Modern South India: A History from the 17th Century to our Times by Rajmohan Gandhi

Author:Rajmohan Gandhi [Gandhi, Rajmohan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Published: 2018-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

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He was born Chinnaswami Subramania (1882–1921) in a Brahmin family in a Tinnevelly town we have encountered before, Ettaiyapuram, but teachers who admired the eleven-year-old’s facility for lyrics named him Bharati, a synonym for Saraswati, the goddess of learning.5

Interested also in languages, the boy was soon fluent, apart from Tamil, in Sanskrit, English and Hindi, perhaps helped with the last by an early journey to Varanasi.

In 1904, he joined the Swadesamitran in Madras, working for eighteen months as a sub-editor and translator under G. Subramania Iyer, the forceful editor. Influenced or encouraged by Iyer, Bharati attended three Congress sessions, in Varanasi in 1905, Calcutta in 1906, and Surat in 1907. In Calcutta, Vivekananda’s Irish disciple, Sister Nivedita as she was called, inspired Bharati, and he acquired a smattering of Bengali.

Alongwith Bharati in Surat was VOC, who was older to him by ten years. Sharing similar interests and views, the two had become close friends. When the Congress split in Surat, Bharati had no hesitation in siding with the extremists led by Tilak, Aurobindo and VOC.

In journals, in Madras, now edited by Bharati—interestingly, the Tamil one was called India and the English journal Bala Bharatam (Young Bharat)—he defended the extremists and mocked the moderates, including in cartoons. The latter were a new feature in South Indian journalism, with Bharati usually conceiving a cartoon and hiring an artist to sketch it.6

Like VOC, Bharati responded with intensity in 1907 to Bipin Chandra Pal’s speeches in Madras, and he seems to have made popular orations of his own on the beach. The Tinnevelly artist, a master of romantic and mystical poetry, who ‘transmuted vague feelings of Tamil patriotism into lyric expression’,7 was now on fire as an activist.

However, preferring exile in Pondicherry to arrest in Madras, he moved in 1908 to the French territory, where he read, composed anew, or translated texts such as the Gita, Bankim’s ‘Vande Mataram’ song, and pieces by Tagore, into Tamil verse or prose. He remained in Pondicherry during World War I, interacting on occasion with other eminent exiles, including Aurobindo.

The Pondicherry years were financially hard, and callers found Bharati agitated.8 A correspondent of The Hindu who met Bharati in the French territory was struck by the poet’s ‘manner of speaking’. Apparently Bharati would suddenly stand up in the middle of a conversation, or suddenly sit down, and ‘thump’ with passion.9

In November 1918, when the war ended, he ventured out of the French territory. Detained in nearby Cuddalore, he was released after three weeks—the result, apparently, of an intervention by an Irishwoman who had made India her home—Annie Besant.10

In Madras in the following year, when Gandhi visited the south, his host, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, introduced Bharati to him as ‘our national bard’. Patriotic verses, devotional, philosophical and autobiographical ones, verses narrating great stories—Bharati had written them all.

But Madras, where he lived in a house in Triplicane, seemed to neglect him. Bharati was only thirty-nine when he died there in September 1921, the eventual result, it was said, of an injury received from a temple elephant he had regularly fed.

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