Musings on the Life & Times of Chinnaswamy Subramania Bharathi Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan 27

Musings on the Life & Times of Chinnaswamy Subramania Bharathi
Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
27

Chellamma was waiting with utmost patience. Typifying her status as Bharathi’s wife.The prominence that Bharathi’s columns in ‘India’ got did not go unnoticed. The Britishers were angling to lay their hands on Bharathi, as he was ‘no longer an irritant on the literary terrain. His fiery write-ups were reaching far and wide and arousing the passions and inspiring many to join the freedom movement. So, if Bharathi was silenced, there would be a set back to the movement itself, concluded the police and civil administration’.

Bharathi had seen his bosom friends VO Chidamabaranar and Subramania Siva in prison. He found their freedom shackled. Bharathi recalled the opening sentence of Jean Jacques Rousseau in The Social Contract that ‘ Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” But Bharathi wanted to be free and not chained or shackles and surely not of the physical variant while lodged in the dungeon of a hod forsaken prison.

It was not beyond the Britishers to set the prisoners up for hard labour. Chellamma mused- Bharathi was a brave man. He was thin and emaciated. But could stand up when it mattered. He was not afraid of being incarcerated. He felt that what his brothers in arms were undergoing in the service of mother land, he was should nog be flinching from himself.

But, Bharathi was constantly advised that jail term would put a stop to his contribution to enthuse the public. And Gandhi’s Sathyagraha was yet to gain traction. Even the bravest of freedom fighters were ‘working underground’. As working was essential and it made no sense to be foolhardy and in bravado get arrested. While getting arrested was no shame , Bharathi’s work outside was worth its weight in gold . The contribution from every freedom fighter cannot be the same. So Bharathi was advised to flee Madras to Pondicherry, under French control,beyond the reach of British security forces.

Friends made frantic attempts to reach out to a willing benefactor to host Bharathi in Pondicherry. Enquiries led to Chitty Kuppuswamy Ayyangar, a mid level business operative with no connections in Madras. He was a close relative of the go between Sri Kuvalai Kriahnamachariar. Bharathi quietly left in the middle of night to Saidapet enroute by train to Puduvai. A friend accompanied him. They stayed in the railway station in Pondicherry and reached the host’s residence. The friend left and informed K R Appadurai, elder brother of Chellamma. The same Appadurai we were told had ‘duped’ Chellamma and daughters of valuable compensation over the copyright to Bharathi’s works. Chellamma had a different take on his credentials .

Chellamma said that her elder brother Appadurai had a lot of love and affection for Bharathi. He always advised him when it mattered, to take the right call aligned with family interest. When Bharathi was confused and bewildered at what may come of his ‘lover Chellamma and his two adorable daughters if he were to be immersed more and more in the cause of the nation’ , it was Appadurai, who gave Bharathi the comfort and confidence and he backed him. And that his family would be taken good care of by Appadurai as Bharathi was not born to feed and care for one Chellamma or two of his daughters but serve Bharat Mata and her 30 crore children. How perceptions differ? Was Appadurai a good soul or a villain. Virtue is in the eye of the beholder!

The friend after dropping Bharathi ‘in the custody of Kuppuswamy Ayyabgar’ went over to Cuddalore where Appadurai was residing. Appadurai immediately went to Pondicherry and helped Bharathi settle by buying him his immediate needs and clothes, said Chellamma. Yet, Bharathi was never flush with funds or things. He always had a deficit budget at home and deficit financing or quantitative easing, as the Americans would say was from ‘compulsory borrowing’.

Chellamma was not shy to point out that Bharathi did not even have good quality papers and pen to write. His lifeline tools. He used to sell old newspapers collected from his friends and buy ‘reams of paper’ to write.He did not have money to pay rent when the family was in Pondicherry, for several months. That is where Bharathi is said to have famously called upon Parasakthi to pay the rent to the angry and amused landlord.

He could not pay the dues to the milk man,grocery shop and servant maid in time . Always ran in arrears. Many were not beyond shouting at him and his wife. Chellamma and daughters felt humiliated in public, and Bharathi was muted when it mattered. But there were a few who accepted his poverty stricken state and put up with his belated payments . Many times, milk man refused to deliver milk and the family got used to running without it. Despite such ‘stifling conditions, Chellamma adroitly managed to treat every guest with respect and enough food. How she did it, even she is unable to comprehend and explain. They had no ‘Kamadhenu’ at home but only in their hearts and minds.

In the early days in Pondicherry, he lived as an exile with the benefactor’s family. His family joined him, much later, as Chellamma moved to Kadayam in Tirunelveli, and even after joining him, they left him alone multiple times, to fend for himself . There were very few friends to keep him company.But poverty kept him continued and everlasting company. He could not leave the town. So he lived as a ‘house arrest prisoner’ But his mind was free and that contributed to his poetic instincts for his prodigious output in Pondy as the Kuyil, Kannamma nee Chellamma Pattus and Panchali Sabatham, all iconic works.Bharathi was himself to make full use of the 10-11 years he spent there, for his spiritual evolution and creative work. Pondichery Presence of Bharathi was a huge turning point in the literary and cultural heritage of India to trigger Bharathi’s classics.

Chellamma illustrated the family’s poverty stricken state rather unashamedly. She felt It was known. Everyone saw, knew and talked about it. What was there to hide? The family’s existence was an open book that Bharathi scripted not with Parasakthi’s munificent benediction but with Daridranarayan’s magnificence.

Once, after a bath, he called out to Chellamma for his dothi. Chellammal said that there was only one dothi which was also wet and drying . He stood like a statue, all drenched in bathwater and sweat . There entered a family friend’s son, to share their misery. But Bharathi was in the least bit flustered. He requested that boy to go and get ( borrow) a dothi from his father, to rescue his modesty. That was Him. And that was us, rued Chellamma.

Amidst all this, when a friend gave him a new dothi for Deepawali, Bharathiyar generously sent it away to a beggar, he remembered, in Thiruvallikeni , in Madras Presidency, ‘who was not having even a piece of cloth to cover his private parts’ worried Bharathi. Brass vessels, few jewels and silver pooja items were always in use, not for cooking or Pooja at home, but for repetitive pledging for a handy loan, all the time.And despite this abominable state of affairs, this man was turning out masterpieces which have stood the test of time. How could he accomplish it? Did not this qualify him to be a Mahakavi?

We had the Tagore-Bharathi construct earlier. Bharathi called himself ‘Shelleydasan’.And he was literally the first among the modern poets to bring the esoteric and tongue twisting Tamil to the household of a commoner tamilian. No one needed a Tholkappiyam or be tuned and trained in tough grammar rules to follow the verse. It was said by Justice R F Nariman, who assisted Nani Palkhivala in the Minerva Milks case, just out of college as a raw junior of the legend, “ The beauty and greatness of Nani was in his ability to be communicative. It was of no use that you were a master in the language. And you had the diction and flair. Unless you reached the ear of the listener and got him to listen and understand at his level, you can claim no fantasy titles to being a class advocate. Nani had that rare skill. He was brilliant in the English language. But he never used it to bombastically proclaim his proclivity. He knew his job was out to convince the law lords. Unless they understood what he argued, it made no sense. Nani had four or five words for every word he used. And then employed the simplest of them, ones in common use. Never for him the highflown oration displaying his wares to impress. The purpose was to communicate and convince the judges. The task of accomplishment mattered. So, Nani always employed simple words. The simplest of synonyms, they were, he always made sure.”.

No wonder Nani waxed eloquent in court and in simple understandable prose. And Justice H R Khanna said that during Kesavanand Bharathi case hearings, Nani reached dizzying heights, unsurpassed till then and possibly never ever. Bharathi was in that league. His written word spoke. Bharathi employed the simplest of words. That even a child could pick up and absorb. Literary critics and writers now readily concede that after the elevated language of Kamban only Thayumanavar and Elango Adigal came to commoner’s eyes, ears and understanding. And the unlettered and illiterate, when they heard the verses of Bharathi, could easily keep pace.

It is now acknowledged by the experts that it was Chinnaswamy Subramania Bharathi, thanks to school buddy Somasundara Bharathi who chose to go poetical in the simplest of Tamil. By choice. Thanks to his versatility. It was after another century and beyond that a poet was indulging ‘ in such poetry for the masses’. That was the part that Bharathi cultivated and became a past master with no parallel. The ordinary line was that a poet had to be an intellectual, appealing to the higher senses in obtuse language with hidden messages, and go well over the heads of the commoners.

Here, was a Bharathi defying all those odds and yet sticking to the metres, scales with grammar and yet scaling unscalable heights that no one had dreamed was possible.

He was a honest man’s poet. A commoner’s poet. Yet, a poet’s poet with his subtleties and nuances. Did it detract from the ‘wizardry of a poet’? Not really. Yet, there were those who thought Bharathi was no equal to the ‘greats to qualify as a Mahakavi’. Who were those people? Let us get there, along the away, for a sizzle, as an interlude, as it were.

( Author is practising advocate in the Madras High Court)