Pingali Venkayya - Career

Career

Venkayya was an accomplished person on many fronts. He was knowledgeable in geology (which he would later obtain a doctorate for) and agriculture. In Andhra Pradesh, this knowledge enabled him to spend most of his fortune experimenting with developing new crop cultivars and to become an authority on diamond mining, leading to him being popularly known as "Diamond Venkayya". He served in the British Indian army during the Anglo-Boer wars in South Africa. It was there he came in contact with Mahatma Gandhi and was influenced by his ideology. On returning to India, he worked as a railway guard and a government employee at Bellary before moving to Lahore, where he enrolled into the Anglo-Vedic college to study Urdu and Japanese.

This versatile man was a prolific writer, a Japanese lecturer and a geophysicist and a freedom fighter. After finishing his primary education at Challapalli and school at the Hindu High School, Masulipatnam, he went to Colombo to complete his Senior Cambridge. Enthused by patriotic zeal, he enlisted himself for the Boer war at 19. While in Africa he met Gandhi, and their rapport lasted for more than half a century. On his return to India he worked as a railway guard at Bangalore and Madras and subsequently joined the government service as the plague officer at Bellary. His patriotic zeal, however, did not permit him to stagnate in a permanent job, and his quest for education took him to Lahore where he joined the Anglo-Vedic College, and learnt Japanese and Urdu. He studied Japanese and history under Prof Gote. During his five years stay in the north, he became active in politics. Pingali met many revolutionaries and planned strategies to overthrow the colonial rule. The 1906 Congress session with Dadabhai Naoroji witnessed Pingali emerging as an activist and a force behind the decision making committee. Here he met the famous philanthropist, the Raja of Munagala, and from 1906–11, he spent his time in Munagala researching on agriculture and crops. For his pioneering study on the special variety of Cambodia cotton, he came to be called Patti Venkayya. Even the British were taken up by his contributions in the field of agriculture and conferred on him honorary membership of the Royal Agricultural Society of Britain.

Finally, this man went back to his roots at Masulipatnam and focused his energies on developing the National School (at Masulipatnam), where he taught his students basic military training, horse riding, history and knowledge of agriculture, soil, crops and its relation to nature. Not content with being a theoretician, Pingali's day-to-day activities also reflected a deep commitment to his liberal values. In 1914, he turned his agricultural land into an estate and named it Swetchapuram.