Saga of One Individual’s Vision

In the early months of 1908, the Tamil-speaking areas of the erstwhile Madras Presidency were convulsed by the Swadeshi Movement. Tirunelveli and Tuticorin became epicentres of the first anti-colonial mass movement in twentieth-century south India. On 13 March, both towns witnessed violent protests following the arrest of the nationalist leader VO Chidambaram Pillai and his associate Subramania Siva. Designated in the official record as the ‘Tinnevelly Riots’, this momentous episode has largely receded from public memory, as has the wider context within which it was embedded. Colonial authorities naturally characterized the violence as ‘sedition’; their nationalist opponents robustly castigated the British rulers for stifling dissent. But underlying this political slugfest was a more consequential conflict, one that pitted a nascent Indian shipping enterprise—the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company (SSNCo)—against the mighty forces of metropolitan capital. AR Venkatachalapathy’s Swadeshi Steam is a remarkable reconstruction of this forgotten event in the history of Indian nationalism and capitalism.