The brothers practiced before the appellate Sudder Court and its cassation court, the Supreme Court, operated in civil matters by the British East India Company under the aegis and authority of the Mughal emperors, and administering customary law in both Hindu and Muslim varieties, as selected and interpreted by learned Brahmin Pandits and Ulema known as Maulvis respectively, and decided by British judicial officers they instructed accordingly, referring in the former case to Dharmaśāstric canons pursuant to the commentary and supercommentary of Jīmūtavāhana's Dāyabhāga Nyāyika school of law, observed in Bengal, and Vijñāneśvara's Mitākṣarā Mīmāṃsāka school of law, which prevailed everywhere else.
[1] Both brothers, members of the Vembaukum family,[2] which had first risen to prominence in the early nineteenth century with the dubash, grain merchant, and shipowner V. Krishna Aiyar, were associated with zamindari litigation, including that of the 2,351-square-mile Estate of Ramnad, a former kingdom with more than half a million tenants and almost 800,000 rupees in revenues.
One of the most storied of the Vembaukum family mansions in Mylapore, within the city of Madras, was Vasantha Vilas ("Abode of Spring"), which he built to supply agricultural laborers with work during a time of extreme drought, the Great Famine of 1876–1878, under a relief scheme enacted by the Presidency.
[1] His widow and sons relocated to the mansion after Rajagopacharlu's death in 1878 at the age of thirty-eight, reportedly from despair, three months after accidentally shooting and killing his brother-in-law as the two of them hunted near Vembakkam lake.
[5] Certain of his creditors mistakenly pursued the Brahmo Samaj for his debts, believing it to be the recipient of personal funds invested by him, which caused some trouble for the organization.