Subramaniya Bharathiyar

Subramaniya Bharathiyar was born on 11 December 1882 at Ettayapuram in the far south of Tamil Nadu, the son of Chinnasami Iyer and Lakshmi Ammal. At home he was called Subbaiah. When he was only eleven, the court poets of Ettayapuram were so moved by his verse that they gave him the title "Bharathi", a name of Saraswathi, the Goddess of learning. From then on he was Bharathi.

As a young man he lived in Kashi, where he learned Sanskrit and Hindi, and the Vedic chant and temple worship of the Ganga ghats went deep into him. He later taught Tamil in Madurai and worked as an editor of the journals Swadesamitran and India in Chennai. In 1906 he met Sister Nivedita, the disciple of Swami Vivekananda, and took her as his guru. To escape arrest by the British he lived for ten years in Puducherry. There he studied the Vedas with Sri Aurobindo, wrote his three great poems, Kannan Pattu, Kuyil Pattu and Panchali Sabatham, and translated the Bhagavad Gita into Tamil. He passed away at Triplicane in Chennai on 11 September 1921, at the age of thirty-eight.

His devotion was not the devotion of fear but of love. He sang of Parashakti as Mother, of Kali as protector, and of Krishna as friend, as mother and as servant. He saw the land itself as a form of Durga and bowed to it with "Vande Mataram". He praised Tamil in the line "When I hear the words Senthamizh Nadu, the honey of joy flows into my ears". That is why Tamils call him Mahakavi, the great poet.