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| Mahakavi Bharathi |
(REGILIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF MAHAKAVI BHARATI)
Poets like Bharati cannot be counted as the treasure of any province. He is entitled by his work, to rank among those who have transcended all limitations of race, language and continent and have become the universal possession of mankind‖, said Sarojini Naidu, the ‘Nightingale of India’, paying a glowing tribute to Mahakavi C. Subramania Bharati. Sri Satyamurthy, while moving an adjournment motion in the Madras Legislative Council on the Seizure of Bharati‘s poems by the then British Government, in 1928, said: ―Late Subramaniya Bharati was a man on whose tongue the Goddess Saraswathi can honestly be believed to have danced the dance of patriotism. If he had been born in any free country, why in any country of the world except India, that man would have been made the Poet Laureate of the country’’.
But Bharati was more than a poet and patriot. In him Mother Bharat found the culmination of the development of her philosophical wisdom right from the ages of Vedic seers to that of the renaissance philosophers like Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. In him the mystic experience of countless sages and saints bedecking the glorious spiritual history of mankind found finest expression. In him the nation found a great social reformer, who, though rooted in the ancient heritage of the country, brought forth a new social philosophy fitted to the needs and changes in the modern times. And he was not merely a patriot–politician, but a political philosopher too, who found a spiritual basis for political ideals, true to the traditions of his Motherland. In him religion, politics, philosophy and social life coursed into a spiritual stream leading to the ultimate realisation of Divinity not only in man, but in the country of his birth and in everything in the universe.
Bharati was not a utopian philosopher who propounded abstract and incomprehensible ideals but a practical Vedantin who gave a concrete form and shape to a way of life, of course, deriving inspiration from our ancient wisdom, yet fulfilling the needs of the present day man. He not only preached his philosophy, but, like all true philosophers, practised it to the very core in his own life.
From time immemorial, our seers and sages have propounded that the Ultimate Reality ―From which everything originates, by which everything is sustained and into which everything dissolves‖ is One, which is called ‗God‘ and in different names by the visionaries of Truth. Bharati accepted this and he found religion as a force, which enables one to realise this unity or identity with the Supreme Being. But his religion was not confined to seeking this identity through more worship of symbols or reading scriptures. He found the concrete manifestation of God in the nature and world, and still more clearly in the Motherland and its people. ―God the Father is Ideal. God the Mother is the actual….‖ He then adds, ―Our ancestors were great apostles of his Mother worship. Para Shakti, supreme energy, is the name whereby they know her… Mother worship will save humanity; for the supreme energy renders immortal all that reflects her beauty and her fire’’.
The development of this thought draws support and sustenance form the Vedas, Vedanta, the Sakta philosophy and Saiva Siddhanta, besides the Bhakti cult propounded by the Alwars and Nayanmars. During his self-imposed exile in Pondicherry, Bharati made a deep study of the Vedas under the profound and benign guidance of Sri Aurobindo and in the company of Sri V.V.S. Iyer. He not only imbibed the spirit of the Vedas, but also expressed them in his own poetic and prose writings, some of which are comparable to Vedic hymns. Like a Vedic seer, he wrote on Agni and Varuna and on other Vedic Gods and Goddesses. Like them he found the manifestation of Shakti in the Wind, the Fire and Rain. Following the footsteps of our great religious teachers he wrote commentaries on Bhagavad Gita, Patanjali Yoga Sutra etc.
True to the spirit of Vedantin he saw God in every phenomenon in the universe. “Kaakkai Chirakinile Nandalala! Ninran Kariyaniram tonrutaiye nandalala!” In the wings of the crow, O Nandalala, I see Thy dark Complexion” sang he. He could see God even in an enemy and hence preached “Pakaivanukkarulwai Nannenje” – “O good heart, be thou benign to thy enemy too” and he also practised that. Bharati himself claimed to be a Siddha and he had an initiation into this field from Kullachami, a Siddha, whom he eulogized in his poems. Bharati was a Shakta too; His political contacts with Bengal revolutionaries, the immense influence of Sri Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and especially, of Sister Nivedita whom he accepted as his ‘Guru‘, on Bharati and his close association with Sri Aurobindo, the visionary of Bhavani Mandir, led to his flowering into a worshipper of Motherland as the manifestation of Maha Shakti. Above all, he was immensely impressed by Bankim Chandra‘s conception of Motherland as the Supreme Being and Vande Mataram as the potent mantra for realising Her. It is noteworthy that Bharati dedicated the collection of his poems at the Altar of the Mother.
Bharati considered it as a misrepresentation of the Advaita philosophy of Sankara, to say that the whole manifested world, the country in which we live in and the people ―including wife and, children‖ around us are mere illusions of Maya. He considered Maya as that which obstructed the vision of truth, of the unity behind all these manifestations, and not as the creator of illusion. In this, he came nearer to the Realistic Advaita of Sri Aurobindo.
In his poems Kannan Pattu, Kannamma Pattu and songs on Muruga, we find the finest expressions of Bhakti as found in Visishtadvaita tradition and in the writings of Alwars and Nayanmars, while we find the supreme wisdom of Advaitic realisation in his Kuyil Pattu and Jnana Ratham, a prose work.
Bharati achieves a unique synthesis of religion and patriotism in his Panchali Sabatham wherein he presents Draupadi both as the motherland in the shackles of alien rule and as the soul, which could realise its salvation only through the grace of God to whom it has to surrender unconditionally. But Bharati was not a pessimistic fatalist. He believed that where there is a will there is a way, but the way to the will was laid through surrender to God.
Bharati found that liberation was attainable here, in his world, and in this very birth. In his song “Kill Delusion” he yearns for the attainment of the status of a Jivan Mukta. Indeed in his last days, he had even reached that state and his poems of that period stand witness to this fact.
Bharati was not only influenced by Indian thought and culture, but he was immensely influenced by Islam and Christianity too. It is said that he had taken classes on Quoran for some of his Muslim friends at Kadayam and he even attempted the translation of the Bible. In his poems too we find adoration of Allah and Jesus as nothing but different forms of the Supreme Being.
To put it in brief, Bharati had given a clear religious philosophy enunciating his views on Religion, God, world and soul, on liberation and on unity of religions.
Courtesy: TATTVA DARSANA Jan-June 2021 (Special Issue)
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