V. Sadagopacharlu

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Vembaukum Sadagopacharlu (died 1863) was an Indian lawyer, jurist, banker, [1] and statesman, who was the first native Indian member of the Madras Legislative Council, serving from 1861 to until his 1863 death, [2] and one of the first Indians to achieve wealth and renown in the courts of British India, doing both alongside his brother, religious reformer and minor polymath V. Rajagopalacharlu, in the judicial system of the Madras Presidency, in which they were leading Vakils, he himself being the first Indian to become one. He belonged to the influential Vembaukum family.

Contents

Early life

Sadagopacharlu hailed from the village of Vembakkam near Kanchipuram. He matriculated from the Presidency College, Madras in 1858 and studied law. Soon, he enrolled himself as a lawyer, and along with his reportedly "even more brilliant" [3] brother V. Rajagopalacharlu, emerged as one of the first and foremost Indians in the bar making up a fortune in a short time. [4] At a time when the typical remuneration of a lawyer of the Madras High Court was 10,000 rupees for participating in a case, [1] his personal total compensation over the course of litigation over the adoption of an heir to the Ramnad estate, on which both he and his brother worked, was 150,000 rupees. [1] The second published case in the Presidency was his, with John D. Mayne, Advocate-General of Madras and author of the standard reference text for the Hindu customary law of British India, Mayne's Hindu Law, as opposing counsel; he himself was the author of the standard reference text on Muslim customary law in India, despite only living to 35. [3] His younger brother would also die prematurely, at 38, shortly after accidentally shooting and killing their sister's husband in 1878. [3]

Sadagopacharlu married the sister of his paternal uncle's wife, and his nephew Sir V. C. Desikachariar's father-in-law took his deceased first wife's niece as his second wife, which facts were cited in the High Court as evidence as to the permissibility of such marriages in Hindu customary law for Brahmins, in relation to Iyengars as one of the orthodox Brahminical sects and Madras as one district of the Presidency's eight. [5]

Politics

Sadagopacharlu was nominated to the Madras Legislative Council in 1861 and served until his death in 1863. Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty was appointed to fill the seat left by his death.

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The Vembaukum or Vembakkam family were one of the two preeminent Brahmin dynasties in the Madras Presidency, dominating the Mylapore clique alongside the Calamur clan, and 'possess(ing) an enormous presence in the... bureaucracy of the capital and its surrounding district(s)', whose historical presence began in the 1820s, with the sprawling clan famously having begun holding yearly family conferences by the 1890s to preserve their dynastic unity, political cohesion and influence, and wealth.

Vembakkam Comanduru Gopalratnam, son of Sir V. C. Desikachariar, grandson of V. Rajagopalacharlu, grandnephew of V. Sadagopacharlu, brother-in-law of K. Bhashyam Iyengar, and son-in-law of V. V. Srinivasa Iyengar, was himself a top-ranking lawyer, writer, humorist, and legal historian, whose magnum opus was The High Court , finished just months before his death in 1962. He was also author of Hāsya Nāṭakaṅkaḷ Kaṭṭuraikaḷ, a work in Tamil. A member of the Vembaukum family, he co-edited the quarterly trade journal The Lawyer and was partially resident in Vasantavilas, where he took on as a junior a youthful Randor Guy.

V. Rajagopalacharlu (1830-1868) was an Indian lawyer, jurist, and Hindu religious reformer, who was of the first Indians in the colonial epoch to achieve wealth and renown in the courts of British India, accomplishing both alongside his brother, V. Sadagopacharlu, in the judicial system of the Madras Presidency, in which they were leading Vakils. He also was an advocate of religious reform within Hinduism, as the primary exponent of the Brahmo Samaj movement in South India.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Price, Pamela G. (1996). Kingship and political practice in colonial India. University of Cambridge Oriental publications (1. publ ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN   978-0-521-55247-9.
  2. ↑ N.S.Chandrasekhara (22 August 2016). Dewan Shashadri Aiyer. Publications Division Ministry of Information & Broadcasting. ISBN   9788123026572.
  3. 1 2 3 "The tragedy at Vembakkam". The Hindu. 5 November 2012. ISSN   0971-751X . Retrieved 30 March 2024.
  4. ↑ Gopalratnam, V. C. (1962). A Century Completed: A History of the Madras High Court, 1862-1962. Madras Law Journal Office.
  5. ↑ "Ragavendra Rau And Anr. vs Jayaram Rau on 30 March, 1897". indiankanoon.org. Retrieved 30 March 2024.


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