V.O. Chidambaram Pillai Founded a Swadeshi Shipping Company in 1906, Bought Two Steamers for the Tuticorin to Colombo Run, and Has Had the Port Named for Him Since 2011

V.O. Chidambaram Pillai, a lawyer from Tuticorin, founded the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, an Indian-owned line registered on 16 October 1906 that ran steamers between Tuticorin and Colombo against the British India Steam Navigation Company (BISN). Tuticorin’s port, now the V.O. Chidambaranar Port Authority, carries his name, and India Post issued a 20 paise stamp for his birth centenary on 5 September 1972.

A Union Cabinet note of 27 January 2011 gives his dates as 5 September 1872 to 18 November 1936 and places his home at Ottapidaram, near Tuticorin. The note calls him a Tamil scholar, a prolific writer, a trade union leader and a freedom fighter. Kasthuri, a history lecturer at Bharathidasan Government College for Women in Puducherry, adds in a 2013 paper that he qualified in law at Tiruchirappalli in 1895 and began practice in Tuticorin in 1900.

A company with Rs 10 lakh on paper and Rs 2 lakh paid in

The swadeshi idea, buying Indian goods and shunning foreign ones, spread south after the 1905 partition of Bengal, which our piece on Lord Curzon covers. In Tuticorin it became a shipping line. Reviewing A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s 2023 history Swadeshi Steam for Outlook, P.A. Krishnan says the company was registered as a joint-stock firm on 16 October 1906. Its authorised capital was Rs 10 lakh (Rs 1 million), in 40,000 shares of Rs 25. Subscribers paid Rs 5 a share at first and many never paid the rest, so the paid-up capital was Rs 2 lakh.

Only Indians, Ceylonese and other Asians could hold shares, according to Kasthuri. Pandithurai Thevar chaired the board, Chidambaram Pillai was secretary and Salem Vijayaraghavachariar was legal adviser. The stated aim, in the words Kasthuri’s paper quotes, was a “cheap and reliable steamer service between Tuticorin and Colombo”. Raman Mahadevan, reviewing the same book in The India Forum, says Calcutta and Bombay put in more money than Madras did. Among the early backers, Krishnan lists the poet Subramania Bharati.

Two steamers, Gallia and Lawoe

The line began on chartered ships. Mahadevan says it hired steamers from the Shah Line of Bombay and, after quarrels over the contracts, bought two reconditioned steamships, the Gallia and the Lawoe (some accounts spell them Galia and Lavo). English crew and technical staff were hired too, and he notes that the cost made the company’s finances worse. In Kasthuri’s account the founder raised a loan, left Tuticorin in December 1906 to buy ships in Bombay, and came home in April 1907 aboard the Gallia.

BISN controlled the traffic between Ceylon and the Coromandel coast, Krishnan writes, and it fought back on price. Open Magazine’s Shoba reports that ticket prices were cut and that BISN answered with free umbrellas. BISN also paid commissions to the railways and arranged rail concessions in India and Ceylon for its passengers, Kasthuri adds, and he puts its losses at Rs 30,000 to 40,000 a month in late 1907 and early 1908. Mahadevan doubts that figure, given the Swadeshi line’s irregular sailings and BISN’s hold on other routes, but he says most Tuticorin traders preferred the swadeshi ships.

The Coral Mills strike of February 1908

The Coral Mills in Tuticorin were run by the Harvey brothers, who were BISN’s agents, Shoba writes. About 1,000 workers struck from 27 February to 6 March 1908 for shorter days, a weekly holiday and better pay, and the mill gave in. Subramania Siva and Chidambaram Pillai spoke to the strikers daily, Kasthuri says, and a relief fund fed their families. The joint magistrate banned public meetings under Section 144 on the first day, and the ban was later withdrawn.

Inside the company the strike caused strain. The directors asked the founder to give up politics, in Kasthuri’s telling. A majority of directors, Mahadevan writes, wanted the firm to keep away from political activity and tried to sideline him.

Arrest on 12 March 1908, riots and a sentence

A procession in Tuticorin on 9 March was planned to mark the release of the nationalist Bipin Chandra Pal from jail. The district magistrate, Wynch, served notices on 8 March, Kasthuri says. Siva, a third speaker named Padmanabha Iyengar, and Chidambaram Pillai were arrested on 12 March and charged with sedition under Sections 124A and 153A of the Indian Penal Code. Rioting broke out in Tinnevelly the next day, and Shoba says four people died in police firing. Keir Hardie, an MP, asked the Commons on 14 July 1908 whether the riots began in an attempt to boycott the Swadeshi steamship company. The Under-Secretary of State for India, Buchanan, said the point did not arise from the question before him.

By late 1907 the founder was part of national politics. Kasthuri places him at the Surat Congress of December 1907, where Madras and Deccan delegates called for Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Lajpat Rai, and says he likened Tilak that day to a calm lion facing a hundred frenzied elephants. The split at Surat and Tilak’s own sedition trials are in our article on Tilak. A Bombay jury convicted Tilak on 22 July 1908, sixteen days after the Tinnevelly sentence.

Buchanan told the Commons on 27 October 1908 that the Additional Sessions Judge of Tinnevelly had sentenced Chidambaram Pillai on 6 July 1908 to transportation for life. Cotton, the member for Nottingham East, had put the sentence on Siva at ten years on 14 July, and Buchanan replied that the punishment in both cases was transportation. As for the two assessors who sat with the judge, one European and one Indian, Buchanan said he believed they had differed.

Later accounts disagree on the sentence. Shoba’s 2019 article calls it a 20-year “double transportation” sentence, her 2024 review in Open Magazine says two life terms, and the 1972 stamp’s issue note, reproduced by Indian Philatelics, says 40 years. The High Court judgment and the parliamentary answers, the two official records used here, name one sentence of transportation for life. Transportation originally meant being sent to the penal settlement in the Andamans, a system described in our piece on the Cellular Jail.

The High Court cut it to six years

The appeal was admitted on 31 July 1908 and the hearing began on 6 October, Buchanan said. A Madras High Court bench of Chief Justice Charles Arnold White and Justice Miller gave judgment on 4 November 1908. The charges were three counts of abetting Siva’s seditious speeches of 23 and 25 February and 5 March 1908. Chidambaram Pillai was present at the first two and absent from the third. The judges rejected the argument that the complaint against him lacked government authority and upheld the convictions.

They wrote that his own aim may have been partly commercial, since he may have found that ordinary competition would not beat BISN and the Coral Mills. His speeches, they found, left no doubt that he had taken up the programme of “Absolute Swaraj”, which they read as requiring the departure of all foreigners from India. Turning to punishment, the court said the law “will be vindicated by a sentence of 6 (six) years’ transportation”, and it said the same of Siva’s appeal.

Edwin Montagu told the Commons on 7 March 1912 that the six years were being served in an Indian jail, not in the Andamans, because an 1882 Act let the government designate Indian jails for transported prisoners. Six months’ remission at the Coronation Durbar had also been granted, Montagu added.

Coimbatore and the oil press

Jacob’s 2024 paper says Chidambaram Pillai was sent to Coimbatore Central Prison on 9 July 1908 and was treated as an ordinary convict, not a political prisoner. Both Kasthuri and DT Next report that he was made to turn an oil press, work normally done by bullocks. The press is kept as part of his memorial inside the prison. A statue of him was unveiled in the prison grounds on 18 November 2016, his 80th death anniversary, DT Next reported. Shoba writes that he lost a fifth of his body weight and that his father died while he was inside.

Jacob adds that he was later moved to Cannanore jail. The release came on 12 December 1912 in Kasthuri’s account, about four years and nine months after the arrest. None of the sources consulted explains why that falls short of six years less the six-month remission.

Liquidation and later years

The Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company went into liquidation on 4 July 1911, by court order according to Krishnan. Under-capitalisation, a lack of professional management and a dispute among the directors sank it, Mahadevan writes. The two ships were sold to BISN, Kasthuri says.

Shoba, drawing on Venkatachalapathy’s research, writes that Chidambaram Pillai came out of jail with no money, worked as a rice trader in Chennai and a bank clerk in Coimbatore, and practised as a pleader at Kovilpatti once he regained his licence. His later writing included a memoir in verse, and he worked on labour union issues. Kasthuri says he resigned from the Congress in 1920. Tuticorin was where he died, on 18 November 1936.

The port, the stamp and the anniversaries

The Cabinet note of 27 January 2011 says Indian ports are usually named after their towns, and that the government has in special cases renamed ports after leaders of the past. The Cabinet approved renaming Tuticorin Port Trust as V.O. Chidambaranar Port Trust. The Press Information Bureau announced on 18 February 2011 a public function at Tuticorin for the next day, to be inaugurated by the Union Shipping Minister, G.K. Vasan. Descendants of Chidambaram Pillai and of other freedom fighters, among them Subramania Bharati, Vanchinathan and Subramania Siva, were to be honoured, and a museum of memorabilia was to open at the venue.

A Gazette of India notification of 31 January 2022 then renamed the body the V.O. Chidambaranar Port Authority under the Major Port Authorities Act, 2021, according to Maritime Gateway. The port handled 41.72 million tonnes of cargo and 7,95,222 containers (TEUs) in 2024 to 2025, a statement from the port said, as reported by DT Next. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu announced on 5 September 2021, his 150th birth anniversary, that the day would be marked as a government function, and released a booklet on his life in English and Tamil, DT Next reports.

India Post’s 1972 stamp was printed in a run of 3 million, according to Indian Philatelics. At the port’s event on 5 September 2025, the 154th anniversary, the Union Minister of Ports, Shipping and Waterways inaugurated a green hydrogen pilot plant of 10 Nm3 an hour built for Rs 3.87 crore, which the Press Information Bureau release describes as a first among Indian ports.