Subramania Bharati Was Given the Title Bharati at 11, Edited the Weekly India With a Cartoon on Every Front Page, and Published the First Part of Panchali Sapatham in 1912 From Exile in Pondicherry

Subramania Bharati was born at Ettayapuram, in what is now Thoothukudi district, on 11 December 1882 and died in Madras (now Chennai) on 11 September 1921, in his thirty-ninth year. Across those years he became the poet Tamil readers call Mahakavi, the Great Poet, worked on the daily Swadesamitran, edited the weekly India and wrote the long poems that the scholar P. Marudanayagam, quoted below, calls the start of modern poetry in Tamil.

This article follows the Tamil Nadu government’s Tamil Virtual Academy, the Press Information Bureau (PIB) and scholars who have worked on his papers. Where they disagree on a date or a number, it says so.

A title at eleven, then four years in Benares

He was born Subramanian and called Subbiah at home, the Tamil Virtual Academy says. His father, Chinnaswami Iyer, wanted him to get a formal education, but the boy preferred composing verse and could produce poems on the spot when elders asked for them. At 11 he was given the title Bharati, which the academy translates as “Goddess of Learning”. The publisher’s note to Usha Rajagopalan’s English translation of his Panchali Sapatham says it was conferred at an assembly of scholars and poets in Ettayapuram and means one blessed by Saraswati. Eleven puts the event in 1893 or 1894, but none of the pages used here gives the year.

Chellamma became his wife when he was 14, the academy says, and his father lost his wealth and then his life. An aunt took the young Bharati to Benares (Varanasi), where he stayed four years, learned Hindi and Sanskrit and began to wear the coat, turban and moustache people later associated with him, according to the academy. The Prime Minister said in December 2024 that Bharati wrote many of his works on the banks of the Ganga during his time in Kashi.

At the request of the Chieftain of Ettayapuram he returned to work at the royal court, and left it. A three-month teaching post followed in 1904 at the Sethupathi school in Madurai, which still keeps his name on its rolls, the school’s head master told DT Next in 2021.

Swadesamitran and the weekly India

Madras was where the teacher became a journalist. According to the academy, he joined the editorial team of the Tamil daily Swadesamitran and threw himself into the freedom struggle, organising public meetings. The Prime Minister’s 2024 address says he joined the paper in 1904. The historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy adds that Bharati was editing journals by about the age of 25, first a monthly for women and then, by 1906, the weekly India.

P. Raja, a former professor of English at Pondicherry, writes that Bharati attended a Congress session at Benares and on the way home met Sister Nivedita in Calcutta, who strengthened his patriotism. India was launched in 1906 by the brothers Tirumalachariar and Srinivasachariar Mandayam to give his writing a free outlet. According to Venkatachalapathy, the paper backed the line of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leader of the Congress faction that wanted harder pressure on the British, and that Bharati put a cartoon on the front page soon after he became editor. No south Indian journal was doing that, he says. Bharati did not draw them himself. The ideas were his.

Readers cut out the cover cartoon and pasted it on cardboard to display outside their houses, Raja reports. In the same address the Prime Minister called India the first Tamil Nadu paper to print political cartoons.

By 1908 the net was closing. A British Press Act was aimed at the sharp tone of India, the academy says, and Bharati was under threat of arrest. Accounts differ on who was arrested that year: Raja says the publisher, Venkatachalapathy the editor. Either way, Bharati crossed into Pondicherry, then a French possession.

The songs: “Fear I have not”

Two of his freedom songs are documented on the pages used here. At the International Bharati Festival of 2020, organised by the Vanavil Cultural Centre in Chennai, the Prime Minister quoted the song “Achamillai, Achamillai” in Tamil and gave this English rendering: “Fear I have not, fear I have not.” The pages used here do not date the song.

Bharati also wrote a Tamil “Vande Mataram”, an adaptation on the theme of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s hymn rather than a line-by-line translation. Its verses, in the Tamil text reproduced by the blog Tamil and Vedas from a Tamil University, Thanjavur, edition, say caste and birth do not matter to those who share the land, ask whether the communities then treated as outcastes do not live alongside everyone else, and say that the thirty crore (300 million) people of the country will live or fall together. A note with the text says Bharati replaced the sixth stanza in his 1907 pamphlet Swadesa Gitankal and later restored the original.

His plain style broke with a very old tradition. Tamil poetry had kept, the publisher’s note says, to strict conventions of style, image and language for more than 2,000 years, a tradition that runs back to the Sangam anthologies. His preface to the first part of Panchali Sapatham asks, in the translator’s English, for “simple phrases, a simple style, easily understood prosody”.

Ten years in French territory

Raja writes that the French authorities in Pondicherry refused a British request to ban India, and that the Mandayam brothers moved the paper there. Within about a year and a half, Venkatachalapathy says, it was proscribed. Then came the shooting of the Tirunelveli Collector, Robert Ashe, by a nationalist on 17 June 1911. Police found Bharati’s journals and books on the conspirators, Venkatachalapathy says, and sympathisers destroyed their copies. Of the paper’s three and a half years, only two years of issues survive.

Bharati was among those who met Sri Aurobindo on his arrival on 4 April 1910, Raja records. Evenings at Aurobindo’s house followed, and Raja quotes Nolini Kanta Gupta, Aurobindo’s disciple, saying Bharati and Gupta himself were the two most keenly interested in the Veda sessions. The scholar P. Marudanayagam, quoted by Raja, puts the peak of Bharati’s creative work in the exile of 1908 to 1918. Money was short. A 1912 letter from Aurobindo, quoted by Raja, puts the cash in hand at about one and a half rupees. For the town itself, see Auroville and Pondicherry.

The long poems come from these years. Panchali Sapatham, Kuyil Pattu and Kannan Pattu head the academy’s list of what he wrote in Pondicherry, which also includes commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The first part of Panchali Sapatham was published in 1912, the Hachette India note says. The poem retells the dice game of the Mahabharata, in which Yudhishthira stakes and loses his kingdom, his brothers and finally Draupadi, who then takes a pledge. The note calls it a political allegory of the freedom movement. The same note describes Kannan Pattu as a set of 23 lyrics on Krishna in many roles and Kuyil Pattu as a narrative poem of about 750 lines. J.B.P. More writes in Madras Musings that Kuyil Pattu came out in 1912 or in 1914 to 1915, depending on who is asked.

Other poems from the exile include “Karumbu Thottathile”, on Tamil workers on overseas sugarcane plantations, and “Puthiya Russia”, welcoming the 1917 revolution, More lists. Five essays of Rabindranath Tagore went into Tamil in 1918, More says, and Bharati sang La Marseillaise, which he also put into Tamil, on the Pondicherry beach road. The Prime Minister has said Bharati translated the Gita into Tamil with a simple commentary.

What he wrote about women and caste

The Prime Minister said in 2020 that women held a central place in Bharati’s idea of progress, and that he wrote that women should walk with their heads high and look people in the eye. The academy says he was active in social reform in Pondicherry and gave the sacred thread, a mark of the twice-born castes, to people of the scheduled castes, naming a man called Kanakalingam. No date is given. Reformist messages ran even through his devotional songs, More says, because Bharati knew his audience was devout.

The Cuddalore arrest and the last year

The academy says he grew tired of exile, tried to leave Pondicherry in 1918 and was arrested in the process. Release came after 22 days, on conditions, and he had to live at Kadayam. DT Next’s account says three weeks in the Cuddalore jail and names Annie Besant among those who pleaded for him. Life at Kadayam was hard, according to the academy, because local people resisted his reformist views and the support he expected from Ettayapuram did not arrive.

A general amnesty lifted limits on his movements, DT Next says, and in 1920 he returned to Madras as sub-editor of Swadesamitran, the academy says. He lived in Triplicane, near the Parthasarathy temple.

How he died is told in two versions. The academy says that while feeding the temple elephant at Triplicane, as he used to, he was lifted and thrown down. The DT Next account, by a historian who cites no separate source, places this in July 1921, with the elephant in musth and chained. A bystander carried him out, it says, and doctors judged him out of danger. A stomach complaint followed around August, and he refused medicine. Both versions give 11 September 1921 as the day of his death. Death came shortly after midnight, DT Next says, though it notes that some give 12 September.

Only two obituaries have been found, Venkatachalapathy says. About a dozen people attended the funeral, DT Next says. Recognition as Mahakavi came only several years after his death, More writes.

The memorials and the honours

The house at Ettayapuram was taken into the State government’s possession on 5 May 1973, its former caretaker told DT Next, and has been under the Department of Information and Public Relations since after 1992. The government’s Urban Tree portal lists the poet’s birth house and the Manimandapam, a memorial hall with a library inside, among the sights of Ettayapuram. At Triplicane, the house where he lived, Bharathiyar Illam, displays his manuscripts and photographs, DT Next reported in 2018.

The Prime Minister took part in three events for him between 2020 and 2024. On 11 December 2020 he presented the Bharati Award at the Vanavil festival to Seeni Viswanathan, then 86, and noted that Bharati’s collected works had been published in 16 volumes. Then, on 11 September 2021, the hundredth anniversary of the death, he announced a Subramania Bharati Chair of Tamil Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Banaras Hindu University, as PIB recorded.

The same month Tamil Nadu declared 11 September Mahakavi Day. DT Next reported in September 2022 that a state minister said the 14 orders issued for the centenary had all been carried out and that it was marked for 52 weeks. The paper also reported that the state had allotted Rs 18 lakh (Rs 1.8 million) to renovate the room where Bharati lived in Varanasi.

On 11 December 2024, Bharati’s birth anniversary, the Prime Minister released the compendium of his complete works compiled by Seeni Viswanathan. PIB’s English rendering of the address refers to 21 volumes in one passage and 23 volumes in another.