Key Points
While independent India today celebrates its freedom fighters with great pride, some names are often lost in the pages of history...
While Mahatma Gandhi called for a boycott of foreign goods in India, kickstarting the Swadeshi Movement, a patriotic Indian in the south had plans to make the country capable of running its independent trade shipping business...
Published by Penguin India, Swadeshi Steam by A.R. Venkatachalapathy will be released on 27 February on SoftCover, ThePrints online venue to launch non-fiction books...
The author, a historian and Tamil writer, put in years of research to unearth the struggles of Pillai and his revolutionary idea of setting up the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company in 1906, a venture that would compete head-on with the British India Steam Navigation Company, the shipping giant that controlled the region...
Chidambaram Pillais anti-colonial shipping line sheds new light on how commerce and politics combined in the struggle for a free India, says Sunil Amrith, MacArthur Prize Fellow in praise of the book...
