Tamil Nadu

Subramania Bharati (Tamil: சுப்ரமணிய பாரதி) (December 11, 1882 - September 11, 1921) was a Tamil poet from Tamil Nadu, India, independence fighter and reformer. Known as Mahakavi Bharati (the laudatory epithet Maha Kavi meaning Great Poet in Tamil), he is celebrated as one of India's greatest poets. Bharati was prolific and adept in both the prose and poetry forms, and his rousing compositions helped rally the masses to support the Indian independence movement in South India. Bharati lived during an eventful period of Indian history; his contemporaries included other prominent leaders of the Indian independence movement such as Mahatma Gandhi, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo and V.V.S.Aiyar.

Early life

Bharati was born to Chinnasami Subramania Iyer and Lakshmi Ammaal on December 11, 1882 in the Tamil village of Ettayapuram. Bharati was educated at a local high school called "The M.D.T.Hindu College". He learnt music from very young age and at 11 was invited to a conference of Ettayapuram court poets and musicians for composing poems and songs. It was here that he was conferred the title of "Bharathi" (Goddess of learning). Bharati lost his mother at the age of 5 and his father at the age of 16. He married his cousin Chellamal in 1897, at the age of fourteen. After an early marriage, Bharati, curious to see the outside world, left for Benares in 1898. The next four years of his life served as a passage of discovery, when Bharathi discovered a country in tumult outside his small hamlet. Bharati worked as a school teacher in Madurai Sethupathy High School (Now a Higher Secondary School) and as a journal editor at various times in his life.

Literary career

Bharati had an exceptional love and devotion towards his mother tongue Tamil language, which he considered as the sweetest of all the languages known to him. He has written in one of his poems, 'Of all the languages I know, I have not heard a sweeter language than Tamil' (யாமறிந்த மொழிகளிலே தமிழ்மொழி போல் இனிதாவது எங்கும் காணோம்). He was fluent in many languages including Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit, Kutchi, French and English and frequently translated works from other languages into Tamil. He had a voracious appetite for learning ancient and contemporary Tamil literature and derived astonishing insights from the ancient poems. He emphasized that musicians should not sing songs which they don't understand and should learn from Hindustani musicians how to train their voices. He was not a simple propagandist poet, however noble his patriotic and humanist sentiments were. He was also a seeker of beauty and philosophic wisdom. As a national poet, as a poet with a universal vision and as a poet of beauty and truth, he is comparable to some of the great poets of the world. Hence his claim to a lofty place in the great galaxy of world poetry.

A number of his creations are about nature. Both Bharati and Shelley were soaring spirits and loved the sparrow and the skylark respectively as symbols of freedom. But Bharathi is not content with the mindless joy of the sparrow; he wants to fly in the sky like a bird so that he can see the endless hills, springs, rivers and the sea. But the human body does not give him full freedom and he also recognizes that the very growth of human civilization is a hindrance to experiencing the bliss of the bird. But he never wants to surrender his humanity. He is alive to the fact that in the world of the bird, there is no intellectual joy of man. Whereas Shelley is unwilling to return to the earth because of its sadness (our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught), Bharathi’s sparrow asks man to give up not life but desire. Bharathi’s poetry is not an escape from but into life.

Journalism

As a journalist, Bharati was the first in India to introduce caricatures and political cartoons to his newspapers; they were satirical and angry hand-drawn illustrations of the poet that improvised heavily on the works of his inspiration Thomas Nast. He published and edited various journals such as Swadeshamitran, India, Vijaya, and Bala Bharatham.

Innovation in Tamil poetry

Bharati was a pioneer in introducing a new style of Tamil poetry. Until then the poems had to follow the strict syntactic rules set down by the ancient Tamil grammatical treatise Tolkappiyam. Bharati broke this syntactic bonds and created a prose-poetic style known as the puthukkavithai (modern poems).

Literary output

Bharati's was a prolific writer and in his short life he produced numerous poems short and long, essays, prose-poetry and fiction. He wrote poems in both the conventional as well as his new style of puthukkavithai. His works may be broadly classified into these heading

• Autobiography (சுய சரிதை)
• Patriotic songs (தேசிய கீதங்கள்)
• Philosophical songs (ஞானப்பாடல்கள்)
• Miscellaneous songs (பல்வகைப் பாடல்கள்)
• Devotional songs (தோத்திரப் பாடல்கள்)
• Commentary on Gita (பகவத் கீதை முன்னுரை)
• Kannan song, Kuyil song (கண்ணன் பாட்டு, குயில் பாட்டு)
• Panchali's Vow (பாஞ்சாலி சபதம்)
• Chandrika's story (சந்திரிகையின் கதை) (an unfinished novel)
• Pappa Pattu (பாப்பாப் பாட்டு) (Songs for the Children)
• Leaders

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