The Teacher at Pondicherry
From a room in Highgate to a garden in French Pondicherry, where he translated the Kural and trained the man who went to Maniyachi
V.V.S. Aiyar gave up his place at Lincoln's Inn, ran from a London conspiracy warrant, and landed at French Pondicherry on 4 December 1910, four miles from British police who could not touch him. In ten years of exile he wrote the first modern Tamil short stories, made the first complete English prose translation of the Tirukkural by a Tamil scholar, and gave revolver practice to young men who came down from British territory, Vanchinathan among them. He was never tried for the Ashe killing, lost a public argument about caste dining at his own school, and drowned at the Papanasam falls on 3 June 1925 going in after his daughter.
The Boat at Naples
It is early in 1910, on a steamer moving east out of a European port. A Tamil man of twenty-eight is on board with a false name and a beard he has grown for the purpose. He is travelling as a Muslim gentleman. He has left behind a set of law books, a place at Lincoln's Inn in London, and the career his family expected of him.
He does not go straight home. The route is long on purpose: Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Naples, Constantinople, Cairo. Accounts of his flight say he posted a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy ahead of him from Rome to a friend in Pondicherry. The title of the book was to be the password when he arrived. Treat that detail as the story his circle told about him, not as a police record.
His name is Varahaneri Venkatesa Subramania Aiyar, and everyone in the Tamil country would soon call him V.V.S. Aiyar. On 4 December 1910 he stepped ashore at Pondicherry, a small French enclave on the Coromandel coast where British police could not arrest him.
He would spend the next decade in that town writing Tamil short stories, translating the Tirukkural into English, and teaching young men to shoot. One of those young men was Vanchinathan. The question this lesson has to answer is how one man held both of those things in the same hands.
The Career He Walked Away From
Aiyar was born on 2 April 1881 at Varahaneri, a suburb of Tiruchirappalli on the Kaveri. His father, Venkatesa Aiyar, was an orthodox and scholarly man, and the son was a prize student. He matriculated in 1895 placed fifth in the whole Madras Presidency. He took a BA at St Joseph's College, Tiruchirappalli, in history, politics and Latin.
Then came the ordinary ladder of a bright provincial boy. He passed the First Grade Pleader's examination at Madras and practised in the Tiruchirappalli courts. In 1906 he moved to Rangoon, then part of British Burma, to work as a junior in an English barrister's chambers. Burma was where Tamil lawyers went to make money.