Poet Saami Pazhaniappan

SaamiPazhaniappan-In The Footsteps of Bharatidasan

Bharatiar and Bharatidasan have played a predominant role in the development of modern Tamil poetry.Bharatiar, the morning star of modern Tamil poetry, dedicated his poetic career for the emancipation of the society from poverty, ignorance, caste ism, superstition and untouchability. Emancipation of Dalits and emancipation of women were more important for him than the political freedom. When he envisaged the freedom of India the first and foremost thing he wished was the freedom of Dalits. For him freedom of India meant primarily the emancipation of the oppressed castes.
'Bharatidasan, together with his senior contemporary and mentor Subramania Bharati, resuscitated the art of Tamil poetry in the twentieth century when it had become decadent and was almost in its deathtraps."says Marudanayagam in his Introduction to the English translation of Bharatidasan's poems. Even though it is a little bit exaggeration, his comparison of the two great poets is apt and unbiased.
"If the master destined to live a short but eventful life, focused his attention on arousing the patriotic feelings of his countrymen through his poems during the pre-independence days, besides breathing a new life into a language that had been put to constant poetic use for an incredibly long period of more than twenty centuries, the disciple, blessed with a full life, could attend to all the other social needs after the country won its freedom and show the world that Tamil, which flourished during the Sangam period,continues to be an astonishingly rich medium for poems on a vast variety of themes demanded by modern age."

An in-depth analysis of Bharatiar's poems will show his keen desire for social emancipation in all aspects.
In Bharatidasan we get a complete switchover to a radical and rational approach. Poetry in his hand turned as a powerful weapon to fight casteism, religious fundamentalism, conservative determinism, sexism and many more social evils under whose grip not only Tamilnadu but the whole Indian subcontinent suffered a lot for many centuries.