When Bharati passed away on September 11, 1921, The Hindu carried a tribute to Bharati from S. Satyamurthi: “Had he been born in England he would have been the poet laureate and been adored by his race. Had he born in any other free country, he would have risen to such heights of eminence that he would have lived longer and enriched his language and race more than he was able to do here. Had he born even in Bengal, he would have been a Rabindranath Tagore. Those who know his poems will know I am indulging in no exaggeration. But born in India and in Tamil India Subramania Bharati had to spend the best part of an all too short life an exile from those who were near and dear to him. No wonder that he pined and suffered and has gone to a premature grave. So long however as the Tamil language lives and there is a spark of patriotism in Tamil India, Subramania Bharati's songs will live.”
There were very few at the funeral, and V. Chakkarai Chettiar, Krishnswamy Sharma and Ramachandra Aiyar spoke in Tamil while Surendranath Arya paid tributes in Telugu. The pyre was lit by Harihara Sharma, a relative and while the mortal remains were consumed, the fire he lit in the minds of the people continued to glow.
However, due recognition to Bharati came much later, but even then with such debates that made one feel that Tamil India had not remembered Bharati well enough!
One such debate took place in 1935, and the dramatis personae were, Va. Raa, Kalki R. Krishnamurthy, Chitti Sundararajan and Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan.
Keen reformer
Va. Ramaswami Aiyangar (Va. Raa) was a close associate and a great admirer of Bharati. Va. Raa. wrote in simple readable Tamil and his novel Sundari was a path breaker in which he brought out the ordeals of a Hindu widow, showing him to be an idealist and a social reformer. After editing Swatantram , a weekly from Thanjavur, he joined Dr. P. Varadarajulu Naidu to run the Tamil journal Thamizh Nadu . Va. Raa was the first biographer of Bharati.
But the best period of his life was editing Manikkodi , the renascent Tamil journal that was started by Stalin K. Srinivasan. T.S. Chokalingam was the publisher and the leading Tamil writers of the time took pride in writing for it. After he left Manikkodi , he joined the Veera Kesari , a daily from Colombo, in October 1934, as desired by V.O.Chidambaram Pillai.
In “Three days with Va. Raa.” an article that appeared in Manikkodi , (August, 1934) N. Ramarathnam, another Manikkodi writer, mentions what Va. Raa. seem to have stated during one of his campaign speeches: “I have read the great poets of English, Shelly and Shakespeare and India's Nobel Laureate Tagore, but I can say that all the writings of them put together will not equal a line of what Bharati had written”. Quoting Va. Raa's views, P. Sri Acharya, writing under the name of Nellai Nesan, disputes this view and says “Bharati is a good poet but not a great poet” ( Dinamani 1935 Bharati Malar).
On November 3, 1935, in its Letters to the Editor column, Ananda Vikatan , edited by Kalki Krishnamurthy, had published a letter supposedly written by a “Student of Literature” (it was the editor Kalki himself!) in which a question was raised whether what was said by some one in Karaikudi (the name of Va. Raa was omitted) is correct, as the correspondent felt it was not.
Commenting on the letter the editor had given his views: “The name of the person was also given. I have omitted the name purposely, as I think he could not have said so.” Continuing, the editor says, “If someone had said so, it should be understood as this person does not have any idea about either literature or poetry. It is possible to conclude that he is an illiterate (Nirakshara kutchi). It is doubtful if he had read Shelly, Tagore and Shakespeare and if he had, probably he has not understood them. It is also doubtful, if he has understood even Bharati properly” (courtesy Anada Vikatan ).
Opposing views
Va. Raa followed up with a detailed essay titled “Bharati and literary review” in Swadesamithran on November 30, 1935 and Kalki openly wrote opposing his views in the same journal on December 7, 1935, in which he went on to say that if Tolstoy had read “Vallippaattu” of Bharati, he would have burnt all the works of Bharati!
In the meanwhile, Va. Raa wrote from Colombo to Ku. Pa. Rajagopalan lamenting that no one ha objected to Kalki's statement that Bharati is a good but not great poet. Then followed long articles by Chitti and Ku. Pa. Ra., questioning Kalki's statement and the contents were later published under the title Kannan en kavi by Sangu Ganesan in 1937.
Later Kalki became a great admirer of Bharati and took the initiative of building the Manimandapam at Ettayapuram in October 1947 and Rajaji, then the Governor of West Bengal, declared it open. Again, it was Chitti, as a member of the team, who covered the function from Ettayapuram through the All India Radio!
