CHENNAI: Do you know who wrote the popular poem Kelada Manida Jaathi ? If your answer is Tamil poet Mahakavi C Subramanya Bharathi, then you are wrong. So claims Vijaya Bharathi, the nationalist poet’s granddaughter.
“The integrity of my grandfather’s work has not been safeguarded,” she says.
Ever since Bharathi’s work was brought to the public domain in 1949, several books have been published under various titles. They are replete with printing mistakes and interpretive errors to false attribution of the works of other poets to Bharathi. The book, Bharathi Paadalgal-Aaivu Padhippu, published by Tamil University, Thanjavur, in the 1970s, has 48 works wrongly attributed to the national poet, claims Vijaya Bharathi.
Kelada Manida Jaathi, under the title Kuruvi Padalgal, was not written by the ‘Mahakavi’ but was included in the book and in the Tamil film Bharati.
When the poet died in 1921, his wife Chellamma tried to release a standardised book on his works that included prose and Carnatic compositions. But her efforts failed. She gave away the rights to Bharathi’s co-brother Vishwanatha Iyer, who, in turn, gave them to the government. Bharati’s works became part of public domain in 1949 within 28 years of the poet’s death against the then Indian copyright law that stipulated 50 years (now 60) for an intellectual work to be made public.
Vijaya Bharathi and her daughter Mira Sundararajan, a lawyer in Canada specialising in copyright law, have decided to approach the Prime Minister and seek his permission to give a lecture in Parliament on Indian Copyright Act, citing Bharathi’s case as an example.