The Coming Age Collected English Writings by C. Subramania Bharati

C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) has an unrivalled reputation in twentieth-century Tamil literature and has come to be known as the Tamil ‘Mahakavi’, meaning ‘Supreme Poet’. His work as a poet and prose-writer ignited a Renaissance in modern Tamil writing. However, he also wrote and published regularly in English.

The Coming Age brings together Bharati’s important English writings in an authoritative and reliable edition presented by his great-granddaughter. The pieces in this volume reveal a well informed and cosmopolitan writer, engaging with the world around him, passionately sharing his opinions.

Exploring Indian history and culture, offering a shattering contemporary view of the colonial experience, commenting on political events, advocating for women’s rights and caste equality, and sharing his deep knowledge of the Tamil language and literary tradition, these pieces present Bharati in a new light for a new generation.

C. Subramania Bharati

(1882-1921) was one of the builders of modern India. An early nationalist thinker from South India, Bharati's literary genius ignited a Renaissance in the literature of his native language, Tamil. He is known as the Mahakavi (supreme poet) of the Tamils. Bharati can lay the claim to being one of India's foremost egalitarian writers, arguing for the supremacy of women and the irrelevance of caste.

Mira T. Sundara Rajan

is a Visiting Professor at UC Davis Law School, California. She holds a doctorate in Intellectual Property Law from Oxford University and has published several works in the area of copyright and intellectual property law. She is the great-granddaughter of C. Subramania Bharati.

In 1908, C. Subramania Bharati, south India's foremost nationalist writer and the Mahakavi ('Supreme Poet') of the Tamils, went to live in exile in Pondicherry. By a strange irony, he gained, in abundance, a luxury that few writers have, and even fewer know how to use: time. He was to spend ten years in exile, in this relative backwater of French India, distanced from the heartland of the Freedom struggle in Madras province, and subject to various petty cruelties at the hands of the British operatives who crossed the border with the tacit consent of the French. Publication of Bharati's works had been proscribed in British India, where his main readership lay, and in Pondicherry, his professional activities as a journalist ground to a halt. Finally, in desperation, he returned to Madras, only to meet with death unexpectedly. He was not yet thirty-nine years old.

What he accomplished during that time in Pondicherry was almost miraculous. Struggling for subsistence, he nevertheless penned a number of pure literary masterpieces. The profound and philosophical Kannan Pattu ('Songs of Kannan') is a series of poems on Krishna as embodied in the various guises of lover, friend, parent, child, servant, and the other personalities of everyday life. The fantastic fable of the Kuyil Pattu (Song of the Koel') describes the magical adventures of the koel bird and her lovers in a luxuriant mango grove.' Panchali Sabadham ('Panchali's Vow') was his feminist retelling of a notorious incident from the Mahabharata, when the vicious leader of the Kaurava princes attempts to insult Panchali, wife of the Pandava heroes, by disrobing her in public. This last work is now considered a modern Tamil 'epic' in a tradition initiated more than 1500 years ago by Ilango Adigal in his Silappadikaram ("The Tale of the Anklet'), one of the classical 'five epics' of Tamil literature.

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