Sarojini Naidu in Praise of Mahatma Gandhi

DR (Mrs) D. V. RAJYALAKSHMI

Sarojini Naidu’s association with Mahatma Gandhi was a saga of sacrificial companionship without a parallel in recent Indian history. She was his companion and nurse, the licensed jester of his little court, and the oracle and high-priestess of his holy fane. She brought him the priceless gift of laughter to act as balm on the unreasonable wounds inflicted on the great man by time and circumstance as well as his own private losses and anxieties. When­ever there was tension, she was there to relieve it by her humour, parody, mimicry, or innocent naughtiness. She alone, among Gandhi's circle, could see her hero in a mock-heroic light. In the course of conversation, she would draw affectionate effigies and verbal cartoons of the Mahatma. The cultured irreverance was aimed only at restoring his poise and bringing him to his spiritual bearings. The beauty of her poetic sensibility was always matched by the beauty bf her sacrificial community of purpose, joined with his role as a national redeemer.

Yet in her poem on Mahatma Gandhi, entitled “The Lotus,” she goes behind the veil of personality to describe the character as well as capture the symbolic essence of his innate nobility and spiritual grandeur. The lotus, a motif which recurs throughout Indian sacred and secular literature, is the symbol of origins as well as of spiritual epiphanies. Brahma, Budaha, Vishnu and Lakshmi are all associated with the Mystic Lotus which represents a whole hierarchy of religious and mythological values and functions in Indian culture. The Mahaa-Purusha is presented in art and literature in the Padmaasana posture (the Lotus-posture) signify­ing that he has risen above the dualistic rhythm of the world­-process (determined by the interplay of pairs and opposites, or dvandvas) and attained a stage in the cosmic curve where the re­generate man takes over from the natural man. At the turning-point in his spiritual age, the great man has overcome casual fatality as well as psychic ambivalence, and he attained oneness and union with the cosmic being. As Ananda Coomaraswami observes:

....there is the much smaller number of great men–heroes, saviours, saints and Avatars–who have definitely passed the period of greatest stress and have attained peace, or at least  have attained to occasional and unmistakable vision of life as a whole. These are the “Prolific” of Blake, the “Masters” of Nietzsche, the true Brahmans in their own right, and partake of the nature of the superman and the Bodhisattva. Their action is determined by their love and wisdom, and by rules. In the world, but not of it, they are the flower of humanity, our leaders and teachers.

The Lotus is the flower of humanity that has reached the commanding height of divinity on the slender but firm stem of action and contemplation; although its seed-bed is in the flux of time. Sarojini’s approach to the Mahatma is not to portray the natural man in him but the total man (Poorna-Purusha) who is “coeval with the Lords of Life and Death”, the Creative Man in apotheosis set up as an Avataar of Vishnu, or Krishna in his Cosmic Presence (Visvaroopa).

O Mystic Lotus, sacred and sublime,
In myriad-petalled grace inviolate,
Supreme o’er transient storms of tragic Fate,
Deep-rooted in the waters of all Time,
What legions loosed from many far-off clime
Of wild-bee hordes with lips insatiate,
And hungry winds with wings of hope or hate,
Have thronged and pressed round thy miraculous prime
To devastate thy loveliness, to drain
The midmost rapture of thy glorious heart...
But who could win thy secret, who attain
Thine ageless beauty born of Brahma’s breath,
Or pluck thine immortality, who art
Coeval, ,with the Lords of Life and Death?

The sonnet is a concentrated allegory in which the purity, radiance, and transfiguring power of the mystic lotus are derived from the ecological facts of the natural flower. Taking its rise in the waters of all Time, the lotus stands high and aloof over the agitated surface of the pool, detached, serene and splendorous. Even in its severe aloofness from the swift-changing currents, the flower occupies a vulnerable position in the air. It is the target of attack by every passing wind, and is a prey to the predatory wild-bee hordes. But the lotus, by its innate nature, derived from the life-force, remains inviolate and resists the ravages of mutability and time’s gross appetite. Like Sri Aurobindo’s “Rose of God”, Sarojini’s “Mystic Lotus” has an ageless beauty born of Brahma’s breath. The natural flower is transfigured into the sempiternal symbol of Immortality, and of the soul’s mystic ascent. A figure from Nature is translated into a spirit working in the world. The propitious semblance of the lotus, opening its utmost power to the sun; upholds the poet’s vision of the great man’s spiritual ascendancy, while taking cognizance of the anterior struggle of the individual to remain as the moral man in an immoral world. Gandhi came to be viewed as the father of the renascent Indian nation. As it only became the tender, father, he appeared like “the elder clad like the folk in glory”. The lotus-universe, in its naturalistic aspect, offers an allegorical correspondence worth the state of the Indian nation. Even as the beauty of the flower attracts the wild-bee hordes, so the fabled opulence of India tempted countless legions of alien powers “loosed from many a far-off clime” to drain its vitality and glory through imperialistic exploitation. As a culture-hero, Gandhiji was subjected to hardship, discrimination and humiliation, first in South Africa and later in India. But this was but part of his ritual purification and preparation for his final sacrificial role in the nation’s service. The secret source of his greatness lay in the ageless beauty of his soul, born of the Brahma’s breath. He rose like the mystic lotus, out-spreading his spiritual confidence to become the very image of divinity in man. “The Lotus” is a poem of religious adoration and a prayer invoking divine grace. It is a meditation in which the poet as individual seeks the evidence and confirmation of human significance in a symbolic man cast in a pan-human, messianic role. The allegorical content as well as the sacred imagery of the poem is unmistakably inspired by the folk-consciousness of India, which viewed Gandhi as the “supreme example of embodied miracle in our midst.”