A unique copyright war

Subramania Bharati remains unique among poets in the world. Not because he attained fame and recognition posthumously after a life of poverty and deprivation, but because his poetry was resuscitated after his death in the most contemporary medium prevalent in pre-Independent India: The gramophone. Still later and even today, he continues to be invoked by the Tamils, with their hoary tradition of poetry that is one of the oldest in the world, through the Tamil people’s enduring modern day love: Films and movie songs.

Who Owns that Song? The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright by A R Venkatachalapathy is a timely book that has arrived almost 100 years after Bharati’s death. Mr Venkatachalapathy writes, “Bharati is not known to have listened to gramophone recordings, or sounds recordings in any form, or even stepped into a cinema hall. He would have been amazed to learn that poems could earn money by being used in these new media.”

Almost all Tamils who are familiar with Bharati’s poems would confess to having “heard” his poems first or “watched” them before reading them in Tamil lessons in school. The hit song Adovomey Pallu in the first secular Tamil film, Naam Iruvar in 1947 echoed Bharati’s joy at India gaining independence; many readers may also recall the rousing recitation by a young Kamal Hassan of the boy scout nationalist poem Achamillai, Achamillai in the 1980 film Varumayin Niram Sigappu. Bharati’s poems have popped up as film titles in Tamil cinema like Pudhumai Penn (1984) even in recent times with the thespian Mani Ratnam’s films such as Kannathil Muthamittal in 2002 and Kaatru Veliyidai in 2017. The Tamil movies have done enduring service to Bharati by transforming his poems into popular songs that beg recall even 70 years after Indian won freedom. In recent decades Carnatic musicians in Tamil Nadu have also taken a cue from the movies and brought his songs to their concert repertoire.

But this enormous posthumous popularity also became the cause celebre set off an extraordinary battle over intellectual property rights. This book traces how Bharati’s poems came into the public domain after his death and the unknown aspects of his copyright and peculiar circumstances that led to it. As the author says, the copyright wars over Bharati’s works “inaugurated a unique moment in the global history of copyright”.

Bharati died at age 39 in Triplicane in then Madras in 1921, the years of radicalism and poverty and exile in Puducherry having taken their toll (his books were burned because he was accused of sedition during British India as a journalist who resisted the imperial power). As his wife Chellamma, his beloved muse, said, he had been a man “in a hurry” — his literary output was hurried and prolific. His writings were, however, modern and accessible; his oeuvre covered a variety of subjects including secularism, nationalism, feminism and women’s rights and equality and Shakti, retelling of mythologies with a feminist perspective, spirituality and children’s verses. In his early death, he had left nothing to his young wife and two daughters, while in his literary output he left behind poetry, prose, fiction, drama, essays, and voluminous material from the newspapers and journals he edited and worked on.

Given how some of his works were proscribed and the lack of familiarity with his work beyond his nationalist and literary friends, less than a dozen people attended his funeral. With no inkling of how his fame would grow after his death, Bharati left behind nearly half of his works uncollected, unpublished in his lifetime, and much was lost. The book chronicles the extraordinary journey of how Bharati’s poems and works were popularised on stage as a run-up to the independence struggle by nationalists and theatre personalities and the loud demand by socialists and nationalists that his work be given to the people of Tamil Nadu.

The problems began when Bharati’s family sold the rights to his works to local a businessman in Chennai, the movie baron AV Meiyappa (of the eponymous AVM Studios in Tamil Nadu). Meiyappa acquired the “rights of reproduction by gramophone, broadcasting, and other sound-producing devices of the songs, works, and compositions of the late C Subramanya Bharathi [sic]”, thus explaining their evergreen popularity in Tamil films.

But the growth of Bharati’s popularity

as a public intellectual in the run up to the 1940s meant that this exclusive ownership clashed with the popular mood. His works on Tamil identity and on Indian independence and feuds between film producers all led to a groundswell of public opinion to make Bharati’s work available to everyone. The book traces the events that led to his works being acquired by the government and a legislation that led the government to “immediately release the entire right to the public”.

This convoluted story of copyright wars, which would certainly mark a global precedent in intellectual property right laws, is fascinating in itself. But as the book says, it also achieved one important objective: Of fulfilling Bharati’s own desire that his works would be “freely available as kerosene and matchboxes” to all.

WHO OWNS THAT SONG?

The Battle for Subramania Bharati’s Copyright

Author: A R Venkatachalapathy Publication: Juggernaut

Price: ~599

191 pages