Dialoguing with Empire: The Literary and Political Rhetoric of Sarojini Naidu

Abstract

Poet, feminist, nationalist, orator and letter- writer, Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) was the most celebrated woman in India during her lifetime. When she visited Britain for the first time in 1895, the British literati who took her under their protective wing, stereotypically exoticized her as a ‘petchrw… a child or a toy’.¹ They knew little of the complex layers of Naidu’s cultural background, an embryonic sense of ‘worldliness’, already evident in the young poet as a consequence of her immersion in both Indian and western cultures from early childhood. On the several visits that followed, the British continued to be guided by prevailing orthodoxies which frequently resulted in orientalist interpretations of her identity and poetry. This chapter offers an alternative reading of the formation of Naidu’s literary and political rhetoric that reconstitutes her (against the rise and fall of the British Empire) as an astute dialogist who strategically and expediently manipulated her way through the colonizer’s sometimes myopic ways of seeing.