Podcast: How an Indian’s Swadeshi Steam knocked the wind out of a British shipping giant’s sails

In 1906, an obscure man from an obscure South Indian port town dreamed up an audacious plan. VO Chidambaram Pillai, a resident of Tuticorin, decided to take on the might of the British Indian Steam Navigation Company – BI. To call this a David and Goliath struggle would be an understatement. BI was perhaps the world’s most powerful shipping conglomerate – in competition for the title with Peninsular & Oriental, with which it merged during the First World War.

A symbol of British commercial might in the Indian Ocean, BI had a clear monopoly over passenger and cargo trade in Tuticorin and numerous other ports dotting the Indian coast. And it had the active support and sympathy of the British Indian government: one historian would refer to BI as a “parastatal organisation”.

Historian AR Venkatachalapathy has spent the past four decades researching Pillai and his frontal assault on British economic and political hegemony. His new book, Swadeshi Steam, chronicles one of the most dramatic and unknown episodes of the Indian nationalist struggle. Pillai’s company, the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company, utilised meagre resources and human capital to successfully wrest away business from BI.

This was quite unprecedented.

In the 1880s, members of the Tagore family, including a young Rabindranath, tried to disrupt the British monopoly on river transportation in Bengal. They failed. In the 1890s, Jamsetji Tata partnered with the Japanese shipping line NYK to take on Peninsular & Oriental. He failed. Pillai’s success in Tuticorin terrified both British business magnates and colonial political authorities.

But Pillai was just beginning. He turned Tuticorin into a laboratory of swadeshi and radical politics, launching a labour strike in another British concern, Coral Mills, and inspiring Indians to challenge the racialised political and economic order which underpinned colonialism. Petrified European residents, used to reverential salaaming by local Indians, fled to boats anchored in the harbor which were a safe distance away from the ferment brewing in the town.

Retribution was swift: Swadeshi Steam was brutally crushed by the British Indian government, while Pillai was handed an incredible two life terms for sedition. Many of his business partners were financially ruined, mired in colossal debt for the rest of their lives.

While Swadeshi Steam ended on a tragic note, it would be wrong to classify it as a failure. In this episode of Past Imperfect, Venkatachalapathy discusses Swadeshi Steam’s career and its broader significance.

During the colonial era, the Madras Presidency was known as the “benighted presidency”, a relative political backwater. Venkatachalapathy’s work challenges this narrative, demonstrating vibrant political and social networks which powered Pillai’s business venture.

Importantly, Swadeshi Steam provides us with a new perspective on the Swadeshi Movement. Far away from its epicenter in Bengal, swadeshi proved to be much more accommodating and cosmopolitan in the Madras Presidency. Swadeshi politics did not devolve into a process of Muslim alienation: in fact, Pillai attracted significant support from Muslims, Christians and members of lower castes.

Pillai’s ordeal speaks to two important features of the colonial Indian economy. First, and most importantly, the cards were stacked against Indians. Venkatachalapathy has amassed a colossal trove of government records which proves how the British government stalked the company’s progress, intimidated its employees and customers, and shored up the interests of BI. Colonial officials disrupted Swadeshi Steam’s operations on the flimsiest of premises while actively pressuring directors to push Pillai out of the company.

Second, human capital proved to be an insuperable barrier for Indian entrepreneurs. Despite branding itself as swadeshi, Pillai’s shipping company had to employ European captains and superior officers because no trained Indians were at hand. As a result, swadeshi business ventures had a strong paedagogical component.

During its short life, Swadeshi Steam aspired not only to ship people and goods but also to train up a cadre of non-European navigators, engineers, merchantmen, and business managers. Non-European, furthermore, did not just mean Indian: Pillai’s intent was to educate a wide cross-section of Asians and, in particular, seek out support from the Japanese. If patriotism powered Swadeshi Steam, the banner of Pan-Asianism fluttered from its masts.

Venkatachalapathy first encountered the story of Pillai and Swadeshi Steam as an adolescent: since then, he has traced their story through dusty archival collections in numerous countries. His research also took him to the descendants of Robert Ashe, the sub-collector of Tuticorin who was assassinated by an Indian radical in 1911 in retribution for his role in crushing Swadeshi Steam.

Ashe’s grandson in Ireland extended the “warmest friendship” to Venkatachalapathy, then researching his grandfather’s assassin. VO Chidambaram Pillai’s audacious business plan had many far-reaching consequences, but even he might have been taken aback by one of its final legacies: reconciliation.

Dinyar Patel is an assistant professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Researchin Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.