Jai Hind is a salutation and slogan that originally meant “Victory to India” but has come to signify “Long live India” or “Salute to India” in modern usage. It was coined and used as a battle cry and in political speeches during India’s independence fight from British rule.

There are numerous theories about who coined the slogan “Jai Hind,” one of them is that it was coined by Chempakaraman Pillai from Tamil Nadu.

Chempakaraman Pillai was born in Trivandrum, the capital of the erstwhile kingdom of Travancore in the present state of Kerala, to Chinnaswami Pillai and Nagammal, who hailed from Nanjilnadu (in present-day Kanyakumari District).

He met Sir Walter Strickland, a British botanist, while he was a young adult growing up in Trivandrum, and he arranged for him and his friend T. Padmanabha Pillai to travel to Europe. Chempakaraman Pillai was taken to Italy by Strickland, then to Switzerland, and finally to Germany, where he lived the rest of his life.

Pillai made headlines in 1914, when Europe teetered on the brink of war. Many Indian revolutionaries overseas sought to seek Germany’s support in their battle for India’s independence, much like Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose did years later. One of them was Pillai.

He he founded the International Pro-India Committee and operated the German and English monthly magazine Pro-India from Zurich that put forward the Indian view of the world to the German people.  Pillai visited Berlin in October 1914, when a number of Indians had formed the Berlin Committee in support of the Indian cause. The International Pro-India Committee and the Berlin Committee merged the next year to become the Indian Independence Committee.

Pillai had travelled to Berlin by that time to try to persuade Germany to take more proactive measures for India’s independence. He became much more active in this role, thus assisting the Germans in gaining a foothold in British India for the first time.

In 1915, Indian revolutionaries even formed a provisional Indian government in Kabul. Chempakaraman became a major factor in British strategy from then on, despite the plans failing and resulting in a strong response from the British, including lengthy trials.

Pillai also had the honour of serving as Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government of India in Afghanistan, which was established in December 1915 and presided over by Raja Mahendra Pratap of Kabul and Prime Minister Maulana Barkatulla. However, the defeat of the Germans in the war shattered the hopes of the revolutionaries.

He was also a member of the Emden, a German warship that attacked the British naval station in Madras and sunk a number of British ships during World War -1.

Pillai remained in Europe after the World War. He apparently worked as a technician while continuing his nationalist activity, although specifics about his life there are unclear. He later met Subhash Chandra Bose in Vienna in 1933 and explained his plan of action to him.

His demise is also the subject of a fantastic legend. Pillai is believed to have enraged the Nazis in the early 1930s when he sought a formal response from the Führer after the Führer made a derogatory comment regarding Indians. Despite the fact that the apology arrived a day beyond the deadline he had set, the enraged Nazis allegedly poisoned him afterwards.

Though it will be impossible to substantiate this narrative, we do know that he died in Nazi Berlin in 1934 and that the specifics of his last journey are known.  His ashes were immersed in a river in Kerala.

In 1991, the Tamil Nadu government announced that a memorial to Chempakaraman Pillai would be built in Madras, and in 2008, then-Chief Minister M Karunanidhi unveiled a statue of Pillai at the Gandhi Mandapam in Adyar, Chennai, honouring the man who masterminded the bombing of British Madras during World War 1.

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