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The first to champion the cause of the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills’ workers was G. Selvapathi Chettiar. This textile merchant’s campaign on behalf of the workers began in 1915. Soon he gathered the support of B.P. Wadia of Annie Besant’s New India and Tiruvarur Vi Kalyanasundaram, who was editing Desabhaktan, a Tamil daily that was sympathetic to the New India line. Of the efforts of the three was born the MLU that in time organised employees in every industry and many a profession in the City – including policemen and barbers. And for many of them it secured an 8-hour day instead of the 12-hour one that was the norm of the times.

Exhorting the workers to join the Union with his fiery speeches was Tiru Vi Ka, who became the most visible face of the Union. In 1923, he was instrumental in forming the first confederation of trade unions. Today, however, he is remembered better for having been a prolific writer, a pioneer of political writing in chaste Tamil. Critics, however, say that his public speaking was at a total variance with his writing. Whereas the former was fiery, the latter was couched in “an unctuous prose”, wound its way deviously to make what was, nevertheless, a well-argued point, and was laced with sentimentality. In fact, a close friend of his, Subramania Sivam, described him as the “castor oil Mudaliar”.

Born the son of a petty shopowner in a village near Poonamallee, he studied at Wesley High School, Royapettah, while at the same time making himself familiar with Tamil through the help of such pandits as Jaffna N. Kadiravel Pillai and Mylai Mahavidwan Thanikachala Mudaliar. He at the same time was practical enough to do a course in book-keeping. This helped him to get a job at Spencer’s; it also helped him to see how the large British companies of the day treated their employees. After 18 months with Spencer’s, he worked in a couple of other British firms, before accepting the post of Tamil Pandit in his old school in 1910. In 1917, he was invited to edit the newly started Desabhaktan. In the years that followed, he was to lecture on Saivite topics at one forum, exhort the workers to fight for their rights at another, speak in a measured, well-argued manner about the political issues of the day at a third, and lecture on women’s rights at a fourth.

With Desabhaktan following New India’s policies, it was constantly in trouble with the British authorities. It also did not receive the kind of advertising support it deserved from the big business houses of Madras – but, then, most of them were British-owned. Its future looked far from bright. And when differences arose between the management and Tiru Vi Ka. They let him quit in July 1920.

Much of these differences were rooted in the time he spent addressing workers’ meetings and calling for greater women’s rights. It was his labour supporters who came to his rescue at this time; they raised Rs.3,000 to help him to start his own weekly Navasakthi. The first issue came out on October 22, 1920. The weekly ran for about 20 years with Tiru Vi Ka finding himself constantly shifting positions, on the one hand supporting Congress nationalism, on the other backing the Justice Party’s Non-Brahmin stand. That he succeeded in playing the balancing act well is testified by the numerous close friends he had in both camps.

Today, however, he is best associated with the pure Tamil vocabulary he brought to Tamil journalism and the books he wrote on women’s rights and Gandhian philosophy. Pennmaiyin Perumai (The Greatness of Womanhood) and Manitha Vaazhkkaiyum Gandhi Adigalum on Gandhi’s philosophy of life are the best known of his numerous works. Bespectacled, mild and scholarly-looking Tiru Vi Ka looked the part of the scholar-writer, not the crusader for people’s rights that he was.

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