[1] Kanakarayan Tiruselvam Paul was born on 24 March 1876 in a Christian family in Salem, Madras Presidency, India.

The following year, he returned to his alma mater, Madras Christian College, as a tutor in the Department of History.

As general secretary, he visited churches, conducted personal interviews, and organized branch meetings all over India.

In North India, he initiated a civic body called 'Premsabha' (meaning 'Council of Love' in Hindi), which did social and religious work among poor Christians of the depressed classes.

[1] The massacre of innocent Indians by General Dyer at the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, in 1918 had fanned the fire of anti-British feelings all over India.

Mahatma Gandhi, launching his first attack on British rule using the weapon of Satyagraha, gave a call for the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920.

The leaders S. K. Datta and K. T. Paul published an article in the 'Young Men of India' in July 1920, protesting against the insensitive behavior of the British in Punjab.

However, his hopes of transforming the Indian polity in cooperation with the British rule strengthened by the diarchy turned into dismay in 1918.

But in the latter phases of the struggle, an increasing number of Christians began to identify with the national movement, and the maintenance of a secular state – especially from among the Reformed Churches: H.C. Mukherjee, Raja Sir Maharaj Singh, K.T.

Paul was committed to political nationalism, seeing in it also a self-awakening of India that would transform the totality of its traditional life.

In the tragedy of Chauri Chaura, a number of policemen were brutally beaten to death by a gang of people who claimed to be Gandhi's followers.

One way in which the Indian Christians responded to it was by developing indigenous leadership and freedom from foreign domination and dependence within the church.

The Society was never active in politics but because it was purely Indian in its personal and management, it continued to express sympathy for the national movement.

Paul was appointed the Joint National General Secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in India in 1913.

Paul began the process of indigenization of the organization at a time when practically all Christian institutions were headed by Europeans.

Paul was moved by the appalling conditions of poverty of the rural masses who constituted 90 per cent of India's population.

Therefore, it was at the urgent request of the missionaries that the YMCA began to render help in the field, seeking the cooperation of the church to make it economically possible for those Christians to become honest and self-respecting citizens.

As a keen student of the Indian situation he had taken note of the Co-operative Act passed by Lord Curzon in 1904, followed by another in 1912, meant to help farmers to overcome their serious financial problems.

Neither the Co-operative Credit banks of the Government nor its agricultural development departments had succeeded in solving the problem of poverty in rural India.

Paul took an intensive study tour of the poverty-stricken districts to supplement the existing knowledge of both the theory and practice of Indian agriculture.

Social disability which deprived the lower castes, of memberships of government Co-operative Credit societies, was a problem faced by Christians both in north and south India.

Paul argued that the disabilities of Christians are so great that if special attention was not given to them it would take a century for the advantages to reach them.

An important outcome of this Rural Work was the appeal it made to the young educated Indian Christians.

It provided scope for such Christian young men to identify themselves with the nationalistic aspirations of the people by working for their upliftment.