To commemorate the death anniversary of freedom fighter Subramania Bharati, Tamil Nadu government has declared September 11 as 'Mahakavi' Day. Bharati’s innovative contributions to Tamil poetry and prose are considered to have sparked a Renaissance in 20th CE Tamil literature. But he also wrote extensively in English, of which little is known. In The Coming Age, published by Penguin Modern Classics, edited and presented by his great-granddaughter Mira T Sundara Rajan, we get a peep into Bharati’s original English writings.

Mira T Sundara Rajan is a writer, a classical pianist, and a scholar and professor who holds a doctorate in law from Oxford University. She is the daughter of Bharati scholar S. Vijaya Bharati, and a great-granddaughter of Mahakavi Bharati. In this conversation, Sundara Rajan speaks about Bharati’s everlasting relevance, his long-term agenda for writing in English, and his love for music, and shares some personal stories from his life.

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