Subramania Bharati was born at Ettayapuram, a small princely state in the Tirunelveli district in Madras state. He was an intellectually precocious child, and at the age of eleven years was given the title 'Bharati' (goddess of learning) when he gave an impressive exhibition of his poetic gifts at a court function. Bharati spent four years in Banaras from 1898 to 1902, where he learned Sanskrit, Hindi and English, and attended lectures by Annie Besant, a political activist and the founder of the Theosophical Society of India. After returning to Ettayapuram in 1902, he worked as a sub-editor of the Tamil daily Swadesamitran and as the editor of India for many years, and was actively involved in politics. His meeting with Sister Nivedita, an English woman and a disciple of Swami Vivekananda, in Calcutta in 1906, proved to be a landmark event. He pledged himself to the political liberation of India, the eradication of casteism and the emancipation of women.

The second milestone in Bharati's life was his meeting with Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1910. From him Bharati imbibed the teaching of the Vedas and the ideas of Vedantic Humanism. Bharati was in political exile in Pondicherry for ten years because of his provocative writing against British rule and returned to British India in 1918. He spent the rest of his life in Madras until a tragic accident in 1921, when he was cast to the ground by the Triplicane temple elephant, which claimed his life.