Sarojini Naidu

• 1. Introduction

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  Sarojini Naidu was born on the 13th of February 1879 in Hyderabad, into a family that seemed to run on creative and political fire. Her mother wrote poetry in Bengali. Her brother Virendranath became a revolutionary. Two sisters became actresses in silent films. Another sister, Suhasini, became an Indian communist leader. This was the household that shaped a woman who would become the first Indian female president of the Indian National Congress, the first woman governor of an Indian state, and one of the defining voices of the independence movement. But she was also something rarer: a celebrated English-language poet who Gandhi himself called the Nightingale of India. How does a twelve-year-old girl who begins writing plays in Persian become the person who leads the Salt March when Gandhi is arrested? How does a poet steeped in British Romanticism reconcile that tradition with fighting British rule? And what did Sarojini Naidu understand about the connection between women's rights and national liberation that the men around her were slow to accept?

• 2. A Family Built for Fire

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  Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, Sarojini's father, held a doctorate of Science from Edinburgh University and served as principal of Nizam College in Hyderabad. He came originally from Brahmangaon, Bikrampur, in Bengal, in what is now Munshiganj, Bangladesh. The family was well-regarded in Hyderabad, occupying a prominent position in the city. Sarojini was the eldest of eight siblings, and the household clearly placed no ceiling on ambition or unconventional paths. Her brother Harindranath was a poet, dramatist, and actor. Sarojini herself showed unusual ability early: she passed her matriculation examination with the highest rank in 1891, when she was only twelve years old. Her play Maher Muneer, written in Persian, was enough to impress the Nizam of the Kingdom of Hyderabad. That impression opened a door. The Nizam's scholarship made it possible for her to study in England from 1895 to 1898, first at King's College in London and then at Girton College, Cambridge. There she encountered artists from the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, an immersion that would permanently colour her literary voice. When she returned to Hyderabad in 1898, she brought with her both a poetic sensibility shaped by British literary circles and a growing awareness of the political ideas she had absorbed abroad. That same year, she married Govindaraju Naidu, a doctor from Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh, whom she had met during her time in England. The marriage was inter-caste and was described at the time as both groundbreaking and scandalous. Both families approved it, and the union proved long and harmonious. They had five children. Their daughter Padmaja would later join the Quit India Movement and hold several governmental positions in independent India.

• 3. The Poet and the Pen

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  Edmund Gosse, the literary figure who suggested Naidu's first book, called her in 1919 the most accomplished living poet in India. Her debut collection, The Golden Threshold, was published in London in 1905. It bore an introduction by Arthur Symons and included a sketch of Naidu as a teenager, in a ruffled white dress, drawn by John Butler Yeats. Her poetry was written in English and worked within the tradition of British Romanticism, built on vivid sensory images and lush depictions of India. Critics sometimes pressed her to explain how that lyric tradition squared with her nationalist politics. She appears to have regarded the tension as generative rather than paralyzing. Her second collection, The Bird of Time, appeared in 1912 in both London and New York, and is considered her most strongly nationalist work. It included what became one of her most enduring poems, "In the Bazaars of Hyderabad". Her third and final collection of new poems published during her lifetime, The Broken Wing, came out in 1917. It contains "The Gift of India", a poem urging Indians to remember the sacrifices of the Indian Army during World War I. She had earlier recited it to the Hyderabad Ladies' War Relief Association in 1915. Also in The Broken Wing was "Awake!", dedicated to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, which she read as the conclusion to a 1915 speech to the Indian National Congress to call for unified Indian action. A collected volume of all her published poems was printed in New York in 1928. After her death, her daughter Padmaja edited the unpublished poems that became The Feather of the Dawn, published in 1961. Naidu's collected speeches were first published in January 1918 and proved popular enough to require expanded reprints in 1919 and again in 1925.

• 4. Women's Rights as National Duty

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  In 1906, Naidu addressed the Social Council of Calcutta to argue for the education of Indian women. She placed the argument in stark terms: the success of the entire independence movement depended on answering the woman question. The true nation-builders, she told her audience, were women, and without women's active cooperation the nationalist movement would come to nothing. This was not a polite request for inclusion. It was a claim that liberation and women's liberation could not be separated. In 1917, Naidu sponsored the establishment of the Women's Indian Association, which gave women a formal platform to voice demands. That same year she served as a spokesperson for a delegation that met with Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, and Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy of India, to press for self-government and women's right to vote. The delegation was followed by public meetings and political conferences, and it appeared at the time to be a significant success. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, when they arrived, proved a sharp disappointment: the reforms made no mention of women at all. In 1918, Naidu moved a resolution on women's franchise at the Eighteenth Session of the Bombay Provincial Conference. Her argument was precise: by putting the Conference formally on record in favour of women's enfranchisement, she aimed to show Montagu that the men of India were not opposed to women's rights. At the Bombay Special Congress that same year, she stated plainly that the right to vote is a human right, not a monopoly of one sex. The resulting Government of India Act 1919 still did not enfranchise Indian women, leaving the matter to provincial councils instead. Between 1921 and 1930, provincial councils approved women's franchise in limited form, but the number of women who actually qualified to vote remained very small. Naidu's 1930 pamphlet, distributed to bring women into the political struggle, told them directly that until recently women had remained spectators but now had to take an active role.

• 5. Salt, Arrest, and Resistance

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  Gandhi initially did not want women to participate in the Salt March of 1930, judging it too physically demanding and the risk of arrest too high. Naidu, along with Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and Khurshed Naoroji, persuaded him otherwise. She marched. When Gandhi was arrested on the 6th of April 1930, he appointed Naidu to lead the campaign in his place. The arc of her confrontations with the British had been building for years. She had returned the Kaisar-i-Hind Medal, awarded to her in 1911 for social work during flood relief, as a direct protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of April 1919. She had traveled to London in 1919 as part of the All India Home Rule League. She had represented the Indian National Congress at the East African Indian National Congress in 1924 and presided over the East African and Indian Congress session in South Africa in 1929. In 1928 she traveled to the United States to promote nonviolent resistance. The British jailed her in 1932. She was jailed again in 1942 for joining the Quit India Movement, and that time she was imprisoned for twenty-one months. She was elected to the Constituent Assembly of India to represent Bihar. She gave her only speech there on the 11th of December 1946, and she died before the Constitution was finalised.

• 6. Governor and Final Years

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  When India gained independence in 1947, Naidu was appointed governor of the United Provinces, the region now known as Uttar Pradesh. She was India's first woman governor. She served in that role until her death. On the 15th of February 1949, she returned to Lucknow from New Delhi and her doctors advised her to rest; all official engagements were cancelled. Her health deteriorated quickly. On the night of the 1st of March, bloodletting was performed after she complained of a severe headache. She then collapsed following a fit of coughing. At around 10:40 p.m., she asked the nurse attending to her to sing to her, and the singing put her to sleep. Sarojini Naidu died of cardiac arrest at 3:30 p.m. on the 2nd of March 1949 at the Government House in Lucknow. She was seventy years old. Her last rites were performed at the Gomati River. Her birthday, the 13th of February, is observed in India as Women's Day in recognition of her place among what has been called the country's feminist luminaries. Asteroid 5647 Sarojininaidu, discovered by Eleanor Helin at Palomar Observatory in 1990, was named in her memory; the official designation was published by the Minor Planet Center on the 27th of August 2019. The building in Hyderabad that houses the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication at the University of Hyderabad is the Golden Threshold, named for her first poetry collection and standing as a link between her literary life and her enduring presence in the city where she was born.