Pachaiyappa Mudaliar - Will

Will

Pachaiyappa Mudaliar was one of the first Indians to leave a will. He had set aside Rs. 4.5 lakh of what he had left to be spent on Hindu religious institutions and the remaining Rs. 7 lakh on providing an English education to Hindu youth. ("At the time of his death his fortune was estimated at five lakhs of pagodas or 1.7 million rupees" Reference: The Dubashes of Madras by Susan Neild-Basu (1984)). The bequests, however, remained contested even after that and it was 1909 before the courts appointed a Board of Trustees and formulated a scheme for the smooth running of the trust. As the 1990s dawned, it was reported that the Trust was worth over 4,500 crores, one of the biggest in that part of the world. Apart from administering religious charities from Kanyakumari to Varanasi, it ran six colleges, a polytechnic and 16 schools in Tamil Nadu, helped several medical facilities and owned several properties in the State.

The Pachaiyappa's College is one institution for which Pachaiyappa Mudaliar became well known. This college was established as Pachaiyappa's Central Institution at Popham's Broadway on 1 January 1842 from the amount Pachaiyappa Mudaliar had allocated to charities as per the contents of his will. In 1856, the institution shifted to its own premises at China Bazaar. It became a school in 1850 and a college in 1889. The Pachaiyappa's Central Institution is the first non-missionary, non-British-financed Hindu education institution in South India.