Maniyachi Junction

Vanchinathan, 17 June 1911: a forest clerk shot Collector Ashe at a railway junction, and the letter in his pocket said why

On the morning of 17 June 1911, Vanchinathan, a twenty-five year old forest department clerk from Shenkottai, shot Robert Ashe, the Collector of Tirunelveli, in a railway carriage at Maniyachi junction and then shot himself. The letter found in his pocket, quoted here only from the record, tied the act to the coming coronation of George V and to what had been done at Tuticorin three years earlier. This is the last dated act in the book, and it is counted at full cost.

The Nine Thirty from Tirunelveli

It is the morning of Saturday, 17 June 1911, on the platform at Tirunelveli junction. Robert William D'Escourt Ashe, the Collector and District Magistrate of Tirunelveli, is boarding the morning train with his wife Mary. They are going up to Kodaikanal to see their children, who are at school in the hills. The plan is to change at Maniyachi, a small junction to the north, and pick up the Boat Mail there.

Ashe is thirty-eight. He has a guard with him, because collectors in the Tamil south in 1911 travel with one. The guard steps off to fetch water.

A young man in a plain shirt gets into the same first class compartment. He is twenty-five, slight, and he has a Belgian-made Browning pistol. He fires once at close range. Ashe is hit in the chest and dies on the seat beside his wife. The young man gets out, runs along the platform, and shoots himself.

In his pocket the police find a letter. It is not a farewell note. It is an explanation, written in advance, and it is the only reason we know what he thought he was doing. His name was Vanchinathan, and he was a clerk in the forest department.

This is the last dated act in this book. It is also the one where the record is fullest and the reasons are hardest to read. So we will take it slowly: the man, the letter, the court, and the bill.

The Clerk from Shenkottai

He was born in 1886 at Shenkottai, in the Travancore country just over the hills from Tirunelveli. He was named Shankaran. Later he was called Vanchinathan, and people in Tamil Nadu still say Vanchi.

He was not a student agitator. He kept accounts for a temple, then took a post in the Travancore forest department and was working at Punalur, a timber town on the Kollam line. A clerk on a modest salary, married, with an ordinary life in front of him.