- Lived:
- 11 December 1882, Ettayapuram (Tuticorin district, Tamil Nadu) → Benares, Madras, a decade of exile in French Pondicherry (Puducherry) → died in Madras, 11 September 1921, aged thirty-eight
- Field:
- poetry and journalism — Tamil’s first modern poet, the Mahakavi (“great poet”), voice of the freedom movement in the Tamil country
- The Big Idea:
- A two-thousand-year-old literary language could be broken open and handed back to the people who spoke it — poems in plain Tamil, set to street tunes, about freedom, women and the end of caste — and a poem everyone can sing is a political weapon no ban can confiscate.
- In their words:
- “Achamillai, achamillai, acham enbadhu illaiye” — “No fear, no fear, there is no such thing as fear” (his works are in the public domain — the whole corpus, as we will see, belongs to the people by law)
- If you remember one thing:
- The greatest Tamil poet of the modern age died at thirty-eight with fourteen people at his funeral — and twenty-eight years later a government bought his songs and gave them to everyone, the first writer in India whose words were made, literally, public property.