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In 1906, Britain’s grip on the world was unassailable. Its navy ruled the seas, and its trade empire spanned the globe. But in the small port town of Tuticorin, a lawyer named V.O. Chidambaram Pillai—known to the world as VOC—had a revolutionary idea that would challenge the might of the empire itself. VOC’s plan was audacious: to launch the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company. This venture would compete head-on with the British India Steam Navigation Company, the shipping giant that controlled the region. Swadeshi Steam is a tale of heroism and defiance in the face of colonial oppression. Based on four decades of research in archives around the world, the book showcases the power of one individual’s vision to ignite a movement.
A. R. Venkatachalapathy is a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai. He was the ICCR Chair in Indian Studies at the National University of Singapore (2011–12). He was awarded the V. K. R. V. Rao Prize (history, 2007) and Vilakku Pudumaippithan Award for lifetime contribution to Tamil (2018). Chalapathy has published widely on the social, cultural, and intellectual history of colonial Tamilnadu. A few of his publications in English include Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture (2019), The Brief History of a Very Big Book: The Making of the Tamil Encyclopaedia (2022), and The Province of the Book: Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (2012). Presently, he is working on the biography of Periyar.
Aparajith Ramnath is an associate professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University. He is a historian of science, technology and industry in South Asia. He is the author of The Birth of an Indian Profession: Engineers, Industry, and the State, 1900-47 (2017), and Engineering a Nation: The Life and Career of M. Visvesvaraya (2024).
