Of historical erasure, identity and trilingualism

Sahitya Akademi Award-winning historian AR Venkatachalapathy, author of Swadeshi Steam, discusses contemporary language politics and Tamil history

- Dhrubo Jyoti

Tell us about your new Tamil book, Tirunelveli Ezucciyum Vaa.Vuu.Vi.yum 1908.

This particular book is focused on one day in the life of VO Chidambaram Pillai (VOC). At the height of the Swadeshi movement, for about two years from 1906, VOC ran a shipping company directly challenging the British India Steam Navigation Company. He was opening new fronts in the anticolonial struggle and mobilising people for the nationalist movement. He also led a major strike in the British-owned cotton mills. He was travelling all over south India and even further to propagate Swadeshi ideals. He was arrested on March 12, 1908. The day after, in Tirunelveli and Thoothukudi, people took to the streets. For a day, it was like a liberated zone. The British government crushed the movement.

By focusing on this dramatic event, I go back and forth narrating the causes and consequences of this uprising. And I end with a very tragic aspect of this story — why and how it got erased from public memory.

I really hope that this will become part of the national discourse. National Maritime Day is celebrated on April 5, which commemorates the voyage of the SS Loyalty from Bombay to London in 1919. I would urge the government to also consider the arrival of the first Swadeshi ship in Bombay from Marseilles, France, in 1907, so that the great sacrifices of VOC are remembered. I think it is more fitting.

How did you decide to explore the life of Pillai?

I began my research when I was in Class 10. With no training, I wrote in notebooks and on pieces of paper. I made photocopies, though it was expensive in those days. If there were four pages, and the fourth page only had a few lines, I would photocopy the three full pages and then manually copy those few lines.