Champakraman Pillai

Chempaka Raman Pillai
Born	15 September 1891 Trivandrum, India
Died	26 May 1934 Nazi Germany
Other names	Champak
Organization	Berlin Committee, Provisional Government of India
Movement	Indian Independence movement, Indo-German Conspiracy

Chempakaraman Pillai, alias Venkat, was an Indian-born political activist and revolutionary. Pillai lived in Germany for most of his active years, and died in Berlin in 1934.

Pillai was born into a Tamil family in Trivandrum, capital of the former kingdom of Travancore in the modern state of Kerala. He was the son of Chinnaswami Pillai and Nagammal. He had a sister named Paappaathi Ammal. She married a sculptor named Chatrapathi Pillai, whose sculpture, Kuravan Kurathi, is in the Trivandrum Museum. Paappaathi Ammal had four daughters, one of whom still resides in Trivandrum.

Pillai attended a technical institute, pursuing a diploma in Engineering. After the outbreak of the First World War, he founded the International Pro-India Committee and based its headquarters in Zürich, appointing himself president in September 1914. During the same period an Indian Independence Committee was formed in Berlin by a group of Indian expatriates in Germany. This latter group was composed of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Mahatma Gandhi, Bhupendranath Dutta, A. Raman Pillai, Taraknath Das, Maulavi Barkatullah, Chandrakant Chakravarty, M. Prabhakar, Birendra Sarkar, and Heramba Lal Gupta.

In October 1914, Pillai moved to Berlin and joined the Berlin Committee, merging it with his International Pro-India Committee as the guiding and controlling institution for all pro-Indian revolutionary activities in Europe. Lala Har Dayal was also persuaded to join the movement. Soon branches sprang up in Amsterdam, , and Washington, as well as in many other parts of Europe and the Americas.

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