A. K. Chettiar

AK Chettiar, aka A Karuppan Chettiar, a journalist, was born on 3rd November 1911 in Kottaiyur of Sivagangai district. He completed his schooling in Tiruvannamalai. Chettiar was interested in touring and started his world tour in the early 1930s. He published a Tamil magazine, Dhanavanigan, in Burma when he was just 20. Chettiar was one of the people who helped launch the Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan.

Due to his interest in photography, he went to Japan in 1935 and joined the Imperial College of Technology, Tokyo. He did a one-year diploma course in photography at the New York Institute of Photography. Chettiar launched a production company, Documentary Films Limited, and collected Gandhi’s archival footage. After 3 years of hard work, he collected footage of 50,000 feet. He started working on the documentary Mahatma Gandhi: Twentieth Century Prophet and released the video of 12000 feet in 1940. The video received good reception from Indian Press and international media, including The New York Times. The documentary, which had a voice-over in Tamil, was also dubbed in Telugu. His documentary-making experience was published in Kumari Malar in 1943. Then, the articles related to this documentary were compiled as a book, Annal Adichuvattil. In 1947, the documentary was dubbed and released in Hindi after Indian independence.

Chettiar is one of the pioneers of modern Tamil travelogues. He collected 140+ essays related to travel belonging to 1825-1940. After editing them, he published it as a book in 1940. He wrote 17 travel books. Ulagam Suttrum Tamilan is his travel essay book. Since 1943, he published Kumari Malar, a magazine in Chennai. It was published until his death in 1983. He died on 10^th September 1983.

The documentary Mahatma Gandhi: Twentieth Century Prophet was believed to have been lost but was found in 2006 at the San Francisco State University. However, it was not the original version, but it was English-dubbed.