C. Subramania Bharati

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Subramania Bharati, the great Tamil poet, can be rightfully regarded as the first nationalist poet of India. His poems, with almost visionary quality, pleaded for an integrated India, exhorting Indians to ignore regional and other rivalries and think in terms of 'India'. Mahakavi Bharatiyar is also regarded as a pioneer of modern Tamil poetry. Through his lyrics in Swadesa Gitangal (1908) and Janma Bhoomi (1909), he popularized the concept of nationalism. His songs and poems are popular even today. This book gives an insight into the life and times of this great son of India.

A fine scholar and literary critic, S. Vijaya Bharati is the grand-daughter of the poet. A graduate of the Madras and Annamalai Universities, she earned her doctorate in 1967 on A Critical Study of Bharati's Works. She has numerous articles and two books on Bharati to her credit.

Bharati has been raised to the status of a national poet; his writings have come to be honoured as national literature. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. When a poet gains recognition as the poet of the people it is often found that his poetry loses part of its appeal and on account of wide interpretations is apt to be misjudged. When literature becomes the property of the common man, it is not often that its noble qualities are preserved. This is most true in the case of Bharati who has partly suffered from the raging interest that swept across this country after its independence. He was at once upheld as the poet of freedom, as the poet of the renaissance in Tamil literature, as the poet of a new era, of a new generation and as a poet nonpareil. The common man to whom the pleasures of literature were now democratically available sang happily through the streets some of the best lyrics of Bharati, and he had little thought of preserving the literary value of this popular poet. This perhaps accounts for there being neither a scholarly edition nor a proper criticism of Bharati's works till this very day.

**Contents and Sample Pages**