Vembaukum Sadagopacharlu (died 1863) was an Indian lawyer, jurist, banker, and statesman, who was the first native Indian member of the

Madras Legislative Council Tamil Nadu Legislative Council was the upper house of the former bicameral legislature of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It began its existence as Madras Legislative Council, the first provincial legislature for Madras Presidency. It was initia ...

, serving from 1861 to until his 1863 death, 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 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 ...

Early life

Sadagopacharlu hailed from the village of

Vembakkam Vembakkam is a town panchayat situated in the Cheyyar taluk, Tiruvannamalai district of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It is located about from the town of Kanchipuram. It contains a BDO office for many villages around it. Other places with t ...

near

Kanchipuram Kanchipuram (International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, IAST: '; ), also known as Kanjeevaram, is a stand alone city corporation, satellite nodal city of Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu in the Tondaimandalam region, from ...

. He matriculated from the

Presidency College, Madras Presidency College is an art, commerce, and science college in the city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu, India. On 16 October 1840, this school was established as the Madras Preparatory School before being repurposed as a high school, and then a gra ...

in 1858 and studied law. Soon, he enrolled himself as a lawyer, and along with his reportedly "even more brilliant" brother V. Rajagopalacharlu, emerged as one of the first and foremost Indians in the bar making up a fortune in a short time. At a time when the typical remuneration of a lawyer of the

Madras High Court The High Court of Judicature at Madras is a High Courts of India, High Court located in Chennai, India. It has appellate jurisdiction over the state of Tamil Nadu and the union territory of Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry. It is one of ...

was 10,000 rupees for participating in a case, his personal total compensation over the course of litigation over the adoption of an heir to the

Ramnad estate The Kingdom of Ramnad or Ramnad estate was a permanently settled kingdom and later ''zamindari'' estate that existed in the Ramnad subdivision of the Madurai district and later Ramnad district of the erstwhile Madras Presidency in British Ind ...

, on which both he and his brother worked, was 150,000 rupees. 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. His younger brother would also die prematurely, at 38, shortly after accidentally shooting and killing their sister's husband in 1878. 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 Brahmin (; ) is a ''Varna (Hinduism), varna'' (theoretical social classes) within Hindu society. The other three varnas are the ''Kshatriya'' (rulers and warriors), ''Vaishya'' (traders, merchants, and farmers), and ''Shudra'' (labourers). Th ...

, in relation to

Iyengars Iyengars (also spelt Ayyangar or Aiyengar, pronounced ) are an ethnoreligious community of Tamil-speaking Hindu Brahmins, whose members follow Sri Vaishnavism and the Visishtadvaita philosophy propounded by Ramanuja. Iyengars are divided i ...

as one of the

orthodox Orthodox, Orthodoxy, or Orthodoxism may refer to: Religion * Orthodoxy, adherence to accepted norms, more specifically adherence to creeds, especially within Christianity and Judaism, but also less commonly in non-Abrahamic religions like Neo-pag ...

Brahminical The historical Vedic religion, also called Vedism or Brahmanism, and sometimes ancient Hinduism or Vedic Hinduism, constituted the religious ideas and practices prevalent amongst some of the Indo-Aryan peoples of the northwest Indian subcontin ...

sects and

Madras Chennai, also known as Madras ( its official name until 1996), is the capital and largest city of Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of India. It is located on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal. According to the 2011 Indian ce ...

as one district of the Presidency's eight.

Politics

Sadagopacharlu was nominated to the

in 1861 and served until his death in 1863.

Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty CSI ( Telugu: గాజుల లక్ష్మీనరసు శెట్టి; 1806–1868) was an Indian merchant and political activist who founded the Madras Native Association, one of the earliest Indian pol ...

was appointed to fill the seat left by his death.

References

* * 1863 deaths 19th-century Indian lawyers Year of birth missing Members of the Madras Legislative Council Politicians from Kanchipuram district {{TamilNadu-politician-stub