Poet of the feminine: The legacy of Subramania Bharati

In the poet’s death centenary year, remembering his advocacy of women. And remembering the women who preserved his rich legacy

When C. Subramania Bharati died 100 years ago on September 11, 1921, he left his literary legacy in the hands of women: his wife and two daughters. There is something deeply and even spiritually satisfying about this fact. Bharati was a champion of women’s rights. As a poet, mystic, and visionary, his advocacy of women reached unique heights. He wrote that women were the propagators of civilisation, not primarily in the sense of propagating human population, but as the preservers and propagators of culture. Accordingly, women must “write the laws” and lead society.

In his English-language essay entitled ‘The Place of Woman’, he writes: “Civilisation is the taming down of man by woman. Men, indeed, have till now been trying, with scant success, to civilise one another by means of the sword and the bullet, the prison cell, the gibbet, and the rack. But it has been the lot of woman to have no other weapon than fables, parables, and symbols in her work of civilising man. … Where woman comes, comes Art. And what is Art, if not the effort of humanity towards divinity?”

But the society of Bharati’s times was not so well-disposed towards women. The notions of women’s property, women’s leadership, and women’s rights were all woefully, fatally underdeveloped in early 20th-century India, which was languishing in the grip of the British colonial administration. The British made a show of improving women’s lot in India, yet they were doing so at a time when women in Britain had still not acquired full “personhood” under the law. The British wielded Western notions of women’s place in society like a blunt-edged weapon, striking down the evil of sati with the same blows that eventually levelled Kerala’s progressive, matrilineal traditions.