Sarojini Naidu

Indian political leader and poet

• Born: February 13, 1879
• Birthplace: Hyderābād, India
• Died: March 2, 1949
• Place of death: Lucknow, India

Naidu demonstrated that women in India can develop the statesmanship necessary to assume leadership of a nation. She was president of the Indian National Congress and was governor of the most politically active state in India; both positions were firsts for a woman. Her poetry, while overlooked in the West, is regarded as some of the most important in India.

Early Life

Sarojini Naidu (sah-ROH-jihn-ee NID-ew) was born in Hyderabad, the capital of the princely state of Hyderabad (Deccan) in the south-central part of India, to Aghorenath Chattopadhyay and Vardha Sundari. Her parents were members of an old priest-caste (Brahman) family in the northeast province of East Bengal (now called Bangladesh). Her parents migrated to Hyderabad because of a teaching position that Naidu’s father, who had received a doctor of science degree from the University of Edinburgh, had obtained. Her father, an ardent educationist, considered radical by his contemporaries because of his advocacy of education for women, hired private tutors to teach English, French, and, later, Persian to his daughter. Naidu proved to be a child prodigy. She was graduated from one of the toughest school systems in the country with a first class education when she was eleven years old and won a scholarship from the king of Hyderabad (the nizam) to continue her college education in England. England found the sixteen-year-old too young for college, so Naidu was asked to attend classes in King’s College, London, for a year; later, she was formally admitted to Girton College of the University of Cambridge.

Naidu’s life in England was far from happy. She was uncomfortable with the English image of her as an exotic almost extraterrestrial girl, quiet and rather aloof. She enjoyed, however, the opportunity of meeting Arthur Symons, a member of the Rhymers’ Club founded by William Butler Yeats in 1891, and Sir Edmund Gosse, a prominent literary figure of the day. The former introduced Naidu to the English world through his introduction to the first volume of her poems, The Golden Threshold (1905), while the latter offered practical advice on how to express her unique poetic sensibility.

Life’s Work

Naidu had changed her name from Chattopadhyay to Naidu when the English reviewed her poems favorably and the Indians exultantly in 1905, the year of their first publication. The very next year saw the need for a new impression, which was followed by two more, in 1909 and 1914. In the meantime, Naidu was busy rearing her four children and putting together a new volume of poetry. The Bird of Time (1912), with new editions in 1914 and 1916. A third volume, The Broken Wing , was published in 1917, and a fourth, The Feather of the Dawn , was posthumously issued in 1961.

Naidu was apologetic about the songlike nature of her poetry. “I sing just as birds do,” she wrote to Symons, without a “voice,” probably implying the awesome prophetic voice of a god thundering through a burning bush a voice that, presumably, alone can transmute the flimsy material of a song into the weighty substance of great poetry. In her self-effacing humility, she forgot the tradition, exemplified by the Old Testament Song of Solomon and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” great poetry in the form of song. Her songs, after all, are songs of life, love, death, and destiny themes the human race has always considered substantial. Further, they add a new note to the repertoire of poetry as song through a harmonious fusion of otherwise intransigent traditions, their “Eastern-ness” meticulously transposed into the Western medium of English prosody. Such a fusion is evident in the way she weaves magical strands around her themes “like a pearl on a string” (“Palinquin-Bearers”) or elevates them to mystical heights “And scale the stars on my broken wing!” (“The Broken Wing”). In these songs, it looks as if, in P. E. Dustoor’s words, “an English garden has exotically put out the most dazzling tropical blooms.”

The dazzling English garden of Naidu’s consciousness slowly started turning into a blighted one with the fast-changing historical events under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi and his satyagraha movement. In Sanskrit, satya means “truth” and graha is the act of “grasping.” Satyagraha is a blanket term that Gandhi used for all forms of peaceful efforts to gain independence from the British rule organized through the Indian National Congress, one of the major political parties in India. Naidu joined the party wholeheartedly. She represented the people of India in negotiating with the British government in England as a member of the Home Rule League (1919) and the Round Table Conference for Indian-British cooperation (1931). She also led demonstrations against the government policies at home and was imprisoned three times: in 1930, 1932, and 1942. She visited the major sections of the African continent in 1924, 1929, and 1931, lending the imperial subjects moral support and political guidance. In 1928-1929 she visited the United States to mobilize American support for the independence struggle.

Fighting the battle outside the country, Naidu realized, would not be productive if she did not address the problems inside it. She knew of social injustices to women that tradition had helped institutionalize, such as prohibition of remarriage for widows, child marriage, polygamy, and deprivation of education for all women. She organized women’s groups, especially for the promotion of education, and raised the consciousness of the women she addressed as speaker to a wide range of women’s groups. Curiously enough, she found it harder to convince the “civilized” English about women’s rights than the so-called primitives at home.

Above all, Naidu gave her full attention to the most sensitive issue of her day: the crisis between the Hindu religious majority and the Muslim minority. A Hindu herself, she was singularly equipped with a heightened awareness that helped her appreciate the experiences of both as one. She did not arrive at this ability because she was a mystic, although three of her poems were included in Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1927), but because she had retained the resilience of the truly primitive imagination that is able to take consciousness back to its undifferentiated origins. Past and present were copresent in her consciousness, not with the discrete linearity of two neighbors but rather like the commingling of waters. It was this unifying consciousness that gave her the courage to be a friend to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who was a devout follower of the congress, but later had to dissociate himself from it and espouse the cause of the rival political party, the Muslim League. She remained his friend without losing her loyalty to the congress at a time when Jinnah came to be looked on as intransigent and fanatical by the leaders of the congress. In 1947, when she became the governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) in north-central independent India, her inauguration ceremony was blessed by the representatives of all the religions of India. During her governorship, she restrained the majority from treating the minority as a poor relation, especially on issues concerning language, which took on epic proportions in the first decade of India’s independence.

Although a dynamic woman, Naidu, strangely enough, had always been physically ill. Her health started deteriorating close to her birthday in 1949 and worsened in March. On March 2 she asked the nurse attending her to sing a song for her. As the nurse’s song ended, Naidu breathed her last breath. It is ironic that her active public life began with the publication of a book of songs and ended with a song.

Significance

Naidu led a full and successful life. It was full because it was authentic in the Sartrean existential sense of choosing freely and accepting the consequences of one’s choices. Such behavior is unlike that of the multitude who let externals social constraints for example choose for them; consequently, they live the lives of others, which creates emptiness instead of adding fullness. One glorious example of an authentic choice in Naidu’s life is her choice of husband: Govindarajulu Naidu, a person of a non-Brahman caste. This act alienated her from family, friends, and society especially the Indian society of her time yet she wore her choice with pride all through her life. Her life was successful not only because she made it through these “outrageously” authentic choices but also because she produced spectacular, though “mundane,” results because of them. She won the Kaisar-i Hind award from the nizam of Hyderabad in 1908, became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1914, was elected president of the Indian National Congress the first woman to hold that elective office and finally became, in 1947, the governor of the most politically active state in India, another first for a woman. Today she is known as the Nightingale of India. February 13, her birthday, is celebrated as women’s day throughout the country.

Bibliography

Azad, Abul Kalam. India Wins Freedom: An Autobiographical Narrative. Introduction and explanatory notes by Louis Fischer. New York: Longmans, Green, 1960. Ghost-written by Humayun Kabir. Contains little discussion of Naidu but gives useful insights into the political controversies of the time by a contemporary who fought for India’s freedom with heart in pain and mind in conflict.

Baig, Tara Ali. Sarojini Naidu. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1974. A smaller version of the biography by Padmini Sengupta, this source is slightly different because of the author’s personal reminiscences of Naidu. Includes comments on the place of women in India and a few citations about Naidu from the police records of British India.

Gandhi, Mahatma. An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Translated by Mahadev Desai. 1957. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. A classic for students of the freedom movement in India. A “spiritual” profile of its ethos, excellent for understanding popular Indian philosophy and the soul-searching that accompanies political activity.

Marx, Edward. The Idea of a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 2004. This examination of cross-culturalism in poetry includes a chapter examining Naidu’s work, “Everybody’s Anima: Sarojini Naidu as Nightingale and Nationalist.”

Morton, Eleanor. The Women in Gandhi’s Life. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1953. The women surrounding Gandhi are portrayed as they figure in his life chronologically. Naidu appears six times. Tara Ali Baig and Padmini Sengupta, two other women writers cited in the bibliography, are amiably critical of Indian society’s treatment of women, as was Naidu herself. Useful source for feminist connections to the Indian freedom movement.

Sengupta, Padmini. Sarojini Naidu. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1966. A well-written and comprehensive biography. Follows the life of the subject chronologically but fails to convey her dynamism as effectively as one might expect from a book of this length. Provides useful bibliographical footnotes and a fairly comprehensive bibliography. A must for the researcher on Naidu.

Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R. Indian Writing in English. 2d rev. Eng. ed. New York: Asia Publishing House, 1973. A pioneering work, this comprehensive study of Indian writing in English is close to a definitive work on the subject. Very useful for a study of the poetic talents of Naidu. Contains a good bibliography and a well-organized index.