Sarojini Naidu: Reclaiming a Kinship

Abstract

In this chapter I try to offer a new way of reading the life and achievement of Sarojini Naidu. As politician, nationalist leader, poet, activist for women’s rights, orator, and celebrity, she was certainly one of the most memorable and colourful Indian women of the last century. She was not only the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress, but also the first woman Governor of a state in independent India. As one of the principal aides and followers of Mahatma Gandhi, she was constantly in the limelight and probably the best-known Indian woman of her time. She also had an international presence as India’s cultural ambassador and spokesperson of the freedom movement. In her life converge some of the dominant cultural, social, and political currents of pre-independence India. Yet, her career exhibits an intriguing paradox. She was one of those great people whose greatness is most difficult to identify and substantiate. Historians of the freedom movement invariably assign to her a minor role in the formation of the Indian nation. Important as a lieutenant and acolyte of Gandhi, by herself and on her own terms, she becomes relatively less significant. Certainly, she made no epoch-making original contribution to either the ideology or practice of the struggle against colonialism. The chapter tries to solve the riddle of Sarojini by suggesting that she was a minor figure in a major mode. Similarly, Sarojini’s poetry mediates between the usually opposing but sometimes complimentary forces of the English poetic tradition and her Indian sensibility, between the politics of nationalism and the aesthetics of feudalism, between the overwhelming power of modernity and the nostalgia for a threatened tradition, between the security of a comfortable patriarchy and the liberating power of the women’s movement. Thus, the text of Sarojini’s life displays both resistance to and cooptation by the dominant ideology of her time which was colonialism. Unlike Tagore, Sarojini was unable to liberate her poetry from these contradictions. Her work remained mired in them; hence, the vague sense of betrayal and eventual hostility of the Indian literary establishment after the initial adoration.