Bengal’s leading extremist, Bipin Chandra Pal, from a Calcutta prison. By the police’s accounts, Pillai had instructed his followers to leave at home anything that could be construed as a weapon, even a walking stick; “if anything goes wrong we must be the injured party and not the offending party,” he reportedly said. Still, the police declared other of his fairly characteristic statements to be illegal and, for good measure, accused him of being an accessory to the seditions of Sivam.
The arrests sparked the very violence the British feared. Protests broke out immediately. The Tuticorin municipal office, courts, and police headquarters were set on fire. Panicked Europeans, anticipating a massacre, sought refuge on board a ship anchored in the harbor. A principal of a girls’ school later wrote of being told by an Indian teacher, “The torch is lighted tonight that is to spread from Cape Comorin to Calcutta and nothing can save the English.” Laborers, tellingly, went out on strike. The British, in a state of panic, sentenced Pillai to two life terms in prison.
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