With Subramania Bharati's 127th birth anniversary
falling earlier this month, it is time to take another look at the poet's
paradoxical personality. On a warm day in June 1921, a man stood by the gopuram
of the
The elephant squealed and suddenly swung its trunk,
hurling the man to the ground. People ran up with cries of alarm but none dared
go near the beast for fear of being trampled till a corpulent Vaisnavite
Brahmin dashed up to the animal and scooped the fallen man to safety. The
unconscious victim's name was Subramania Bharati, and though he recovered
briefly, by September 1921 he was dead at the age of 39.
Much has been written about the literary legacy of
Subramania Bharati. He looms over 20th century Tamil like a titan; the man who
broke with centuries of Tolkappiam tradition to create a new voice—modern and
passionate—yet with a deep feeling for the past. Bharati's songs have become
perennial favourites, incorporated into that hallowed institution—the kutcheri.
Though his voice continues to reverberate through his
popular songs and poems, it is the man that eludes us, a subject both
enormously interesting and controversial to this day. Bharati scholars
generally agree that he was a man driven by an intense inner life that defies
conventional analysis of motive and intent. He once said, “He who writes poetry
is not a poet. He whose poetry has become his life, and who has made his life
his poetry, it is he who is a poet.” It was the same for everything that
Bharati did. He gave himself up completely to the causes and beliefs he held
true, without regard to the consequences—to others and to himself. In the end,
these consequences would combine to destroy him.
Bharati's life can be sketched briefly through four
main punctuations. Born in 1882 in Ettayapuram in Tirunelveli district of
today's Tamil Nadu, the boy named Subramanian lost his mother at the age of
two, was married when he was 11, and when his father too died shortly
thereafter, was sent to Benares to live with his aunt. Significantly, in this
early period in Ettayapuram, the young Subramanian displayed such facility in
Tamil that the local Raja conferred upon him the title by which he would become
forever known? ‘Bharati', or one blessed by the goddess Saraswati.
These and other experiences changed Bharati forever. He
became convinced that Hinduism, while remaining sublime in essence, had become
debased in practice. There, on the banks of the
The second punctuation covers the years 1902 to 1908,
when Bharati threw himself into journalism, first joining the Madras-based
political weekly Swadesamitran. At Swadesamitran,Bharati had a vantage view of
the undercurrents that were beginning to shake the nation, and his impetuous
and fiery nature was drawn to Tilak's call. When the Congress split between the
radicals and moderates at the Surat Congress of 1907, he threw in his lot with
Tilak's Revolutionary Party.
Those were heady days. In the company of friends, he
roamed
Vande mataram
enbomengal
manila thaiyai
vanangudu menbom
We say vande mataram, our
Respectful mother we salute.
“Through it all, there is utter peace in the gathering.
There is not a policeman in sight,” writes Nevinson. Another contemporary of
Bharati's, the lawyer Doraiswamy Aiyar, described the revolutionary Bharati of
this time. “He was full of energy and curiosity. He spoke what he thought,
directly and without dissimulation—” —clearly a trait that won him both
admirers and enemies. However, ominously, “Bharati's body was weak; his
constitution frail; there were times when we felt that the smallest push would
send him staggering.” Even at the age of twenty six, this was a man who lived
life on the edge.
1908 was a year of stepped-up repression by the British
in
Persuaded by friends, Bharati decided that his supreme
task was to continue the resistance through his writings and so slipped over
the border into French Pondicherry. A new and, in many ways, dark period in
Bharati's life was commencing.
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