The Life and Poetry of Mrs. Sarojini Naidu

A poet, patriot, orator and wit all made into one was Mrs. Sarojini Naidu. Born on 13th February 1879, she is better remembered as the “Nightingale of India,” as Gurudev Tagore hailed her, than as the governor of a province which post she occupied at the time of her death in 1949.

Her life and poetry are Interesting and instructive. In politics and poetry she has gone like a meteor in flaming splendour from success to success. But she was by no means a plaster saint; a woman of rich emotional nature, of aesthetic sensibility and strong impulses, it was not always roses and roses in all her way. The triumphs and tragedies of her life are amply reflected in her poetry. They were like haunting echoes of a grand symphony which can never be forgotten. Hindu by birth, she was brought up in constant touch with Muhammadans in the city of Hyderabad. Consequently one of the passions that governed her life was Hindu-­Muslim unity. She also desired to stretch out hands of fellow­ship to the Western world, with the culture and civilization of which she came in to touch at an early age.

Her father, Dr. Agorenath Chattopadhyaya was a doyen among educationalists of the old Hyderabad state. It was to him she owed her early training in life and poetry. In her preface to Golden Threshold Sarojini said that “she came out as a full bloom linguist” out of the room in which her father shut her in her childhood as a reprove. Dr. Chattopadhyaya was, in his daughter’s very words, a “great dreamer of dreams.” In “Saluta­tions to my father’s spirit” she addressed him thus:

“Farewell farewell, O brave and tender sage
O mystic jester, golden-hearted child
Selfless, serene, untroubled, unbeguiled
By trivial snares of grief and greed and rage
splendid dreams, in a dreamless age

In 1895 at her sixteenth year, she was sent to Europe to begin her travels and studies in England, France, and Italy. Her marriage in December 1898 to Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu, was unique in those days as it was both inter-caste and inter-state and thus naturally evoked considerable opposition from all quarters.

Poetry was her first love. I quote her: “While I live, it will always be the supreme desire of my life to write poetry – one poem, one line of enduring verse even.” Prior to her, there were women who blazed across Indo-Anglian poetry, notably the Dutt sisters. But while with the latter even the thought seems to be imbued with the Western ideal the poetry of Mrs. Naidu breathes the Indian atmosphere. Edmund Goose, who in Sarojini’s language showed her the way to the Golden Threshold of poetry, was convinced that she became a genuine Indian poet, not a machine­-made imitator of the English classics. In his introduction to her first volume of poetry Golden Threshold published in 1905, Arthur Symon observed that “her poems hint at a rare temperament, a temperament of the women of the East, finding expression through western language.” Her mastery over English rhymes and meters has made her poetry a harmonious blending of East and West.

Her poem “Palanquin Bearers” which runs as follows is an example revealing her mastery over poetic feeling and lyric expression.

“Lightly, O lightly we bear her along
She sways like a flower in the wind of our song
She skims like a bird on the seam of a stream,
She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream
Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing
We bear her along like a pearl on a string”

She was a lyricist of high order and her poems are more painted words than thoughts. With a brush dipped in the colours of the rainbow, she painted the picture of an Indian dancer.

“Eyes ravished with rapture celestially painting
What passionate bosoms aflaming with fire
Drink deep of the husk of the hyacinth heaven
The glimmer around them in fountains of light”
Her “Persian Love Song” concludes thus:

“Hourly this subtle mystery flowers anew,
O love, I know not why ...
Unless it be, perchance, that I am you,
Dear love, that you are I”

            The Bird of Time her second volume of poetry came out in 1912. It was a chronicle of her reaction to the joys and sorrows of life. Within four years The Broken Wing another anthology followed, evidencing the premonitions of a passionate and broken heart. “The Feather of the Dawn” published posthu­mously, also speaks of unrequited love and of various aspects of Unattainable quest. Her later outlook on life may be gleaned by reading a few lines from the “Feather of the Dawn”:

“Life gave me joy and song for dower
Laughter and grace and shining fame,
Hope like a forest tree in flower
Dreams with reverberant wings of flame.
God troubled in His high domain
sent you, O Love, from starry spheres
With quick and ardent gifts or pain
To teach me tears, to teach me tears.”

One would agree with Sir C. P. Ramaswamy Aiyar in describing Sarojini as a poet who embodied and typified the discovery of the inner-self of the poet in a limitless world for private exploration. She must have looked into her own heart when she sung:

“Let us rise, O my heart, let us go
Where the twilight is calling,
Far away from the sound of this lonely
and menacing crowd
To the glens, to the glades, where the
magical darkness is falling,
In rivers of gold from the breast of a
radiant cloud
Come away, come away from this song
and its tumult of sorrow
There is rest, there is peace from the
pang of its manifold strife,
Where the halcyon might hold in trust
the dear songs of the morrow
And the silence is but a rich pause
in the music of life”

From the year 1917, Sarojini Naidu signalised herself in the forefront of political struggle for the independence of her motherland. She made a passionate call to her mother to awake:

“Waken, O Mother thy children implore thee,
Who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee
The night is afresh with a dawn of the morrow,
Why still clost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow,
Awaken and sever the woes that enthral us
And hallow our hands for the triumphs that call us

Lo, we would thrill the high stars with thy story,
And set thee again in the forefront of glory.”

Mrs. Sarojini Naidu was a picturesque adventurer in the high seas of Indian politics. In the words of Margaret E. Cousins, in politics she stood for the Ruskin’s ideal of a woman being the inspirer and guide. Yet, she became a stalwart in the Indian Freedom Movement, stood shoulder to shoulder with the other lieutenants of Gandhiji and shared his confidence. As president of the Madras Provincial Congress, as member of Subjects Committee of the National Congress, as elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1925, and as participant in Round Table Conferences, she vastly displayed her capacities for organiza­tion, comradeship and political wisdom. On the platform she was a splendid speaker comparable to the silver-tongued orator, V. S. Srinivasa Sastry. Endowed with a mellifluous voice, her poetic soul often found expression in her oratory. Her oratory was like the warblings of a sweet-throated bird, swift and spon­taneous. She played with words, and words flowed from her as from a fountain. It has been observed that her speeches reminded one of the sensuous beauty which one felt in the sinuous forms of the medieval Indian sculpture.

She was an artist in words, a painter of sparkling and colourful phrases. Her legendary sense of humour must have been a source of relief to her colleagues during some of the bleak days of freedom struggle. Perhaps she was the only one who could crack jokes with and at the expense of Gandhiji. Gandhiji was to her “a micky mouse of man”, Sardar Patel “the Bardoli bull”, and Pandit Nehru, the “Prince Charming”. Once she persuaded Gandhiji to play a game of ping pong with her. That must have been an impressive sight! The Father of the Nation and the Nightingale of India facing each other across a table tennis net.

In her times, she was the spokeswoman of her own sex. Firstly by leading a deputation to the Viceroy on behalf of the Indian women in Fiji, and later as the leader of the All India Women’s Deputation to Montague, the then Secretary of State for India she fully identified herself with the claim for the political franchise for Indian women. Her Memorandum to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the desirability of granting political equality to Indian women, was regarded as a remarkable combination of the prose of fact with the idealism of the poetry. Her address at the conference of International Women Suffrage Alliance held in Geneva, altered the false ideas concerning the conditions and capacities of Indian women.

In her foreword to Women in Modern India, Sarojini Naidu observed that “the mission of womanhood remains indivisible all over the world, but the woman of every race must naturally seek to interpret and fulfil her share in accordance with her own vision and version of national life. The Indian woman of today, whatever her creed or community, is clearly imbibed and inspired by a profound renascent consciousness of her special and long-­forgotten place and purpose, privilege and responsibility in creating and sustaining auspicious and enduring conditions of national progress and international fellowship.” Thus Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, proved herself a unique link between the great heroines of the past and free and progressive womanhood of today. She was the nightingale who sang of India’s freedom. As such, she would continue to be a source of inspiration to the coming generations.