The Chariot of Wisdom

by Subramania Bharati

Genres: Fantasy

Synopsis

Breaking the constraints of style and imagery central to classical Tamil literature, Mahakavi C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) heralded a new era for the language by making it simpler, thereby encouraging a wider readership. His prodigious contribution to the writings of his homeland - done while in exile during a tumultuous time in the nation's freedom movement - has since propelled his stature to that of a revered literary figure in the subcontinent.

In The Chariot of Wisdom, his only novella, a vexed journalist, plagued by material worries and the daily attrition of twentieth-century, British-occupied India, escapes into a daydream to realms mystical and unexplored. He navigates an imaginary chariot through The World of Tranquillity, The World of Pleasure, The World of Truth and The World of Dharma, and finds his values and ideals informing, competing and often contradicting one another. As his self-doubts deepen, he battles the notion that peace and happiness come at a price.

A critical examination of a colonized, afflicted civilization marred by corruption and greed, Bharati's pioneering work speaks to a morally wounded country through astute observations and lively humour. Translated with refined intellectual acuity by Gregory James, this modern classic - as timely today as it was a century ago - is a cleverly masked plea to the people of a distracted nation to rally together in pursuit of a just society.

Release date: May 25, 2023

Publisher: Hachette India

Print pages: 280

Sample

Major Milestones in Bharati’s Life

1882, 11 Dec

Born in Ettayapuram, Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) district, Tamil Nadu

1893

Accorded the title of ‘Bharati’

1894–1897

Attends Hindu College High School, Tirunelveli

1897, 15 June

Marries Chellamma (aged 7)

1898

Death of father, Chinnaswami Iyer

1898–1901

Higher education in Benares (Varanasi), while living with his uncle and aunt

1902–1904

Appointed court poet at Ettayapuram

1904, Aug

Tamil teacher at Sethupathi High School, Madurai

1904, Nov

Joins Swadesamitran (சுதேசமித்திரன் Cutēcamittiraṉ) as sub-editor

1905

Partition of Bengal; attends Indian National Congress meeting in Varanasi, presided over by Gopal Krishna Gokhale

1906

Meets Sister Nivedita, who was to become a major influence; later dedicates his nationalistic poems to her, his ‘guru’; attends Indian National Congress session in Calcutta (Kolkata), presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, where demands for Swaraj and the boycott of British goods are raised

1907

Attends Indian National Congress meeting in Surat with V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and Mandayam Srinivasachariar; meets freedom fighters Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, Lala Lajpat Rai; Dr Rash Behari Ghosh nominated President of Indian National Congress, leading to the party splitting between Extremists, led by Tilak, and Moderates; Bharati, an Extremist, is greatly impressed by Tilak who later features in his poems. Edits English weekly Bala-Bharata, or Young India; also associated with nationalist newspapers India (இந்தியா Intiyā), Vijaya (விஜயா Vijayā), Karmayōgi (கர்மயோகி Karmayōki) and Sūryōdayam (சூரியோதயம் Cūriyōtayam)

1908

Brings out a pamphlet of his experience at the Surat Congress entitled, எங்கள் காங்கிரஸ் யாத்திரை Eṅkaḷ Kāṅkiras yāttirai (Our Congress Tour); publishes his first book of poems, சுவதேச கீதங்கள் Cuvatēca kītaṅkaḷ (Songs of Freedom), dedicated to Sister Nivedita

1908, Sep

M. Srinivasa Iyengar, de jure editor of India, arrested by the British, and imprisoned for five years, while Bharati, the de facto editor, escapes to the French territory of Pondicherry (Puducherry), on the advice of friends

1908, 20 Oct

Resumes publication of India from Puducherry, with a circulation of over 4,000 copies; Bharati calls for political freedom and denounces the British for their injustice to the people of India

1909

Publishes second volume of poetry, ஜென்ம பூமி Jeṉma pūmi (Birthplace), again dedicated to Sister Nivedita

1910, April

Sri Aurobindo goes to Puducherry seeking political asylum; he and Bharati spend many hours discussing a wide range of subjects

1910, March

British Government bans India in British India; journal ceases publication for want of funds

1912

Writes major works – கண்ணன் பாட்டு Kaṅṅaṉ pāṭṭu (‘The Krishna Songs’), குயில் பாட்டு Kuyil pāṭṭu (‘The Cuckoo’s Song’), பாஞ்சாலி சபதம் Pāñcāli capatam (Panchali’s Pledge), and a Tamil translation of the Bhagavad Gita

1917

A collection of poems under the title நாட்டுப் பாட்டு Nāṭṭup pāṭṭu (Songs of Our Nation) is released

1918, 20 Nov

Courts arrest at Cuddalore (Kadalur); imprisoned for about a month

1919

Lives in Kadayam (his wife’s home village, in Tirunelveli district); meets Mahatma Gandhi in Madras (Chennai)

1920, Nov

Returns to Chennai and rejoins Swadesamitran as sub-editor; continues to seek funds to publish his books, but without success

1921, July

Attacked by Triplicane Parathasarathy temple elephant; saved by his friend Kuvalai Kannan, but sustains heavy injuries

1921, 11 Sep

Dies in Chennai at the age of 39

Introduction

Chinnaswami Subramania Bharati (சின்னசுவாமி சுப்பிரமணிய பாரதி Ciṉṉacuvāmi Cuppiramaṇiya Pārati) (1882–1921) is a cultural and literary icon in Tamil Nadu, where his prose, poetry and patriotic songs are held in the highest esteem. He was born in Ettayapuram in Tuticorin (Thoothukudi) District, at the time part of Tinnevelly (Tirunelveli) District, to Chinnaswami Iyer and Lakshmi Ammal. His father was an employee of the local rajah. Bharati, an epithet of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of Knowledge and Music, was an honorific title conferred upon him in 1893 – at the age of eleven – by the rajah, in recognition of his exceptional proficiency in poetry. Popularly known in Tamil Nadu as Mahakavi (great poet) Bharatiyar, he is, however, not widely appreciated beyond India, and even in much of India itself, despite being an innovative littérateur, pioneering journalist, dynamic social reformer and independence campaigner, and now a National Poet. Although there is a considerable body of research literature in Tamil on his life and work, an in-depth English-language study of his oeuvre is lacking.

During Bharatiyar’s lifetime, over one-fifth of the world’s land mass, comprising a quarter of its population, would be directed from London, the capital of the British Empire. Any stirrings of separatism were generally regarded as localized nuisances by an establishment that ruled as if by divine right. Nonetheless,

the awareness of other cultures which came with British and European colonization… raised the level of anxieties about the empire and threatened the Western sense of cultural pre-eminence. [K]nowledge of other myths and religions and cultures was… a challenge to the classical and biblical traditions and deepened the doubt of freethinkers who were already critical of the Christian hegemony.1

Despite its repression of opposition, Britain’s global supremacy was beginning to wane. Rudyard Kipling’s ‘all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre’2 in echo of ‘Ozymandias’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s powerful metaphor for the impermanence of imperial dominion,3 had already presaged the inexorable putrefaction of British jingoistic might.

In the early twentieth century, Bharatiyar was a leading Tamil journalist and activist in the Indian independence struggle, ‘the voice of the newly awakened national consciousness’.4 Indeed, one of his lexical contributions to the Tamil language was the calque from English, புரட்சி puraṭci ‘revolution’ < புரள் puraḷ ‘to roll over, to be overturned’. Aspects of his vision of a free, democratic, non-sectarian India are woven into his dream-fantasy, ஞானரதம் Ñāṉaratam (The Chariot of Wisdom). This story was written in 1908/1909, at the height of the Swadeshi movement, a self-sufficiency campaign formed in 1905 with the aim of breaking the imperial monopoly over essential goods. Bharatiyar had attended the session of the Indian National Congress held in December 1906 in Kolkata, at which resolutions concerning Swadeshi and self-government were passed:

This Congress accords its most cordial support to the Swadeshi movement and calls upon the people of the country to labor for its success by making earnest and sustained efforts to promote the growth of indigenous industries and to stimulate the production of indigenous articles by giving them preference over imported commodities even at some sacrifice.

This Congress is of the opinion that the system of Government obtaining in the self-governing British Colonies should be extended to India.5

The view that attacking the Empire on the economic front was a key contingency to its rapid decline is a point made in Ñāṉaratam. In 1908, Bharatiyar had begun to serialize his story in the Tamil nationalist weekly, இந்தியா/India, which he had edited since early 1907.6 The magazine was considered subversive by the British authorities, and when M. Srinivasa Iyengar, India’s de jure editor, was arrested,7 Bharatiyar himself, faced with imminent detention for his feisty writings and cartoons, escaped to the French littoral enclave of Pondicherry (now a district in the Indian union territory of Puducherry). France was a rival colonial power to Britain, no less exploitative but happy to offer a haven to anti-British irredentists.

From Pondicherry, Bharatiyar continued to edit and publish India, as well as a political daily, விஜயா Vijayā (victory) – both periodicals were soon proscribed in British India, and eventually had to cease production because of lack of revenue.8 He resumed writing Ñāṉaratam, but only for two further instalments, with a promise that his story would be completed, and published as a book. In January 1910, all the parts that had already appeared were assembled and printed as a single work, in five chapters, but nothing more materialized.

Ñāṉaratam is written as a visio, or dream vision, a genre in which authors typically portray themselves as falling asleep and encountering in a dream a series of emblematic characters or symbolic events often in an idealized world, with a veneer of authenticity and an ambiance imbued with the colours and sounds of Nature.9 Within this tradition, Ñāṉaratam is presented as a first-person reverie; the narrator is ostensibly Bharatiyar himself.

The story opens in an ocean-front tenement flat in Triplicane, a coastal neighbourhood of Madras (Chennai). As the morning breeze from the Bay of Bengal wafts in over his balcony, the narrator yearns to take a trap-ride along the Marina.10 But realizing that such a diversion is beyond his means, in the half-light he languidly trances himself instead into a daydream11 to board the Chariot of Wisdom, an illusory vehicle that could apparently usher him away from the stresses of his daily life. Thus begins an allegorical journey through different Worlds.

Bharatiyar’s initial objective is the World of Tranquillity, where he discovers that he can abandon his worries and sorrows, but only at the expense of his joys and desires, and thus his mind:

There exists a Hindu notion that the mind is the vehicle of desire. You mount your mind or wish-car and reach your destination, that is to say, the object of your desire. From this arises a part equation between manas (mind) and kāma (desire), so that either of them… may be mounted and ridden to the goal. And, vice versa, manas, which is primarily merely the vehicle of desire, turns almost into a synonym of kāma.12

As he cannot commit to such a Faustian bargain, he leaves in disillusion, and continues on to the carefree World of the Gandharvas, celestial nature-spirits renowned for their proficiency in music and dance. This happy World is eventually also a disappointment to him, since he is unable to evade the comparison of what he deems the afflictions of the ‘land of sorrow’, India, which he sees as a decrepit, subjugated state over which the denizens of the plundering colonizer lorded with impunity13 – poverty, famine, and subjection having bespoiled the populace of a glorious ancient civilization. While Bharatiyar looks to a renaissance of Indian grandeur, he rejects what he perceives as the hypocrisy of its oppressively conservative zeitgeist, in contrast to the Gandharvas’ realm of splendid hedonism, where he is overawed by new sensual pleasures:

As soon as I reached the World of the Gandharvas, I felt euphoric in a way quite new to me. There was delightful music in the air… that seemed like a continuous shower of melody pouring into my soul.

A common feature of visio compositions is the inclusion of a local guide to accompany the narrator around the dreamland and lead him or her to an understanding of the novel milieu. In the World of the Gandharvas, Bharatiyar’s chaperone is Parvatakumari, a young lady who shares with him her knowledge and experience of her home domain.

‘I’m quite moved by this sweet sound. Where’s it coming from?’ [he asks her]…

‘This dulcet music’s in the nature of the moon’s rays,’ she replie[s]. ‘It’s clearly audible in this World, but not to the ears of you earthlings. Even on Earth, though, the ears of gifted poets can perceive this music.’14

Inspired by the Keatsian concept of Beauty as Truth, Bharatiyar is nonetheless disconcerted by the Gandharvas’ plastic lives, their seeming unwillingness, or inability, to innovate or to develop their society, and their lack of spirituality. Parvatakumari understands his dilemma:

You’re not to be blamed for being dissatisfied with our life. Because however pitiable human birth may be, it’s superior to ours in one important respect. That is, that human nature’s perfectly designed for spiritual quest. To be dissatisfied with anything’s a protective quality of human nature, and also an indication of its rare excellence. Man perceives an ephemerality in material things and becomes dissatisfied with them.

Bharatiyar is, on the other hand, impressed by the achievements of Western civilization. Like Keats, and Shelley, he had great admiration for the glory of ancient Greece. He observes, for example, that its sculptors had reached eminent heights in realization and interpretation.

In the World of the Gandharvas, the statues, except those of gods, showed off its sculptors’ skill in workmanship and did not reflect their inner quest. In that respect, in the Earthly World, the sculptures of Greece are greatly renowned. Their carvers envisaged perfect beauty and represented it in stone through their inner vision, even though what they actually saw were the defective human forms.

However, he is critical of the West’s application of its accomplishments to the pursuit of violent ends.

During his tour of the World of the Gandharvas, including visiting a festival to Manmata, the god of Love, Bharatiyar becomes enamoured of his ‘ideal’, Parvatakumari, perforce platonically. Despite this mystical experience, however, he grows restless for novel emprises; mere pleasure had become unsatisfying.

Kumari had become my soulmate. I felt an elation that I had never before had, even in my dreams, and became completely freed from fatigue and disease, depression and melancholy. However, my Mind remained unfulfilled. Something seemed to be missing. In the course of time, even what the World of the Gandharvas offered, although still exceptional, wore off.

The chapter ends somewhat abruptly, and ‘the following day’ Bharatiyar finds himself in the World of Truth. But here again, he does not find contentment. He realizes that his own shortcomings vex his quest for Truth, and that such a pursuit constitutes unantic. . .