Subramania Bharati
Subramania Bharati was a Tamil poet, journalist and independence activist who modernised Tamil literature and wrote some of the most widely sung nationalist verse in India. Born in Ettayapuram in 1882, he was given the title Bharati — one blessed by Saraswati, goddess of learning — at eleven after a display of poetic skill before the local court. He was orphaned young and married at fourteen. He worked as a Tamil teacher and then as a journalist, joining the newspaper Swadesamitran in 1904 and editing the weekly India from 1906, one of the first Tamil papers to carry political cartoons. He attended the Congress sessions at Benares in 1905 and Surat in 1907, where he sided with the radical faction around Bal Gangadhar Tilak against the moderates. His verse broke with the ornate classical register that had dominated Tamil poetry, using a direct spoken idiom that made it singable and memorable. He wrote about freedom from British rule, but also against caste and untouchability and, insistently, for the education and independence of women — the figure of the new woman in his poetry was radical for its time and place, and he refused to observe caste practice in his own household. Facing arrest, he fled to Pondicherry, then French territory, in 1908 and stayed for a decade, writing much of his best work there in poverty. He returned in 1918, was immediately imprisoned, and never recovered his health or income. He was struck by a temple elephant he habitually fed and died a few weeks later in 1921, aged thirty-eight, with few present at his funeral.
- Lived: 1882 CE – 1921 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: poet
