Sinhakulathipati Papanarya Yatiraj Surendranath Voegeli-Arya was an Indian independence activist from the

Madras Presidency The Madras Presidency, or the Presidency of Fort St. George, also known as Madras Province, was an administrative subdivision (presidency) of British India. At its greatest extent, the presidency included most of southern India, including the ...

Early life

Surendranath Arya was born Ethiraj to Dhanakoti Raju Naidu in a

Telugu Telugu may refer to: * Telugu language, a major Dravidian language of India *Telugu people, an ethno-linguistic group of India * Telugu script, used to write the Telugu language ** Telugu (Unicode block), a block of Telugu characters in Unicode S ...

-speaking family of the city of

Madras Chennai (, ), formerly known as Madras ( the official name until 1996), is the capital city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost Indian state. The largest city of the state in area and population, Chennai is located on the Coromandel Coast of th ...

. On completion of his initial education, he got involved in extremist political activities and moved to Bengal in 1897 where he lived until 1906 and formed contacts with Bengali revolutionaries. On his return, he adopted the name "Surendranath" after the Bengali revolutionary Surendranath Banerjee and styled himself "Arya" or "native of India".

Arrest

Once in Madras, he established a close bond with the Tamil revolutionary Subramanya Bharathi and was one of the founders of the Chennai Jana Sangam. He was arrested on 18 August 1908 on charges of sedition and sentenced to transportation for 11 years. According to the prosecution, Ethiraj is believed to have said on 3 May 1908:

Imprisonment

Surendranath Arya was released from prison in 1914 after six years of rigorous imprisonment in Bellary. During his imprisonment, his health had broken down and he had contracted leprosy. He was treated by Danish Christian missionaries and in gratitude towards them, Arya converted to Christianity. Arya went to the United States to study divination where he earned a Masters of Arts degree from Grove City College in 1917. After he returned to Madras as a missionary of the Danish Mission Church. On returning to India, Arya married a Swedish American woman whose name "Voegeli" he added to his own. Arya was one of the few who attended Bharathy's cremation in 1921 where he delivered an eulogy in Telugu.

Later life

Arya divorced his Swedish American wife and reconverted to Hinduism in the late 1920s. He became a member of the Brahmo Samaj and supported the

Self Respect Movement The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhoo ...

. During this time, he became a close friend of

Periyar E. V. Ramasami Erode Venkatappa Ramasamy (17 September 1879 – 24 December 1973), revered as Periyar or Thanthai Periyar, was an Indian social activist and politician who started the Self-Respect Movement and Dravidar Kazhagam. He is known as the 'F ...

In popular culture

Nizhalgal Ravi Ravichandran Samanna (born 16 April 1956), known professionally as Nizhalgal Ravi, is an Indian film, television and voice actor who works mainly in Tamil cinema. He has performed in Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu films and television series. He st ...

played the part of Surendranath Arya in the 2000 Tamil film '' Bharathi''.

Notes

References

* * {{cite book, title=Growth of public opinion in the Madras Presidency (1858-1909), pages=53, publisher=University of Madras, author=D. Sadasivan, year=1974 Indian independence activists from Tamil Nadu