[2] Born in Thiruvananthapuram, to Tamil parents, he left for Europe as a youth, where he spent the rest of his active life as an Indian nationalist and revolutionary.

[1] Chempakaraman Pillai is credited with the coining of the salutation and slogan "Jai Hind"[1][5] in the pre-independence days of India.

[4] Pillai was born into a Tamil Vellalar family in Thiruvananthapuram, capital of the erstwhile Kingdom of Travancore in the modern state of Kerala.

His parents, Chinnaswami Pillai and Nagammal, hailed from Nanjinad (in present-day Kanyakumari district, Tamil Nadu).

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.

This latter group was composed of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Bhupendranath Dutta, A. Raman Pillai, Taraknath Das, Maulavi Barkatullah, Chandrakant Chakravarty, M. Prabhakar, Birendra Sarkar, and Heramba Lal Gupta.

His family stated that Pillai coordinated the German attack with his personal presence in the SMS Emden, though this is not the official view.

[6] In 1907, Pillai coined the term "Jai Hind",[8][9][10] which was adopted as a slogan of the Indian National Army in the 1940s at the suggestion of Abid Hasan.