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Romance and Realism in the poetry of

SAROJINI NAIDU

Romance and Realism in the poetry of SAROJINI NAIDU

DR. SHATAKSHI ANAND

Biblio Publications Delhi

Biblio Publications Publisher and Distributors 85/5 East Moti Bag, Sarai Rohilla, Delhi-110007 e-mail : [email protected] +91-9891095718, +9881846956

ROMANCE AND REALISM IN THE POETRY OF SAROJINI NAIDU

FIRST EDITION: 2018 © RESERVED

450/-

ISBN: 978-81-936617-0-3

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ROMANCE AND REALISM IN THE POETRY OF SAROJINI NAIDU

BY SHATAKSHI ANAND

PREFACE Like Rabindra Nath Tagore and Sri Aurobindo, Sarojini Naidu too was more than a poet; she was one of mother India’s most gifted children, readily sharing her burden of pain, fiercely articulating her agonies and hopes, and gallantly striving to redeem the mother and redeem the time. Her love for India, evident from her passionate involvement with the freedom struggle did, in no way, withhold her from being so enamoured by the poetic Muse. It is rather unfortunate that Sarojini Naidu has been criticized for writing about the colourful land of romance and mystery, the India of the common western imagination, with the essential reality— a real experience, a real landscape and the real people being blurred into a mystified sentimentality. The present book is a humble attempt to correct such myopic perspectives. By focusing attention on the romantic and the real elements which constitute the fabric of her poetry, and by studying the technical skill and brilliance which characterize her poetic expression, it becomes apparent how Sarojini Naidu’s poetry stands the test of universal principles of literary criticism beyond the considerations of national boundaries. The book is divided into six chapters. The first chapterThe Contemporary Scene and the Emergence of Sarojini

Naidu- provides on account of Sarojini’s social, political and literary background. The second chapter –The Singer of Beautiful Songs- presents Sarojini as a lyric poet and singer. The third chapter- The Patriotic Stance- brings out the achievements of Sarojini Naidu, as a writer of national, patriotic and historic songs sung in the spirit of liberty in an age of heroic striving. The fourth chapter-The Critic of life- shows her treatment of the essential reality of human life in all its manifestations. The fifth chapter- Her Craftsmanship gives an account of her art and technique. The concluding chapter records the major findings of the study and highlights her contribution as a nationalist poet of both Romance and Realism. I am beholden to my supervisor Dr. N.K. Ghosh for his unstinted support and cooperation. I am thankful to Dr. Mukhtar Singh for his constant encouragement. To the staff of the Sahitya Akademi Library, New Delhi ; Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Library, Agra and Agra College Central Library for helping me locate valuable material necessary for the completion of this book. Shatakshi Anand

Contents PREFACE

5

THE COMTEMPORARY SCENE AND THE EMERGENCE OF SAROJINI NAIDU

10

THE SINGER OF BEAUTIFUL SONGS

35

THE PATRIOTIC STANCE

59

THE CRITIC OF LIFE

82

HER CRAFTSMANSHIP

106

THE SUMMING - UP

125

BIBLIOGRAPHY

131

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1 THE COMTEMPORARY SCENE AND THE EMERGENCE OF SAROJINI NAIDU Sarojini Naidu lived in one of the most tumultuous periods of Indian history, a period in which a passion for radical change in every walk of life reigned supreme. People had begun to look at everything from a national and revolutionary point of view. In the words of Humayun Kabir: “Old political ideas have crumbled; old social standards have lost their compelling force. The old economic system has been shattered beyond repair. Even religion can no longer console people as in the past. In every sphere of thought and action there is uncertainty, doubt and hesitation with old landmarks swept away, it is not surprising that Indian youth is restless and turbulent”.1 In the 19th century Indian society and religion had become the victims of several evils. Parda pratha, sati pratha, dowry system, child marriage, untouchability etc. are some of the social evils which had become luminant in society. During the last quarter of 19th century and the first half of the 20th century India was not only

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politically slave to the foreign yoke, but socially also it was chained in the shackles of outworn traditions and superstitions. Due to the impact of western culture there grew up a new intelligentsia which displayed the new scientific outlook with rapidity and challenged absoluteness of the old social institutions, religious outlooks and ethical conceptions. The first and foremost problem of those days was the problem of caste system – the steel frame of Hinduism – which divided the Hindu community into a multitude of almost hermetically sealed groups, hierarchically graded and based on birth. The association with the British brought forth new social reforms which in turn, brought about a new grouping of population. The Indian people became differentiated into such categories as capitalists, workers, merchants, tenants, land labours, doctors, lawyers, technicians, with each category being composed of individuals belonging to various castes and communities but having identical material and political interests. Ancient beliefs, superstitions and traditions were replaced by intellect, logic and a rational outlook. Another very significant problem was that of marriage. It is needless to say that the institution of marriage had reached a deteriorating condition by the beginning of the twentieth century. Inequal marriage, child marriage, widowhood and the system of sati were the results of the defective system of marriage. Inspired by the British influence the young man of those times had changed his outlook in this regard. When he tried to materialize his dreams of love and marriage in actual life, he found that the barriers of caste, creed and customs were too strong for him. Hollowed with tradition and sanctified by religion, the agelong institution of untouchability continued to exist in all its barbarous vigour during this period. There prevailed the segregation of a section of the Hindus as untouchable who were precluded from such elementary right as the right of entry to public temples.

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The social reformers and the political leaders such as Gandhi crusaded against untouchability and strove for the spread of education. The condition of women in Indian society was also very miserable. They suffered from the medieval forms of social subordination and suppression for centuries. In brief during this period, the Indians were trying hard to be purified of social evils. In the society a struggle was going on to introduce such measures of social amelioration as abolition of caste and untouchability. Efforts were being made for the emancipation of women. All these measures brought an awareness among the people and roused them to a new consciousness. Towards the beginning of 20th century, the British imperialism opened an all-round offensive against the Indian national economy. Under the British rule India’s economic condition had become very week, Indian trade, Industry and agriculture had been destroyed by the English so that the Indians could not stand against the Britishers in business competition- “One of the most important facts in the history of India during the first century of British rule is the decay of her flourishing trade and Industry”.2 In fact, the history of Indian agriculture under the British rule was the history of the progressive impoverishment of the agricultural populationof the steady growth of their indebtedness of the increasing expropriation of the peasants of their land and their transformation into paupers as the agriculture proletariat. The foremost manifestation of their exploitation was the use of India as the hinterland for the role of British manufactures and the source of raw material for the metropolitan economy. Those were the times when the inflow of private British capital increased. The direct consequence of the new capitalist economic structure established by the British was the emergence of a new middle class. Due to the mechanization of the industries, the population problem of India also began to assume dangerous proportions. The living conditions

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of the laborers were terribly poor and most of them lived a life of perpetual want and misery. The selfish industrial policy of British, the unemployment problem, the increasing poverty of the rural communities, the miserable conditions of the labours and the exploitation of the capitalists were the factors which made the economic life of India quite pitiable. Consequently, a feeling of disappointment and degradation set in the minds of the people which found a clear expression in the poetry of Sarojini Naidu. From the very beginning of the 20th century India had begun to come under the influence of modern means of science. It was under the British rule that modern means of transport and communication appeared in our country. It was the pressure of British industrialists who wanted to import cheap raw materials that led to the development of modern means of transport and communication, especially railways. The phenomenal progress in the field of science also led to the emergence of the press in India. Some popular magazines pertaining to Hindi literature such as ‘Indu’ (1909), ‘Madhuri’ (1923) and ‘Vishal Bharat’ (1928) also appeared during the period. Before the First World War the people of the western countries were eagerly waiting for a millennium which the multifarious discoveries and inventions of science were likely to bring. Thought it was an age of scientific progress and prosperity, yet as far as the international conditions were concerned, science transcended the limits of time and space by providing the boons of electricity, aeroplane, telephone and railways. In spite of all this, the scientists invented many infernal weapons and thus sought to wield scientific power for the annihilation of humanity. During the end of 19th century and the early decades of 20th century, the Indian society was bound in the shackles of age old customs and outdated traditions.

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A few stalwarts of Indian thought and culture undertook the task of sociocultural renaissance. They were Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the found of ‘Brahma Samaj’ who was associated with the abolition of ‘Suttee’, Swami Shraddhananda, Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Dayanand, the leader of Theosophical Society, Mrs. Annie Besasnt, Ram Krishna Paramhansa and his famous disciple Swami Vivekananda, Bal Ganga Dhar Tilak, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindra Nath Tagore. All these thinkers and sociocultural reformers influenced the age and its trend of thinking by their high ideals and aspirations and cultural insight. Infact the sociocultural renaissance proved a blessing in disguise for Indian literature. Sarojini Naidu’s life extends over a period of seventy years. At her birth Queen Victoria, as empress of India ruled this vast subcontinent through her Governor-General stationed at Calcutta ( now Kolkata). When Sarojini died India was an Independent country with a free voice in the comity of nations. The period between her birth and her death witnessed important events in Indian history. There was a marked, though not permanent, change in thought, in social manners, in politico economic principles, and Sarojini contributed her mite towards the emergence of this change in the sociopolitical field. Sarojini Naidu has been acclaimed as one of India’s distinguished authors who have written in English and attained an international status. Unlike most of her sex who take to the ivory tower in moments of isolation and depression, she led, through the vicissitudes of fortune, a very active life of public engagements both as a poet and as a politician. If Mahatma Gandhi lifted politics to the moral sphere, Sarojini Naidu lifted it to artistic sphere. She started her life as a poetess, but when she was drawn in to the rough and tumble of politics, here whole life became a poem and a song. A fragrant flower of the strange sapling of poetry and politics, Sarojini scattered the scent around here wherever she

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happened to be. That she filled in many a dignified post during her life time speaks of the beauty of her personality and the versatility of her genius. In her lifetime Sarojini was quite popular among the IndoAnglian poets and was also the least criticized. The Indian public accepted its own image of Sarojini rather than the image projected by her verse. Some of her poems still appear in school anthologies. Sarojini had never been in and out of fashion; She was always respected and occasionally taken too much for granted. As pointed out by Mokashi-Punekar : Sarojini was the Nightingale of India- read or- unread- the symbol of an achievement at a time when such achievements were badges needed for the Indian mind to establish its pride and identity. 3 Sarojini did not receive any academic honours. Although she frequently visited the Allahabad University, addressed the convocations of several seats of higher learning- Benaras, Agra and Dacca, for example- and was Chancellor of several universities in her capacity as Governor of U.P., no university came forward to confer any degree honoris causa in recognition of her poetical works. This shows that the academic world of her time was reluctant to accept her as a poet worthy of recognition. She was a poet, pure and simple and she paid dearly for it- “ the price of not being taken seriously in the heyday of fame or in the period of comparative neglect”. 4 Sarojini was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879, in a respected family of Brahmins which had migrated from Brahmanagar, a village in East Bengal. Harindra her brother, wrote: Our parents had done everything to make us feel that life was one fluent process of rainbows and fancy happenings. 5 Sarojini was the eldest daughter of Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya and Varada sundari. The Chattopadhyaya’s belonged to an ancient

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line of great Sanskrit scholars who were highly respected in Bengal. Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya was a unique combination of science and literature. His favourite subject was chemistry. Aghorenath had a good command of Sanskrit and was widely read in the literature of the east and the west. He was also a good scholar of English, Hebrew, French, German and Russian. His idea was to learn something new every day. His literary taste has been praised by his contemporaries. He had resolved that his daughter should be given a purely scientific education in order that she might flower in as a mathematician or a scientist. Sarojini’s mother, Varada Sundari, an East Bengali riverside village belle, possessed beauty and qualities to attract the village boy Aghorenath. Her face round like a moon, and her eyes were brimful of mercy, kindness and contemplation and her smile was a blessing to those who stood before her smile was a blessing to those who stood before her. In her youth she had composed some beautiful Bengali lyrics, and had a melodious voice. She had won the viceroy’s gold medal for singing when she was a student in her village school in Bengal. She bore life’s inevitable sufferings with utmost resignation. She was a spiritual lady, who instilled in to her children’s heart belief in GOD. When her husband died, her hair jet black till then turned snow white in a night. Sarojini was really fortunate to have such gifted parents. Sarojini’s girlhood home, according to Harindra, was “a museum of wisdom and culture, a zoo crowded with a medley of strange types—some even verging on the mystic, for our home was open to all”.6it was really a liberal home where Hindus, Muslims and Christians, Parsies and Sikhs, Brahmins and Sudras and indeed all living things had an honoured and equal place. It was a strange confluence of different races and cultures. Lavish hospitality awaited guests here. Apart from the parents Sarojini’s home had many linguists among its inmates. Virendra Nath Chattopadhyaya,

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the eldest brother spoke sixteen languages. Harindra and Sarojini herself were polyglots alike other members of the house. Sarojini’s sisters Sunalini and Suhasini were talented girls and could compose songs. It was in such cultural atmosphere that Sarojini was born and bred. From her very looks people declared that the girl promised a great and glorious future for herself. Sarojini’s married home was also full of song, dance and colour. A generous welcome awaited one and all here, and a glimpse of it can be had in Sarojini’s letter to Arthur Symons, in which she invites her sponsor to come to her lovely home: Come and share my exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adore the sunshine; the voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold and blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And, do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal form my heart’s blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved in to aerial essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the ‘very me’, that part of me that incessantly, and insolently yes, and a little deliberately, triumphs over that other part a thing of nerves and tissues that suffers and cries out, and that must die tomorrow perhaps or twenty years hence. 7 In this home Sarojini was all happy and contented enjoying the love of her husband and sharing the laughter of her children. Sarojini was sent to school at an early age and proved to be a clever pupil, always standing first in her class but her school studies did not interest here as much as the teaching or training she received at her parental home. She became leader in her school, and was a

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rebel from the start. Her father wanted her to be an adept in English, a language which in her early childhood she seemed to have been reluctant to learn. Aghorenath punished her one day when she was nine years old by shutting her up in a room alone. The punishment did its work, and Sarojini since then determined to obey her father and become proficient in English. She soon mastered the language and spoke to her parents only in English, though her mother spoke back to her in Hindustani. She also acquired fluency in Urdu and Persian in her girlhood. She could follow Bengali too. Sarojini has narrated the story of her early poetic endeavours thus:I don’t think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature. My training under my father’s eye was of a serious scientific character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a scientist, but the poetic instinct which I inherited from him and also from my mother (who wrote same lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger. One day when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in algebra it wouldn’t came right, but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it down, from that day my poetic career began. At thirteen I wrote a long poem ‘Lady of the lake’ – 1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I began on the spur of the moment without forethought, just to spite my doctor who said that I was very ill and must not touch a book. My health broke down permanently about this time, and my regular study being stopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat volumes of journals “I took myself very seriously in those days”. 8

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Sarojini began writing English poetry at the age of eleven. She composed a long poem when she was thirteen, from the age of thirteen to fifteen she wrote a number of verses published privately by her father under the title Songs ( 1895). In the Archives of the National Library, Kolkata are preserved Sarojini’s earliest poems printed on rough paper and with the inscription on the cover, “poems by S. Chattopadhyaya, dated 3 rd October 1896”. Songs is a collection of Sarojini’s earliest poems and reveal her precocious mind. Even as a child, Sarojini was a lover of travels and wrote “ Traveller’s Song” in May 1892 at the age of twelve O’er ltalia’s Sunny plains All aglow with rosy flowers, I wander now mid fallen fanes, And now amid of the myrtle bowersButwhosesoeverI may roam I long for thee, my dear home! 9 Another poem, “On my Birthday,” was written on Sarojini’s fourteenth birthday ( February 13, 1893). It brings out the happiness of a girl in immature but spontaneous verse: My birthday! O this day I am fourteen! And childhood’s years on golden wings have fled, Right many a grateful blessing have I seen, And purest joys on me their lustre shed, As flew these years over my happy head. My joys were not what joys to childhood seem; Not on unthinking sports my soul was fed, But nursed it was on many a brighter theme, And lofty high ideas formed my radiant dreams. 10 In March 1893, Sarojini’s poems contained in songs were written at her parental home and at the summer holiday resort of

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Shorapur. It seems that Sarojini was sent to Shorapur because of her budding love for a young doctor, her future husband. Her love for the doctor began after her matriculation. At first this love affair was not approved by her parents and it was decided to send Sarojini away from Hyderabad. The Nizam gave her a special scholarship and she was sent to England in 1895, accompanied by Annie Besant to study first at Kings College, London and then at Girton College, Cambridge. She stayed in England for three years. The classroom seemed to stifle her romantic spirit, which responded to the beauty of the countryside, and she did not attend lectures often. This association with the English countryside, made her choose the flowers and birds and rural life of England as subjects for her poetry. When Sarojini returned to India in 1898.She married Dr. Naidu, M.B., C.M. (Edin), Medical Officer to his highness, the Nizam’s imperial service troops, at Madras on December2 of the same year under the Indian special marriage act, in the teeth of heavy opposition from both sides and to the scandal had to deny at the time of marriage that they were Hindu, Muslims,Christians, Persian, Buddhist,Sikh or Jain. After her marriage, Sarojini built her home “The Golden Threshold”. It was a quiet bungalow set in the midst of a walled in compound and nestling in the shade of trees. A marble plate with the legend” The Golden Threshold” greeted one at the entrance of the house and a huge swing, so common in the south Indian homes, hung in the verandah. It was an easy shelter to which she often returned to seek relief from her travels. Today it is a hotel. Sarojini’s travel abroad constituted in itself a liberal education. She came to know, more or less intimately, all the rising literary men of the day. Sarojini’s youth passed during a time of great literary ferment when Victorian traditions, unable to stand the force of the new thought, were crumbling. The poetry of the nineties marked a

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severance from Victorian poetry. The day of Tennyson – the last of the great Victorians – was over resulting in the setting up of a poetic convention of smooth flowing verse, pretty epithets and onomatopoeic ornamentation: much that was produced had therefore a great deal of watery sentimentality. A reaction against Tennysonion convention and sentimentality is visible, even while Tennyson was alive, in the rugged simplicity of Browning, the vehement passion of the pre-pahaelites, the purely classical thought and form of Arnold. The revolt had already come, and the young enthusiasts of the nineties put the last nail in to coffin of this tradition. The life and movement of cities came to inspire the voice of the new singer. As a product of the age she lived in, Sarojini had inherited some of its characteristics. She sang of: The solace of faith to the lips that falter, The succor of hope to the hands that fail, The tidings of joy when Peace shall triumph, When Truth shall conquer and Love prevail.11 Sarojini’s literary career came to a premature end as an act of voluntary surrender at the altar of the motherland. Even in her early years she was both socially and politically a rebel. Whenever she appeared on the platform, it was in the dual but complementary role as the spokesperson of Indian womanhood and as the soldier of Indian freedom. She fearlessly condemned evil customs such as infant marriage, nautches, extravagant expenditure on social and religious occasions and the glaring disparity of age between girls and men when their marriages were arranged. She wagged many a battle on the political front in the cause of women’s franchise. She pleaded before montage, the Southborough committee, and the joint parliamentary committee, and by her eloquence and fervor advanced the cause of Indian woman. She toured every part of India and addressed

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woman’s meetings and presided over woman’s conferences, and made the biggest single contribution to the awakening of Indian womanhood. 12 In one of her speeches she thundered form the platform: “You talk of Indian womanhood, you talk of the courage and devotion that took Savitri to the very realms or death to win back her husband’s soul. Yet to the savitri of today you deny that power to win back the national life from the depths of death”. 13 In 1917, when Mrs. Annie Besant was elected that first woman President of the Indian National congress on Mrs. Besant’s right and left sat Sarojini Naidu and Bi Amma, the mother of the Ali Brothers ( Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali). The presence of this triumvirate was a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity as well as the dawn of the era of women in Indian politics. Even early as 1906 Sarojini cast a spell on men of the eminence of Gokhale. Her personal association with Gopal Krishna Gokhale commenced, as it ended, with a written message. It had fallen to Sarojini to propose the resolution on the education of women at the Calcutta session of the All India Conference, 1906. Something in her speech moved Gokhale sufficiently to pass her some hurried and cordial sentences which, according to Sarojini’s own statement, struck the keynote of all their future intercourse: May I take the Liberty, he wrote to offer you my most respectful and enthusiastic congratulations? Your speech was more than an intellectual treat of the highest order. It was a perfect piece of art. We all felt for the moment to be lifted to a higher plane. 14 One evening in Poona, stirred by some deep emotions, Gokhle told Sarojini words of counsel and warning. He spoke of the unequalled happiness and privilege of service for India… He said: Stand here with me with the stars and the hills for witness, and in their presence consecrate your life and your talent, your song and your speech, your thought and your dream to the

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motherland. O poet, see visions from the hill tops and spread abroad the message of hope to the toilers in the valleys. 15 Sarojini was in England when the First World War (1914-18) broke out. For the first time in her life she met Mahatma Gandhi and it was in London. The Mahatma had described how it happened. He was organizing an ambulance unit to help the British war effort. The Byceum, a ladies’ club, undertook to make as many clothes for the soldiers as they could. He writes: Shrimati Sarojini Naidu was a member of this club and threw herself whole heartedly in to the work. This was my first acquaintance with her. She placed before me a heap of clothes which had been cut to pattern, and asked me to get them all sewn up and return them to her. I welcomed her demand and with the assistance of friends got as many clothes made as I could manage during my training for first aid. 16 When she died on March 2, 1949, the work of one generation was over, it was passed on to the succeeding generation. Now the new entrants would carry it on. What would be the attitude of the new generation towards the old? Would it be one of gratitude, or criticism, or pardon for mistake ? Children, my children, who wake to inherit The ultimate hope of ourtravailing spirit, Say, when your young hearts shall take to their keeping, The manifold dreams have sown for your reaping, Is it praise, is it pain you will grant us for guerdon? Anoint with your love or arraign with your pardon? 17 Another great influence on Sarojini was that of Sir Edmund Gosse. Sarojini was sent, to England for further studies. She was fortunate to have formed a few literary friendships there. One such friendship was with Edmund Gosse, the well-known English critic. Sarojini was introduced to him in January 1896. To Miss Manning’s modest rooms used to come some of the great literary figures of

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the day, and it was here that Sarojini saw Edmund Gosse for the first time. It was at Miss Manning’s that she saw also William Archer, who did so much to popularize lbsen in England, and William Heinemann, her future publisher. She wrote to Gosse in 1896: I do not dare to trust myself to thank you for what you said on Sunday. You cannot know what these words meant to me, no people always colour my life, how when I am in the very depth of self-disgust and despair as I often am- they will give me new hope and new courage- no, you cannot know! Poetry is the one thing I love so passionately, so intensely, so absolutely that it is my very life of life and now you have told me that I am a poet- I am a poet! I keep repeating it to myself to try to realise it. Will you let me tell you a little about myself because I want you to know you have been an influence on my life ever since I was eleven years old. 18 and As you [ Edmund] have been for so long so good an influence in my life I wanted you to go on forever; I will send you everything I write and you must tell me what you think. I want you to be more severe and exacting than ever, the better I do, because I do not want to outlast the years but the centuries. 19 Her early work which was never published, was imitative of her readings in English verse—in Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Swinburne and the pre-Raphaelites, they were merely full of English colours, flowers, odours, skylarks and nightingales. The celebrated English critic advised her to consign all that she had written in a falsely English vein to the waste-paper basket and start afresh with some sincere, penetrating analysis of native passion of the principles of antique religion, and of the soul-stirring mysterious intimations of the East. He also advised her not to write about “robins and skylarks” of midland countries, but about fruits, flowers and trees of India, especially of the Deccan. With the

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docility and the rapid appreciation of genius, Sarojini instantly accepted and acted upon the suggestion. And thereafter, her writings tended to be typically Indian in the choice of subjects and sentiments. She showed Gosse some of her poems. He was disappointed. He felt that she had been “ anglicising her feelings”. Gosse advised her to leave English vein and to seek inspiration from India and not from England: I Implored her to consider that from an Indian of extreme sensibility, who has mastered not merely the language, but the prosody of her west that we wished to receive was, not a reshuffle of Anglo-Saxon sentiment in an Anglo-Saxon setting, but some revelation of her heart of India, some sincere penetrating analysis of native passion… 20 Without such sincere advice,she might have continued to write in the false vein. The sunlight, snow-capped Himalayas might have remained lost in the fog and mist of England. The champak flowers, the jasmine garlands, and the intoxicating Indianscenes might not have found a place in her poetry and she might have continued to sing of tulips and golden daffodils. The Bul-Bul and Koel might have remained in oblivion under the western spell of nightingales, skylarks and robins. The flowing rivers of India might have remained silent as the silent ocean of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”. Soon after her acquaintance with Edmund Gosse, Sarojini became one of the most welcome and intimate of his guests. When he came to learn of her poetic aptitude he entreated her to show her poems to him. They were given to him with reluctance. He hastily examined them as soon as he was alone, but was disappointed. In the opinion of Gosse, the poems were: Skillful in form, correct in grammar and blameless in sentiment, but they had the disadvantage of being totally without individuality. They were western in feeling and in imagery; they were founded on reminiscences of Tennyson and Shelley; I am

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not sure that they did not even breathe on atmosphere of Christian resignations. 21 On the advice of Edmund Gosse, Sarojini gave up writing on Western themes. Thereafter with the vibrant optimism she wrote: “ let us rise, Omy heart, let us gather the dreams that remain….! 22 Meanwhile she was also introduced to Arthur Symons, who was the first English poet and critic to suggest her to publish her poems which had individual beauty of their own. He appreciated her poetry for the expression of “ a rare temperament, the temperament of a women of the East”. 23 If Edmund Gosse gave a pragmatic direction to Sarojini as a poetess, it was Arthur Symons who fully understood her as a person. Sarojini first met Symons in London in 1896. She read earliest of her verses to him; the later ones were sent to him from India in 1904, when she was twenty-five. This distinguished man of English letters suggested her to publish her poems which, he thought, had an individual beauty of their own. But she hesitated, and wrote to him that his letter made her very proud and very sad: Proud because it came from a big gun in the field, and “Sad” because she thought that her poems were not beautiful to be published. But Symons valued Sarojini’s poems for their flamboyancy and ephemeral note. Symons conceded that they did not express the whole of that temperament, but they did express its essence: there was “an Eastern Magic” in them. Symons ultimately succeeded in this persuasion that Sarojini’s poems be published. Symons prefaced an excellent essay to The Golden Threshold, recalling how Sarojini’s poetic career had begun and what had been her physical appearance then. In his introduction to The Golden Threshold, Symons wrote: “To those who knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes…” 24

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Symons spoke of her “low voice” and love of aloofness, and, like Gosse, was impressed by her Eastern maturity; and first there was the wisdom of the East.” He noticed in her a passionate tranquility of mind, before which everything means and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. According to him, her body was never without suffering, or her heart without conflict but neither the body’s weakness nor the heart’s violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of the Buddha on his lotus throne. His introduction to The Golden Threshold is extremely sensitive and presents us a living picture, of Sarojini as she was in those days. In one place, Symons says of her: There was something else, something hardly personal, something which belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian which I realized, wondered at, and admired, is her passionate tranquility of mind, before which everything means and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. 25 How well he summed up the very role she was to play in her country’s affairs where, in the face of meanness triviality and controversies, her wit and wisdom saw to it that differences were “burnt away in smoke”. Symons was in constant correspondence with her, and she laid bare her very heart to him. Their friendship proved extremely fruitful for the young poetess. Sarojini’s trip to Italy was also a revelation. The Italian scene, with its warm and sensuous luminosities, exercised a therapeutic influence not only in a physical but also in a spiritual sense. It restored her to zest for life, the enjoyment of this world of sense and succession. She wrote to a friend: This Italy is made of the gold of dawn and daylight, The gold of the stars and dancing in weird, Enchanting rhythms through this magic month 26

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Sarojini also met the members of the Rhymers Club who made her understand the verbal and technical accomplishment, the mastery of phrase owned rhythm. Sarojini, like the Rhymers, stuck to the verbal felicity, metrical discipline, and musical texture. Sarojini, in her frequent visits to Bengal, soon got to know Tagore and became an intimate visitor to Jorasanko, Tagore’s ancestral home. On march 15, 1919, Sarojini was asked to speak at the unveiling of Rabindranath Tagore’s portrait by the editor of the Hindu, Kasturiranga Iyengar at the hall of the student’s Home in Madras. She praised the poet and remarked that she was in England when his Gitanjali won worldwide fame. She truly understood the genius of Tagore when she exclaimed: “For one, to adequately understand the real meaning of his mystic genius, one must take into account the traditional mysticism and the traditional spirituality of Bengal. Every race has its own traditional genius that transmitted itself from age to age. Genius, like Character,beauty and many other things in life, was due largely to environment. The beauty born of the murmuring of Bengal forests, of those green fields and wide rivers and the dark July clouds of Bengal, had been transmitted into the glory and scenery of Rabindranath’s poetry.” Sarojini had profound respect for Tagore and his wise utterances, although she could never read Bengali, and hence Tagore’s poems, in the original. Her favorite occupation was to make someone read out to her in Bengali the poems of Tagore for her understanding. Tagore’s songs and Rabindra Sangeet endlessly delighted her. Her biographer padmini Sengupta, records that she heard Sarojini at parties to into ecstasies over Tagore’s songs. Sarojini’s friendship with Tagore lasted throughout her life. She not only admired his poetry and songs, but greatly appreciated his paintings. In December 1933, Sarojini arranged a Tagore week in Bombay and organized exhibition of his paintings, dramatizations

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of his plays, and lectures on his genius. Tagore himself arrived with fifty members from Shantiniketan on December 23, and an exhibition was opened in the Town hall. Sarojini soon became familiar and respected figure in shantiniketan and a Governor of Visva Bharti. On December, 22, 1948, Sarojini paid her last visit to Shantiniketan and launched with Rabinidranath’s son Ratindranath at Uttarayan. Thus Sarojini had a great impact of Tagore in her life and career. She continued her friendship with the Tagore family and connection with Shantiniketan till the very last. Sarojini always held Tagore in high esteem, and his influence on her was immense. Her poetic career spans from 1898 to 1927 but she composed her best poetry up to 1914, the year she came in contact with Mahatma Gandhi. During this brief period, she composed a corpus of poetry which time will not willingly let die. Her entire poetical work is contained in four volumes: (i)The Golden Threshold (ii)The bird of time (iii)The Broken Wing (iv)The Feather of Dawn. Sarojini’s first major collection of poems is the Golden Threshold. It was first published in 1905 in England with an introduction by Arthur Symons, and was dedicated to Edmund Gosse “ The very title of the book” in the opinion of Ansari, “Suggests the presence of undistinguished emotion conveyed in colourful and gorgeous imagery” 27 Due to the sudden fame for the book in India and abroad, some of the comments that appeared in the press were noteworthy. The lyrics in this collection reveal that in composing them the poetess was moved by human emotions of joy and grief, love, sorrow, success and failure. “Suttee”, “Coromandel Fishers” etc. reveal

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various phases of emotional life. “To A Buddha Seated on a Lotus” sums up Indian Philosophy of contentment and self-realization. The Times of London wrote on its publication: Her poetry seems to sing itself as if her swift thought and strong emotion sprang into lyrics themselves…, in this case the marriage of the western culture with eastern has not proved barren. It has given the poet new eyes with which to see old things. The result is something unique which we need not hesitate to call poetry. 28 Various newspapers and critics welcomed the emergence of a new poet and showered praises on Sarojini Naidu’s poetic art. Sarojini Naidu’s second poetical publication. The Bird of Time appeared in 1912 with an introduction by Edmund Gosse. The book was dedicated to her father Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya and to her mother Smt. Varada Sundari. Its title was borrowed from Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyats of Omar Khayyam: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly- and Lo! The Bird is on the Wing. 29 It has one hundred and seven pages containing forty six poems which are divided into four sections entitled “ Songs of Love and Death”, “Songs of the Spring Time”, “Indian Folk Songs”and”Songs of Life”. The Broken Wing came out in 1917. It was the last of Sarojini’s books published in her lifetime. The foreword of The Broken Wing was written by Sarojini Naidu herself. The dedication, written at Hyderabad, Deccan on August 10, 1916, is in the rhetorical vein: To the dream of Today and The hope of Tomorrow It contains 61 short poems. G.K. Gokhale asked her “Why should a song- bird like you have a broken wing?” 30 and her answer

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in the opening poem itself was “Behold! I scale the stars upon my broken wing! 31 The Broken Wing shows a marked decline in her lyrical faculty, and it shows “The woman, the mother, the patriot remained, but the poet was now no more than a memory”. 32 Though Sarojini Naidu scarcely wrote any poetry after 1917, yet she always called herself a “wandering Singer”. Her three books of poems were heartily welcomed by all her readers. One volume of Sarojini’s collected poems The Sceptered Flute was produced in America by Dodd, Mead and Co., in 1937 with an introduction by Joseph Auslander. This volume was rapidly sold out and therefore another publication appeared under the same title, The Sceptered Flute Songs of India by Kitabistan in 1943. The publishers said that they had great pleasure in presenting for the first time inIndia the collected works of ‘our greatest living poet’. Though Sarojini was deeply involved in the political movement of the country, she kept the lamp of her poetry lighted, at least in a limited degree. In the year 1928, Sarojini told her friend, Dr. Amar Nath Jha that she would write a book called The Feather of the Dawn but “ We heard no more of this collection and it is to be feared that the poems are lost,” 33 says Jha. But the collection was not lost and after the death of Sarojini Naidu, her daughter Padmja Naidu, collected and edited her mother’s unpublished poems in a slim volume of 30 poems entitled The Feather of Dawn which was brought out by Asia Publishing House, Bombay in 1961. The Collection shows that Sarojini did not abandon poetry as has been supposed by some. Her poetic vein did not dry up and the lilting tunes of a number of lyrics in her last collection, bring out that she continued to sing like a song bird up to the very end. Sarojini’s era was that of the sonnet with its disciplines of form, the ode with its call to higher thought, and the lyric with its

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emphasis upon imagery and colour. She was a genuine child of the age she lived in, and followed its norms and practices. Further, it is very likely that the reason for her distaste of modern forms in art and literature was something much closer to her intrinsic nature. In modern poetry, there is perhaps truth, but no exaltation of spirit. What rings through many of her poems is this heroic transformation of the mere mortal in to a divinely possessed person lifted to higher realms, such as in her ode “ To India”. O young through all thy immemorial years! Rise, Mother, rise regenerate from thy gloom, And, like a bride high-mated with the spheres, Beget new glories from thine ageless womb ! 34 It is certainly this aspect of her nature that took her in to the service of her country. She was not in favour of verse libre, and worked under the influence of the Rhymers. Her world is a mingled fare of rainbow and romance, of sunlight and starlight, and at the same time of death and deprivation. Wonderful lights exist side by side with shadows in her world. Sarojini’s romantic yearnings are to be clearly seen in her poetry throughout. The great gifted and glorious daughter of India worked hard and kept her promise till the last. The Bharat Kokila, one of the greatest India’s daughters passed away on March 2, 1949. A black bordered gazette of India, extraordinary was issued on March 3, 1949 announcing Sarojini Naidu’s death. The Government paid its tribute by calling her “a brilliant orator”, a great poet, person endowed with unusual charm and sense of humour as well as a genius in oratory, administrative skills and popular leadership. A memorial stand today on the banks of Gomati river. Tributes poured in from all parts of India. It is true that a poet is a person of sharp sensibility and deep insight, and is primarily guided and controlled by his inner urges.

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But he is also a social being, he comes into contact with other persons, places and things, and thus gains in experiences. These outer experiences supply food to his inner experiences. A poet who has seen life in its entirety will, as a matter of fact, be able to point a rich and variegated picture of the world for the benefit of readers. As for Sarojini Naidu, she had seen life full and whole and acquired a wide range of experiences. She was in touch with so many celebrities of the day, and learnt much from the during the impressionable years of her career.

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Humayun Kabir, Our Heritage (Bombay: National Books, 1946), p. 89 Majumdar & Chaudhary, An Advance History of India (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 799. Shankar Mokashi Punekar, “A Note on Sarojini Naidu”-Indian Writing in English ( Dhrwar; 1968), p. 181. Ibid, p. 183. Harindra Nath Chattopadhyay, Life and Myself vol. 1 (Bombay: Nalanda Pub., 1948), p. 7. Ibid Arthur Symon, “Introduction” The Golden Threshold (London: Welliam Heinemann, 1905), pp. 17-18. Ibid, pp. 11-12. Sarojini Naidu, “Traveler’s Song” (unpublished poem Calcutta: National Library). Sarojini Naidu, “On My Birthday” (unpublished poem). Sarojini Naidu “The Faery Isle of Janjira” The Sceptred Flute, (Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1943), p.122. Hindustan Times, March 3, 1949.

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13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

Speech on National education of Women,(Lahore: Bradlaugh Hall, April 6, 1916). Sarojini Naidu “Lovely Comrade” Reminiscences of Gokhale, (Bombay: Chronicle, Feb 19, 1915 and later broughtout as a booklet). Sarojini Naidu “Lovely Comrade” Reminiscences of Gokhale, (Bombay: Chronicle, Feb 19, 1915 and later brought out as a booklet). M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or edited by Mahindra Desai, (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Pub. House, 1940), p. 426. Sarojini Naidu, “At Dawn” The Sceptred Flute, pp. 129-30. A letter to Edmund Gosse by Sarojini Naidu in 1896. Ibid. K.R. S. Iyengar, “Indian writing in English”, (New Delhi: Sterling Pub., 1985), p. 209. Edmund Gosse, “Introduction” The Bird of Time, (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p.4. Sarojini Naidu, “In The Forest” The Sceptred Flute, p.33. Arthur Symons, “Introduction” The Golden Threshold, (London: Welliam Heinemann, 1905), pp.18-20. Ibid, p.5. Ibid, pp. 16-17. Quoted by Iqbal Singh, illustrated weekly, November of 1952. A.A. Ansari, “The poetry of Sarojini Naidu” Indo-English Literature(Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1977), p. 73. Quoted in The Times of London. Edward Fitzgerald’s, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, (Bombay: Jaico Publ. House, 1948), p.26. Sarojini Naidu,” The Broken Wing” The Sceptred Flute, p. 145. Ibid. K.R.S. Iyenger, Indian Writing in English, (New Delhi: Sterling Pub., 1985), p. 218. Amarnath Jha, Sarojini Naidu, (A Primitive Pub.), p. 11. Sarojini Naidu,”To India” The Sceptred Flute, p. 58.

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2 THE SINGER OF BEAUTIFUL SONGS Sarojini, “ The Singer of Beautiful Songs” will always be remembered and recalled by her two names: “ The Nightingale of India” and” Bharat Kokila” as Mahatma Gandhi ornamented her. She emerged as the very soul of India and was attached firmly to its soil. Despite all her western garb and literary affiliation with the English poets her sensibility was “ wholly native”. Blessed with remarkable creative talent, she adroitly composed charming songs with a striking note of native fervor. In this task she fell in the long tradition of Indian women writers since the Vedic age. In the tradition of Vishwavara and Ghosha, the singers of sonorous songs in Vedas of Gargie, Maitreyi and Sulabha, the unchangeable upanishedic debaters of Sumana, Shyama, Sumangala, sangh Mitra and Rajyashri. She blossomed into a poet under a powerful influence of English Romantic poets like—Shelley and Keats and tutored by romantic critics—Gosse and Symons she remained every inch a romantic. She could not become as Edmund Gosse, says she hoped to be: “ A Keats” of India but her poetry possessed an “Individual Beauty” of its own. She may be compared to Shelley and Keats in this connection. Sarojini’s early verses were western in sentiment and

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imagery, and they were founded on reminiscences of Tennyson and Shelley. Written under the impact of the Romantics, Sarojini’s work conveys an impression of exuberance and heat, for , on the whole, she lives not in high reflective moments, nor even in profoundly emotional ones, but in a brilliant beauty of suggestive sensation. Sarojini loves to be luxurious; She deals with tangibilities, here genius is predominantly visual and auditory sight and sound and vibrant palpableness are the constituents of her soul. Sarojini’s success lies in her using the sensuous basis of poetry for the one legitimate aim all poetic language must have: the revelation of realities not quite of earth. Her poems draw aside the veil of the gross world and show us brief vistas of some subtle abiding and perfect sense- existence the colour and cry of a dream plane which is a kind of magic background to the earth. In her sensuousness Sarojini is very close to Keats. Her world is a mingled fare of rainbow and romance, of sunlight and starlight and at the same time of death and deprivation. Like Keats again her poetic motto was around beauty in its perfect form. A few poetic images, gathered up at random from among a variety of arresting ones, will suffice to illustrate how exquisitely the nakedness of fact can be robed in “fancy weeds” and with what pleasing effect. Consider, for example, how the common is lifted from commonplace in a suggestive simile: Anklet bells! Frail-anklet bells! That hold Loves ancient mystery As hide the lips of limpid shells Faint tonesof the remembered sea 1 Sarojini developed her thought with images, which at times may seem a trifle overelaborate; but they make less familiar things more real and more familiar. We are naturally pleased with comparisons.

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One can scarcely be a lyric poet without a masterly handling of the imagery: and so to read Sarojini is to find the colour and condensed significance of metaphor grandly used and personification made an impassioned perception. Sarojini is a talented melodist, charming us with the sweetness of her lines. Her songs attain to unity because they contain one cry. The cry of the dominantunmediated emotion at the moment of writing. She finds great joy in beauty and her palanquin bearers burst out in rapture again and again over the beauty of the lady whom they are carrying. In a song of two stanzas similes tell how the palanquin bearers felt when they carried a delicate and beautiful Indian maiden in their palanquin: 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 foam of a streams, 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. Softly, O softly we bear her along, She hangs like a star in the dew of our songs; She springs like a beam on the brow of the tide, She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride. Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing We bear her along like a pearl on a string. 2 The similes clearly, are used, not to explain but to fill the mind’s eye with pictures of an elusive delicacy and beauty. Every critic who has reviewed Sarojini’s works has been struck by the harmony of her lines, whether she sings of the beautiful dancers with houri like faces who bewitch the voluptuous watches of the night or of the coromandel fishers out to capture the leaping wealth of the tide. Her command of lingering cadence, her unfailing genius in the apt use of epithets, and her artistic use of alliteration are all

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evident in such songs as “Indian Dancers” the “Palanquin Bearers” and “June Sunset”. Sarojini’s genius was essentially lyrical, like Shelley’s. Her lyrical poetry occupies an important place in Indo- English poetry. The majority of her poetry constitutes of songs, and the song impulse penetrats even those poems which are not lyrical. She has written a few ballads and narrative poems, but these, too are filled with her particular mood and emotion. Sarojini Naidu’s art of lyrics has been much influenced both by British romanticism, especially, Persian and Urdu poetic modes, with their characteristics opulence. In ardour of passion and mystical imagination, and in the witchery of music she has no equal. The songs cry rises straight from her heart and goes straight to the heart of the reader. That is why she has been called “The perfect singing God”. Her songs are the poetic cry of the Joy, sorrow, exultation and are suffused with emotional intensity. For their emotional intensity, spontaneity and music, rapture and simplicity, personal melancholy and prophetic passion Sarojini’s songs have become part and parcel of human memory. Sarojini’s songs are incomparable for their technique: Sarojini Naidu’s finest songs have a perfect structure and an exquisite finish and, she handles various metres and stanza forms with consummate ease. To her and to Rilke; singing was being; of all Indian English poets of her generation she has perhaps the finest ear and her mastery of words- music is indubitable… 3 She has attempted every form of the songs as hymn, ode, elegy, sonnet, and has achieved excellence in each like Keats. An object of beauty was her a joy for ever and beauty of every kind thrilled her and inspired her to poetic activity. To quote A.N. Dwivedi: Like Keats and Shelley, she employed a high – browed diction, which is steeped in passion, pulse and power. Her

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sonorous and unusual words add to the subtlety of expression of ideas and display a keen perception of beauty 4 Her eyes turn towards beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun, and it is this beauty which she celebrates in one song after another. The beauty lifted her up and transformed her into an elfin spirit and gave her a “strange sensation”. In the poem “ Indian Dancers” Sarojini reveals the richness of words and their music she sings: Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially panting, What passionate be some a flaming with fire Drink deep of the hush of the hyacinth heavens That glimmer around them in fountains of light; O wild and entrancing the strain of keen music That cleaveth the stars like a wail of desire, And beautiful dancers with houri-like faces Be-witch the voluptuons watches of night. 5 Her song appeal is various, and wonderful and full of the magic of melody. Her personal songs are idealistic in character. Sarojini always longs for an ideal. Her ideals are many. Sometimes one finds her in pursuit of death, sometimes in pursuit of love and sometimes in pursuit of a new millennium that she would like to bring about in this world. A song is marked by simplicity, brevity, spontaneity, music and melody and it is essentially these characteristics which her poetry has. Sarojini’s songs are marked by spontaneity of expression; variety of music and songs come to her as spontaneously and naturally as do leaves to a tree; initially she was a singer of song and a “ song bird” and is rightly called the ‘ nightingale of India’. She herself wrote to Arthur Symons: … I have the vision and the desire, but the voice, if I could write just one poem full of beauty and spirit of greatness, I

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should be exultantly silent forever, but I sing just as the birds do, and my songs are as ephemeral. 6 A true poet signs as the birds do; he sings because he must. It is this birdlike quality which she possesses in plenty. It was the quality which Keats had in mind when he said that poetry should come like leaves on the trees or not come at all. This quality is conspicuous in her fold songs. With the experiences of life gathering upon her, it intensified and deepened and assumed a more sober colouring in her later poetry. Sarojini Naidu is a singer of beauty of human joys and suffering. In the poems “ Guerdon” Sarojini prays to God to award suitable rewards to various objects, creatures and human beings and that fields and forests should be graced by the gifts of spring. She sings: To hawk and to heron The pride of their wing; Her grace to the panther, Her tints to the dove… The rapture of Love ! 7 Sarojini’s songs are marked by spontaneity of expression and easy and graceful diction. Her genius was essentially lyrical. All her poetry is really lyrical. The lyrical impulse penetrates into her un-lyrical verses, be it pictorial, epical or dramatic; as it also does with Swinburne, and it does much less with Wordsworth, or Byron or Keats. In “Guerdon” she expresses her feelings with spontaneity and melody: To the hand of the diver The gems of the tide, To the eyes of the bridegroom To face of his bride; To the heart of a dreamer The dreams of his youth…, For me, O my Master,

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The rapture of Truth ! 8 In the first stanza of this poem Sarojini says that the priests and prophets may exult in the propagation of their creeds, and the kings and their followers may feel pleasure in their glories triumphs, but she desires to be a singer of love and truth and set her goal in life: “ For me, O my Master, The rapture of Song !” 9 She was not an idle singer, shutting her eyes from the suffering of mankind. In her song “ The Faery Isle of Janjira” She conspicuously describes her ideal—her infinite love for mankind: In to the strife of the throng and the tumult, The war of sweet Love against folly and wrong; Where brave hearts carry the sword of battle, ‘ Tis mine to carry the banner of song, The solace of faith to the lips that falter, The succor of hope to the hands the fail, The tidings of joy when Peace shall triumph, When Truth shall conquer and Love prevail. 10 Sarojini’s songs are ephemeral, as she doubted. Some of them like “To a Buddha Seated on Lotus”, “ In Salutation of Eternal peace”, “ June Sunset”, “ Summer Woods”, “ The Old Woman”, etc. have stood the wear and tear of time by virtue of their poetical excellence and undisputed lyrical quality. In the song “The Time of Roses” she expresses the enchanting beauty and ravishing perfume of lovely roses which bloom in plenty everywhere: In bright fields and garden closes How they burgeon and unfold ! How theysweep o’er tombs and towers In voluptuous crimson showers And untrammeled tides of gold ! 11 They attract wild bees by their sweet and magical perfume and scatter the abundant wealth of their beauty and scent, which rival

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the turban plume of her lover, which is carried, by winds in all directions and, thus, the entire atmosphere becomes magical and sweet scented. Sarojini Naidu was fascinated by the music and melody of words. Their musical sounds thrill the reader’s heart. In her songs she attains a high degree of rhythmical beauty and variety. She was master of musical suggestion, the use of words as song. She had indeed inner and outer music and the whole of effect of her metre and the very sound and sense of language canbe changed by a change in her mood. Though it can’t be too clearly understood that both metre and mood are in the control of her art, in her method of dealing with words only her inner music had a very remarkable effect upon her outer music making each a living instrument of her sorrow and her soul. Naturally her genius did not lean to blank verse, for she had a very highly developed art of rhyme. The rhymes of her great songs are unique. There is never the least trace of effort in their simplicity and force. Her rhymes nearly always achieve either by means of a pause, or by position or by sheer sonority and emphasis a splendid and arresting isolation. Moreover, emotion comes to her, as it were, in a rhythmical harmony: Lord Buddha, on thy Lotus-throne, With praying eyes and hands elate, What mystic rapture dost thou own. Immutable and ultimate? 12 Sarojini did not seek to grapple with life’s problems as does a philosopher. Beauty made her nerve tingle and stirred her in to quivering songs. She poignantly cherishes the sweet and loving memory of her beloved. In “ The Festival of Memory” she frequently sings: Doth repture hold a feast, Doth sorrow keep a fast

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For love’s dear memory Whose sweetness shall outlast The changing winds of Time, Secret and unsurpassed. 13 Sarojini’s latter songs are distinguished by a note of melancholy which never mars her love for life. Melancholy is the result of the grim spectacle of human suffering and frustration in love. In the song “ In Salutation to the Eternal Peace” she expresses her sorrow and love for mankind: Say, shall I heed dull presages of doom, Or dread the rumoured loneliness and gloom, The mute and mythic terror of the tomb? For my glad heart is drunk and drenched with Thee, O inmost wine of living ecstasy! O inmost essence of eternity! 14 Emotional intensity and exultation is another characteristic of a song, and this emotional intensity and ecstasy also characterize the songs of Sarojini Naidu. The song proper is the product of a swift momentary and passionate impulse coming from without for the most part, suddenly awakening the poet into a vivid life, seizing upon him and setting him on fire. It is a shortlived fire, but it completely possesses the poet as longs as it lasts. Sarojini’s songs are characterized by a great intensity of feeling and depth of passion. The following lines of “ The Broken Wing” illustrate the intensity of her feeling: Shall spring that wakes mine ancient land again, Call to my wild and suffering heart in vain ? Or Fate’s blind arrows still the pulsing note Of my far- reaching, frail, unconquered throat? Or a weak bleeding pinion daunt or tire My flight to the high realms of my desire? Behold ! I rise to meet the destined spring

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And scale the star upon my broken wing! 15 There is one emotion described in all its intensity in a song. All her songs possess the emotional depth and intensity. The joys of spring, the rapture of love, the suffering of lovers in separation, colourful spectacles of Indian life, the mystic peace enjoyed by Buddha and numerous other emotions thrill her and in the heat of emotion she begins to sing. Cousins aptly says: The poems like “ The Broken Wing” were of a depth of emotional intensity that swept me of my feet. I remember especially the love and reverence which she poured in to her poems to her father and her national guru, Gokhale. 16 There is a whole class of Sarojini’s songs which deffy analysis; which purposely darken and blur the outlines of thought and emotion whenever those outlines tend to become clear; which laugh at method; which when we think we catch their meaning, glide in to something else, leaving the thought we seemed to attain unfinished; in which nothing is finished; but which all the same, leave a vivid impression behind them of the state of Sarojini’s feeling of which we are often conscious. Her nature songs and spring songs follow the pattern of the ancient Indian classical poetry to a great extent. The sights and sounds and scenes of nature, especially those of spring, thrill her and rapturously begins to sing: Young leaves grow green on the banyan twigs, And red on the peeple tree, The honey-birds pipe to the budding figs And honey blooms call thee bee. Popies squander their fragile gold In the silvery aloe- brake, Coral and ivory lilies unfold. 17 In seasons of India, particulary the spring, fascinate her, she sings of the joys of the spring in a number of songs. Sarojini Naidu finds joy in the widest commonalty spread in the realm nature.

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The melodious songs of bul-bul, the beauty and fragrance of rose, dew-drops glittering on the blades of grass and the petals of flowers, the musical movement of zephyr are the numerous expression of joy in the springtime. In “ The joy of the Springtime”, Sarojini expresses the sensuous beauty of springtime: Springtime, O Spring time, what is your essence, The lift of a bulbul, the laugh of a rose, The dance of the dew on the wings of the moonbeam, The voice of the zephyr that sings as he goes, The hope of a bride or the dream of a maiden Watching the petals if gladness unclose 18 An undercurrent of powerful emotions runs in “Ecstasy”. The poetess aims at arousing similar emotions with intensity in the hearts of her readers: Their joy form birds and the streams let us borrlow, O heart! Let us sing, The years are before us for weeping and sorrow…. To-day it is spring ! 19 The poetess describes her feelings in a dramatic manner which may be called the monologue form which was successfully practiced by Robert Browing. Some of her songs like “ Vasant Panchami”, “The coming of Spring”, “The magic of Spring”, etc. are noticeable for wistful melancholy and indicate the occurrence of some emotional crises in the poet’s life. The coming of spring cannot delight her: O spring, I cannot run to greet Your coming as I did of old, Clad in a shining veil of gold, With champa-buds and blowing wheat And silver ankets on my feet 20 And I buried my heart so deep, so deep,

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Under a secret hill of pain, And said: “ O broken pitiful thing Ever the magic spring shall ne’er wake Thee to life again, Tho’ march words glimmer with opal rain And passionate koels sing 21 In “Village Song” Sarojini reveals the attraction of pastoral life. It is unspoiled by the sorrows and suffering of life. The young village boy who is giving up all worldy pleasure, goes to the forest: “Where upon the champa- boughs the Champa buds are blowing; To the koel-haunted river-isles where lotus lities glisten” 22 His mother tries her level best to prevent him from going away be presenting before him the rosy picture of life. The world is full of pleasure “of bridal songs and cradle-songs and sandal scented leisure”. 23 the boy pries deeper and deeper into reality and finds a powerful undercurrent of deep sorrow in all the gay pageants of life. The bridal songs and the cradle songs have cadences of sorrow. The laughter of the sun to-day, the wind of depth tomorrow. The lines can be compared with Shelley’s “ To a skylark” ! We look before and after, And pine for what is not Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught. 24 Sarojini’s love songs comprise the major part of her poetry. They are of the ever-changing, indifferent, infinite character of passion, which fled from its fulfilment as if it were an enemy who would rob her of all joy since it robbed her of pursuit and limited the illimitable. An Ariel imagination and passionate intensity are the cardinal characteristics of her love poem: You flaunt your beauty in the rose, your glory in the dawn, Your sweetness in the nightingale, your whiteness in the swan.

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You haunt my walking like a dream, my slumber like a moon, Pervade me like musky scent possess me like a tune. 25 Her passionate yearning to the fulfilment of love characterizes “To love”. Love is self-surrender, complete identification of two loving hearts and all obstacles cannot hinder the path of love. The beloved offers her all at the shrine of love and does not wait for a return: O Love! of riches that are mine, What gift had I withheld before thy shrine? What tender ecstasy of prayer and praise Or lyric flower of my impassioned days? 26 In the poem “ The Path of Tears”, Sarojini Naidu expresses the unfathomable agony of a maiden who has sacrificed her all at the altar of love and fears that her lover has turned his eyes away. In”Love’s Guerdn” the maiden intensely loves her lover who has abandoned her without blame or reproach. She gladly accepts all sorrows and suffering, cruelty and unkindness, he inflicts on her. She feels the hunger of love, tormenting her heart and soul: Fierce were the wounds you struck me, O’ my Love, And bitter were the blows !... 27 And Love it were not such dep unmeasured wrong To wreck my life of youth and all delight Bereave my days of sweetness and to blight My hidden wells of slumber and of song. 28 The eight poems in “ The Sanctuary”, deal with the love as the supreme sacrifice in the love-lorn maiden’s life. Her love songs dealing with a variety of love experiences are characterized by intensity and draw both on the Hindu tradition of love poetry and the Sufi Muslim tradition. She joyously surrenders her life and

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fancies herself making a shrine to protect her love from Time and Fate: O Could my love design A secret, sealed, invulnerable shrine To hide you, happy and inviolate, From covetous Time and Fate. 29 In “ The Worship of Love” Sarojini Naidu has vividly recreated the devotional atmosphere of an indian temple but it is in the temple of love that she gives herself to martyrdom: Burn me , O Love, as in a glowing censer Dies the rich substance of a sandal grain, Let my soul die till naught but an intenser And every twilight star shall hold its breath And praise the for my death ! 30 Sarojini’s love songs have an autobiographical interest also, and may be read as expression of her own deep and passionate love for Govind Rajalu Naidu, with whom she fell in love early in life. Her songs of life and death also reveal the emotional intensity. In the poems, dealing especially with life, there is a note of steadfast courage and dauntless forbearance against the suffering and futile striving of life, but the somber and ghastly shadow of death, of the transience of life haunt her poems : Shall my soul falter or my body fear Its poignant hour of bitter suffering, Or fail are I achieve my destined deed Of song or service for my country’s need ?31 In “the old woman” she describes her faith in God, and in “solitude” she expresses the note of mysticism of the Almightiness of God : Or perchance, we may glean a far glimpse of the infinite bosom,

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in whose glorious shadow all life is unfolded or furled, Thro’ the luminoushours ere the lotus of dawn shallreblossom, in petals of splendorto worship the Lord of the world.32 Another distinctive feature of Sarojini’s songs is the combination of simplicity with sophistication. Rapture and simplicity are the two essential qualities of a song. A song is the expression of a passionate ideal and besides being rapturous, pure passion is always simple, whether it be the passion of love, hatred, joy or despair. Sarojini’s songs have the quality of simplicity in a marked degree. In this respect no poet except Shelley can stand in comparison. Sarojini Naidu had a propensity for the ornate style, and the choicest jewels of language, but she could also be simple when she liked. Indeed, in her song we find a rare combination of the simple and the ornate, according to the recruitment of thought and emotion passages of extreme simplicity coexist with passage which are highly ornate. The concluding lines of “ The Time of Roses” is an example of extreme simplicity: Hide me in a shrine of roses, Drown me in a wine of roses, Drawn from every fragrant grove! Bind me on a pyre of roses, Burn me in a fire of roses, Crown me with the roses of Love ! 33 But in this very poem, the second and the third stanzas, on the contrary, are high-strung. She is not only sophisticated but simple also. The lines of extreme simplicity exist side by side with exuberant, rich, ornate and luxuriant images which find expression in uncommon, big words. All kinds of styles suit her; She has no mental reservations, no withstanding, she prefers the ornate style with the choicest ornamentations of language. The following lines of “ Alabaster” express the ornate style:

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…………alabaster box whose art Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart, Carven with delicate dreams and wrought With many a subtle and exquisite thought. Therein I treasure the spice and scent Or rich and passionate memories blent Like odours of cinnanion, sandal and clove Of song and sorrow and life and love. 34 Another stylistic device peculiar to her is the device of ‘triplicity’. Her poems have a triple structure, and her thought, emotion and fancy flow in a triple course. This result in compactness of shape, and contribute to clarity and precision, but it is over-done and degenerates in to mannerism. This makes the carpentry neat but narrow and imparts a colouring of omnipresence to her songs. She has an unambitious mind, a neat mind, a mind that realizes that in a small measure life can be perfect. The following lines of “Indian Weavers” exemplify Sarojini’s use of this device: Weavers, weaving solemn and still, What do you weave in the moon lightchill?... White as a feather and white as a cloud, We weave a dead man’s funeral shroud. 35 Her songs especially captured folk songs, and Indian fold songs, delineate multitudinous phases of Indian life and some of them are fast vanishing with the advancement of industrialization and materialism. Her poetry is a simple, lucid and adorned album of Indian life. “Corn-Grinders” is a beautiful song written, in simple, easy, direct and graceful language. In this song, the old widows in early morning when the merry stars laugh in the sky are at their grinding wheels. They sing a pathetic song which accords well with their own sad predicament: Alas ! Alas! My Lord is dead !

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Ah; who will ease my bitter pain He went to seek a millet- grain In the rich farmer’s granary shed; They caught him in a baited snare, And slew my lover unware… Alas ! alas ! my lord is dead. 36 The corngrinders first ask a little mouse the cause of its suffering. Then they ask a she deer the cause of its sorrow, lastly they inquired form a bride why she weeps “with all the happy world asleep”. She replies that her husband is dead and now “who will stay these hungry tears.” 37 In this song the poetess reaveals an unbounded humanity which encompasses even the animal world. Her heart was so much full of the milk of kindness that she extended her sympathy to the sorrowful mouse and deer. Pathos is the main feature of this poem. It is pathetic and simple from start to finish. In “Bangle Sellers” Sarojini Naidu creates a vivid scene of Indian life with simplicity and ornamentation. She emphasizes in this poem a radiance, suggestive of joyousness. Some are meet for a maiden’s wrist, Silver and blue as the mountain-mist. Meet for a bride on her bridal morn For her who has journeyed through life midway. 38 Sarojini Naidu divided the song “Bells” into three parts “AnkletBells”, “Cattle Bells” and “Temple Bells”. The anket bells conceal the old mystery of love. The singing of the anket bells communicates two different moods-one of union and other of separation. Cattle bells are reminiscent of the bygone pastoral beauty in Indian countryside. The temples bells are indicative of man’s eternal praise of God and his prayer for pity and solace for life’s despair and peace for the dead. How vividly she creates the pastoral spectacle in a beautiful manner: Cattle-bells! Soft cattle-bells !

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What gracious memories you bring Of drowsy fields and dreaming wells, And weary labour’s folded wing, Of frugal mirth found festal fires Brief trysts that youth and beauty keep, Of flowering roofs and fragrant byres, White heifers gathered in for sleep, Old songs the wandering women sing. 39 Sarojini presents a colourful pageant of the life of the Indian masses and of their diverse occupations, customs, traditions, beliefs, superstitions, aspirations, simple joys and sorrows, particularly in a rural setting. In the beginning of her carrier Sarojini Naidu gave an English colour to the multifarious objects, which she depicted in her poetry. But later on, being advised by Edmund Gosse, she opened the window to the East to enable the West to develop a better understanding of the other part of the world. Her subsequent poetry has out and out the Indian background. Now Sarojini Naidu loves the birds, blossoms climate, soil and folk of her country. She discovers the true beauty of her land. A rich heritage is in unfolded in her poems: Yet must I go where the loud world beckons Into the strife of the throng and the tumult The war of sweet love against folly and wrong. 40 The political aspirations of Sarojini Naidu are for the welfare of the people. In her, there is no trace of a desire for self- elevation. Her ambition lies in raising in destinies of the teeming millions who toil in poverty and dust. The poem “ Street Cries” reveals her feelings for the laboring class. The people who labour the fields gain very little for their ardent labour. With “faint thirsting blood in languid throats” they labour: When the earth falters and the waters swoon

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With the implacable radiance of noon And in dim shelters Koels hush their notes, And the faint, thirsting blood languid throats Craves liquid succor from the cruel heat. 41 Besides the hard lot of poor farmers in the fields and labourers in the city, Sarojini Naidu refers to the hardships of soldiers of India. The poem “ The Gift of India”, was written in 1915 when many stalwarts sacrificed their lives in the First World War. The soldiers risked their lives and shed blood. She asks: Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep Or compass the woe of the watch I keep ? 42 Sarojini Naidu feels an urge to serve the country of hungry producers of the food grains, of the thirsty folks panting. For water in the streets, of the stalwart soldiers shedding blood in alien lands. Then she is moved by the cries of the street vendors embodying different needs. When the first cymbals beat rings through the dawn, the world is aroused to human need of labour for bread. “Buy bread, buy bread, rings down the eager street”. 43Then there are bangle-sellers and vendors with beautiful bangles which are: “ Silver and blue as the mountain mist, some are flushed like the buds that dream.” 44 In her folk songs there is a realization of reality of life of general masses. The life is weaved with the mingled yarn, dark and gay. “In The Bazars of Hyderabad”, flower girls wear the allegory of life: With tassels of azure and red? Crowns for the brow of a bride-groom, Chaplets of garland his bed, Sheets of white bossoms new gathered To perfume the sleep of the dead. 45

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The poems about Indian folks in country and town speak of the challenges and the suffering of the toiling humanity are little known to the wild birds and fireflies and hence Sarojini asks: What do you know in your blithe, brief season? Of dreams deferred and a heart grown old 46 Life is seen here consistently in two aspects: the sense and the soul. Just as the sun and the moon can be seen together in the sky, so are the sorrows and the joys in life. Sarojini’s country folk deeply experience human sensibility and real existence. The poetess believes in the human story of love and faith. In the rainbow world of “Bangle Sellers”, who carry the loads of “Rainbow-tinted circles of light for happy daughter and happy wives”. 47 the imagination of the poetess matches their silvers and blues with the “Mountain mist” and their flush with the “buds that dream”. In the poem the “Wandering Beggars” we again find faith in Allah that rocks the cradle of humanity in poverty. The beggars wander from dawn to night until the end of the journey of life. The “fearless band” marches to the drum beat of life: Life may grant us or withhold Roof or raiment, bread or gold, But our hearts are gay and bold. 48 The bold and fearless poverty- sticken people wander from land to land. They donot wander aimlessly ; they actually carry a banner of freedom from poverty and want: “so we go a fearless band, the ataff of freedom in our hand”. 49 The attitude of Sarojini Naidu towards the festivals of india is marked by the sheer joy. In the poem “spring song”, three festivals vasant Panchami and deepavali are described. Vasant Panchami is the festivals vasant Panchami is the festival of the spring season, when girls pluck new leaves to decorate their garden swings and wear “golden veils”. The joys of the new blown buds and nesting birds blend with human delight. The description of “shining golden

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veils’ brings home oneness of human joys with the gold, green, red and blues of heaven. The festival carries a message of gaiety to brides who bear jewels on their feet and worship with them: Ye brides who sternwar bear on jeweled feet Your gofts of silver lamps and-blown wheat,50 The festivals and legends are beautifully described in her poems. On Nagpanchami day which is the festival of serpents, “milk and maize, wild figs and golden honey”, and prayers are offered with “fasting lips”. The prayer expresses universal longin: guard our helpless lives and guide our patient labours, and cherish our dear vision like the jewels in yours crests, O spread the troubled longings that clamour in our breasts. 51 In many of her poems, Sarojini invokes the various gods and goddesses of common belief. She does not believe in folk garment for a “dead man’s funeral”. C.D. Narsimhaiah aptly remarks: Here, in twelve lines is an elliptical, allusive, and symbolic Representation of life’s journey from birth to death….. It is not merely a component poem, but a very distinguished One for sarojini because the poet here is in full possession of Her own tradition, admirable poise, economy, and an ear and Eye for striking rhythm, image and symbol all used to find To make the poem most evocative. The weavers are the fates, The Indian trinity, weaving the web of life. There can be no two opinions about the predominance of lyrical impulse in Sarojini’s poetry. Her poems are mostly short flights of fancy. Some are the effusions of rapture of spring, some others transport us into a world of inner ecstasy and spiritual elation, and many other quiver with the passion of love. There are some poems which enable us to peer in to india’s luminous past. In sarojini’s poetry the song appeal is “various and wonderful full of the magic of melody”. Among Her Notable Songs, One May Mention, “The Festival of memory”, “Palanquin bearers”,

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“To a Buddha seated on a lotus”, “Wandering singers”, “Guerdon”, etc. As a matter of fact, the poetess, when inspired, cannotlive at a lower level,- - this is clearly borne out by the poem “Guerdon”, which will “take its place among the lyrical classics”. A critic has even suggested that sarojini’s metrical accomplishment is part of her song. Like keats and shelly, she employed a high browed diction, which is steeped in passion, pulse and power. Her sonorous and unusual words add to the subtlety of expression of ideas and display a keen perception of beauty.

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Sarojini Naidu, “ Bells” The Sceptred Flute ( Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1948), p. 170. Sarojini Naidu, “ Palanquin-Bearers” The Sceptred Flute, p. 3. M.K. Naik, “ A History of Indian Literature, ( New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1982),pp.64-65. A.N.Dwivedi, Sarojini Naidu, ( Allahabad: Kitabmahal, 1979), p. 137. Sarojini Naidu,”Indian Dancers” The Golden Threshold, (London: William Heinemann, 1905), p. 71 Arthus Symons, “Introduction” The Golden Threshold, p. 10. Sarojini Naidu, “Guerdon” The Bird of Time, (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 102. Ibid, p. 102. Ibid, p. 102. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Faery Isle of Janjra” The Bird of Time, p.80. Sarojini Naidu,” The Time of Roses” The Broken Wing, (London: William Heinemann, 1917),p. 56. Sarojini Naidu, “ To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus” The Golden Threshold,p. 97 Sarojini Naidu,”The Festival of Memory” The Broken Wing, p.69.

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

Sarojini Naidu,” In Salutation to the Eternal Peace” The Bird of Time”p. 98. Sarojini Naidu,The Broken Wing, pp.3-4. Mrs. J.H. Cousins, New Ways in English Literature, ( Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1949),p. 143. Sarojini Naidu,” Spring” The Sceptred Flute, p. 87. Sarojini Naidu, “The Joy of the Springtime”, The Bird of Time, p.39. Sarojini Naidu, “ Ecstasy” The Bird of Time, p. 53. Sarojini Naidu, “The Coming of Spring”, The Broken Wing, p. 49. Sarojini Naidu, “The Magic of Spring”, The Broken Wing, p. 57. Sarojini Naidu, “Village Song,” The Golden Threshold, p. 37. Ibid, p. 38. Shelley,”To a Skylark” shelly poetical Works ( New York: OUP,1986) p.603. Sarojini Naidu,”Humayun to Zubeida” The Golden Threshold, p. 50. Sarojini Naidu, “ To Love” The Bird of Time, p. 32. Sarojini Naidu, “Love’s Guerdon” The Sceptred Flute, p. 220. Sarojini Naidu, “ Supplication” The Broken Wing, p. 90. Sarojini Naidu, “The Fear of Love” The Broken wing, p. 97. Sarojini Naidu, “The Worship of Love” The Broken Wing, p.100. Sarojini Naidu, “Death and Life” The Bird of Time, p.77. Sarojini Naidu, “ Solitude” The Bird of Time,p. 91. Sarojini Naidu, “The Time of Roses” The Broken Wing, p. 57. Sarojini Naidu, “Alabaster” The Golden Threshold, p. 30. Sarojini Naidu, “Indian Weavers” The Golden Threshold,p. 30. Sarojini naidu “ Corn Grinder” The Golden Threshold, p. 35. Ibid, p. 36. Sarojini Naidu,” The Bangale Sellers” The Bird of Time, pp. 6465. Sarojini Naidu, “ Bells” The Broken Wing,pp. 32-33. Sarojini Naidu, “The Faery isle of Janjira” The Bird of Time, pp. 79-80.

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Sarojini Naidu, “Street Cries” The Golden Threshold, p. 92. Sarojini Naidu, “The Gift of India” The Broken Wing, p.5. Sarojini Naidu, “Street Cries” The Golden Threshold, p. 92. Sarojini Naidu, “ Bangle Sellers” The Bird of Time, p. 64. Sarojini Naidu, “In The Bazar of Hyderabad” The Birdof Time, p. 62. Sarojini Naidu, “A Song in Spring” The Bird of Time, p. 37. Sarojini Naidu, “Bangle Sellers” The Bird of Time, p. 64. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Wandering Beggars” The Broken Wing, p. 27. Ibid. Sarojini Naidu, “Vasant Panchami” The Bird of Time, p. 41. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Festival of Serpents” The Bird of Time, p.66 C.D. Narsimhaiah, “The Swan and the Eagle, ( Simla: Indian Instituteof Advanced Study, 1969),p.22.

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3 THE PATRIOTIC STANCE Sarojini Naidu’s belief in goodness and kindness was so much a part of her life that she has left a trail of glory and warm affectionate memories behind her. True, it was that at times her biting sarcasm or her quick rebuke left a few who sought her acquaintance a little bewildered but her generosity and desire to help other so overshadowed a few shortcomings that she may have painted a picture of a woman who was not only a dynamic personality, politician, patriot and peacemaker but one who abounded in love for her fellow human beings. Sarojini Naidu always inspired others. She was a source of hope, courage and creative activity. She also particularly tried to awake the women of India, and it was her habit throughout her arduous life, to designate herself as a “mere woman”. She stressed this fact when she became president of the India National Congress in 1925, when she presided over the Asian relation conference in 1947 and on many other memorable occasions. She even joked about her feminine qualification when she became the first women governor of an Indian State and said, “I am going as governess to look after the U.P.”. She claimed that women were always honoured in India.

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Towards the end of 19th century a few stalwarts of Indian thoughts and culture undertook the task of socio-cultural renaissance. Among them the first and foremost was Raja Ram Mohan Roy (1978-1933). His name was associated with great reform, the abolition of ‘Suttee’ and the introduction of Western learning in India. He was the founder of “Brahma Samaj” or DivineSociety”. He vehemently denounced the age-old rituals and practices like caste and idolatory that he thought had become absolute “In this religion philosophical and social outlook; he was deeply influenced by the monotheism and anti idolatory of Islam, the ethical teaching of Christianity and the liberal and rationalist doctrines of the West.” 1 Bal Ganga Dhar Tilak also made a remarkable contribution in the sociocultural renaissance of the country. He wrote ‘ Gita Rahasya’ and showed that the Gita had preached a gospel of ceaseless and selfless activity. Tilak organized Ganapati Festival and Shivaji Festival and transformed them in to a National Movement for the intellectual spiritual, cultural and artistic uplift of the messes. In this contest the other most outstanding name is that of Mahatma Gandhi. He was one of those polital thinkers who believed that religion and politics must go hand in hand. Gandhiji’s patriotism is based on social justice, brotherhood, equality and happiness. Gandhiji also believed in Truth and nonviolence. He said, “Truth is my God”. Sarojini Naidu was very much influenced by the thoughts and feelings of these great stalwarts of Indian renaissance. Due to the true impact of these great contemporary philosophers and thinkers Sarojini Naidu was inclined towards patriotism and the servive of Motherland. Her love for Motherland is always reflected in her works. She loved her Motherland intensely and gladly, sacrificed her comforts and luxuries and happy domestic life for the cause of

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her Motherland. She had sophistication, refinement, gentleness and humanity and she made many sided contributions to the Indian Culture. She demonstrated that politics can be a clean game, that political opponents can be civilized and courteous towards each other. Moreover, one can remain gracious and creative in the midst of turmoil and change. Sarojini Naidu was India’s unofficial ambassador to the outs8ide world. She upheld India’s honour and tried to project India’s true image. Wherever she went she was deeply conscious of India’s contribution to the world civilization, so she was filled with anguish when she saw India ignored or slighted. Saojini’s love for the Motherland began in childhood. She wrote the “Traveller’s Song” at the age of twelve. The poem shows that even when she was in Europe, she carried India with her. O’er Italia’s sunny plains All aglow with rosy flowers, I wonder no’ mid fallen fanes, And now amid the myrtle bowers But whosesoever I may roam I long for thee, my dear home 2 The service of the country made powerful effect on her life. She is filled with a deep passion for mother India. There are many poems on the great leaders of India who devoted their lives for the independence of their Motherland. She describes in the following words the beauty of the garden where she “walked” with G.K. Gokhale: The rain has wrought its wizardly a new With silver jasmine, golden champak stars. 3 Sarojini Naidu recited the poem, “Awake” at the session of the Indian National Congress in 1915 with the purpose to awaken and unity the souls of Indians belonging to various religions and to make them pledge allegiance to the nation. It was a call from the

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open platform in lyric. Ovation to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, in particular, to serve and adore the Motherland when “The night is a flush with a dream of the morrow.” 4Also she writes about the loveliness of the should of the Father of the Nation, M.K. Gandhi. In the Poem “The Lotus” she addresses him as: O mystic lotus, sacred and sublime, In myriad-petalled grace inviolate, Supreme o’er transient storms of tragic Fate 5 The poetess left the love of the poetry and decided to concentrate her intellect, genius and all her strength of her soul and life on the service of the nation. Her patriotism was too deep rooted and it demanded supreme sacrifice. In “The Gift of India”, she had offered to the world gift of her children’s lives. There is a tinge of material grief when India says: Lo! I have flung to the East and West Priceless treasures torn from my breast And yielded the sons of my stricken womb To the drum-beats of duty, the sabres of doom 6 It was written in August, 1915, when the First World War was going on. Sarojini read the poem at the Hyderabad ladies “was relief association in 1915 at the death of brave soldiers. Mother India expresses her grief for those who sacrificed their lives in the war. They are lying buried in their graves in foreign lands “like pearls in their alien graves”.7 “Some are lying dead in Persia and some in Egyptian sands”8 as if they have been sent to sleep by the sweet rhythmic music of her murmuring rivers: They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France 9 None can measure the grief of the tears Mother-India shed. Her anguish and despair are intense and unfathomable, but her heart thrills with pride when she remembers their heroic deeds. She prays and hopes of victory for the allied powers… England,

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France and Russia over Germany and Australia. She pays a glowing tribute to her martyred sons: When the terror and tumult of hate shall cease And life be refashioned on the anvils of peace, And your love shall offer memorial thanks To the comrades fought in your dauntless ones. Remember the blood of my martyred sons 10 In the Poem “Suttee” she describes the heroic self-sacrifice of women of India. “Suttee” express the pathetic condition of the sad predicament of an Indian widow whose husband has died-she sings this song before she offers herself to the flames burning her lord’s pyre: Life of my life, Death’s bitter sword Hath served us like a broken word, Rent us in twin who are but are… Shall the flesh survive when the soul in gone? 11 Sarojini Naidu had the strongest artistic instinct of patriotism. She heard the call of the Motherland and responded with all her heart. The hatred of tyranny, the overthrow of the tyrant, the love of liberty, the regeneration of her country, are recurring notes of her poetry. Many of her poems manifest her passion for a glorious age when India will be free, when love will reign supreme, and when tyranny and oppression will disappear. She believes that she cannot die unless the evils are removed from the society. It was Gokhale who, first in 1902, persuaded Sarojini Naidu to step out of her ivory tower and dedicate herself to the service of her Motherland. Gokhale was her first political ‘guru’ until she adopted mahatma Gandhi as her master. This ‘heroic heart’, as Sarojini called him, influenced her mot. It is to be remembered that Gokhale was also the restraining adviser of Mahatma Gandhi in South African affairs. When Gokhale died on February 19,1915,

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at the early age of 49, Sarojini paid her homage in the poem “In Memoriam”. Heroic heart! lost hope of all our days! Need’st thou the homage of our love and praise? Lo! let the mournful millions round thy pyre Kindle their souls with consecrated fire Caught form the brave torch fallen from thy hand, To succor and to save our suffering land And in a daily worship taught by thee Up build the temple of her unity 12 She also wrote “Gokhale the Man” published in the Bombay chronicle and “In Gokhale’s Garden” included in The Feather of The Dawn. Sarojini’s permanent political teacher was Mahatma Gandhi, whom she first met in London in 1914. Gandhi was a great soul and an austere Saint, simple in his ways of living and an apostle of peace and non-violence, but Sarojini was in certain respects, different from him; a gay poetess, fond of happy living, ornaments and coloured saris, and epicurean. But these differences did not come in the way of their friendship. On the contrary, the saint and the singer possessed many traits and ideals in common. They were both messengers of peace and harmony. They could sacrifice even their lives for the sake of their motherland, they strove hard for communal harmony and national integration. Further, both were endowed with wit and humour. They also were united in their fight for India’s freedom. They sought each other’s advice and support in times of need. Gandhi’s Champaran Satyagraha cast a magic spell on Sarojini, and the “little man”, since then (from 1916 onwards), became almost her object of worship. In ‘The Broken Wing’ she addressed a poem to him. Sarojini believed in the sacredness of all relitions, and her poem ‘The Call of Evening Prayer’ is a testimony to it. The Various invocations to God-”Allah ho Akbar”, “Ave Maria” “Ahura

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Mazda”, and “Narayana”- were one and the same for her. She, like Gandhiji, was deeply disturbed at the evidence of disharmony between the Hindus and Muslims. As early as June 1913, She wrote to G. Natesan the editor of the Indian Review, as follows: One request I would like to make of you as an editor and leader of Indian opinion. I feel we have come to a very critical time in our history and that a great responsibility lies with those who are in the position of our leaders. You have realized that the Musalmans have definitely held out their hand to theHindus. Be gracious, be wise, be brave when Hindus hold out their hand to the Mussalmans at the next congress. Do not analyse motives too closely. I am going away a very sick person. I believe my illness is of a year but this is a request I am making to all my friends who lead public opinion. 13 On march 2, 1911, Sarojini attended the historic session of the Muslim League which met in Lucknow to adopt a new Constitution seeking loyal co-operation with the Hindus in national and social matters. Again in 1916 she joined the conference of All-India Muslim League at Lucknow. She is again seen in apublic meeting at Patna on October 13, 1917, speaking to students on HinduMuslim unity. Sarojini also speaks on this subject form the congress presidential Chair. She said: I who have dedicated my life to the dream of Hindu Muslim unity cannot contemplate without tears of blood the dissensions and divisions between us that rend the very fabric of my hope… I beseech by Hindu brothers to rise to the height of their traditional tolerance which is the basic glory of our Vedic faith and try to comprehend how intense and far reaching a reality is the brotherhood of Islam which combines seventy millions of Indian Mussalmans to share with breathless misery the misfortunes, that are so swiftly overtaking the Islamic countries

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and crushing them under the heel of the military depotism of foreign power. 14 In the same breath she spoke to the Muslim thus: In their turn I would implore my Muslim comrades not to permit their preoccupation with the sorrows of Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Arabia to obliterate their consciousness of their supreme duty to India, their Motherland, which must always have the first claim upon their devotion and allegiance. 15 Sarojini always remembered Gokhale’s superhuman efforts to establish a strong bond of brotherhood between the two large communities of India. Her firm faith was that mystic genius of the Hindus and the dynamic forces of Islam had to be united in the cause of national peace and prosperity and that personal grudges had to be forgotten once and for all for creating a new generation of Indians. On March 12, 1930 Mahatma Gandhi launched the well-known salt satyagreha. He had chosen seventy-five comrades on his padyatra, and decreed that no women were to join him. Gandhiji and his comrades reached Dandi on April 5 cover two hundred miles in twenty-four days. Sarojini was at Dandi to meet the Mahatma. After prayers, Gandhi defined the salt law by picking up some dried salt on the beach. As the mahatma up the salt Sarojini cried: “Hail deliverer”, and thousands of women who had now joined the movement waded in to the water to fill their vessels with sea water and waste salt and carry them home. The police made a large number of arrests, including the Mahatma. Sarojini visited him in jail, and was asked to become the leader after Abbas Tyabji was arrested. She immediately staged a Dharna and become the leader of a huge army. Prayers being over, Sarjini exhorted the assemblage that Gandhi’s body is in jail, but his soul is with people, India’sprestige was in their hands, they must not resist, they must not use any

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violence under any circumstances, they will be beaten, but they must not resist, they must not even raise a hand toward off blows. And the police did come forward to stop her and her followers and not allow them to advance further in their proposed raid on the Dharsana salt work. A spate of arrests took place all over the country, and on February 6, 1931, pt. Motilal Nehru passed away. This was a great shock to congress workers as well as to Sarojin. The years after 1931, however, saw the growth of friendship between lord lrwin, viceroy, and Mahatma Gandhi. The mahatma in the second round table conference that took place in London, and worked as Gandhi’s right hand there. After the conference, she along with Srinivas shastri went to cape town. On return to India, the freedom struggle was powerfully launched as the talks had failed. Sarojini and Gandhiji and other congress leader were arrested in 1932 for their involvement in the civil Disobedience Movement. She could be released only on May 8, 1933. During 1934-1937, sarojini extensively toured the country, addressing the young man and women and awakening a national consciousness in them.on march 4, 1935, she presided over the all India musical conference in Delhi. She also participated as president of the Bombay provincial congress committee in the Golden jubilee celebration of the Indian national congress. In 1938, sarojini inaugurated the ‘hoogly mills workers conference at champadevi. She played a stellar role in solving the problem of congress and president ship in 1939, when subhash Chandra bose declined to act as president because of internal dissension in the party. In 1940, she offered individual satyagraha and courted arrest along with other congress workers. In this way, the ding-dong battle for freedom continued over the years until 1942 when the clarion call was sounded for the nation to rise as one man and force the britishers to leave the country. The “Quit

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India” movement was now feverishly started by the congress. Sarojini and other prominent leaders were incarcerated in the aga khan palace, Poona. The mirthful nature of sarojini naidu changedthe otherwise somber jail atmosphere. Gandhiji after six months decided to go on a fast. The public was kept ignorant about it. Gandhiji was kept ignorant about it. Gandhiji was already weak, and when the fast started he fell in to a nausea on the fourth day. B.C. Roy, a famous physician of Calcutta, was immediately summoned, and medical bulletins were regularly issued. A wave of restlessness ran through the country, and Gandiji was persuaded to give up his fast. Sarojini herself fell seriously ill with Malaria and was taken out of the palace-prison in a stretcher on March 21, 1943. She retired to Hyderabad for months, but had soon to take charge of the movement as almost all other congress leaders were still in jail. In February 1944, Kasturba, Gandhiji’s wife, died in her husband’s arms while still in jail. the Mahatma was released on May 6 on ground of ill-health. Sarojini presented him a rupee eighty lakh purse on behalf of the grateful nation. The battle for freedom was now drawing to a close. With the end of world war, the britishers had decided to hand over the reign of India to her own leaders by a gradual process. Sarojini naidu looks her country through prophetic eyes and portrays the ageless India as her “imaging eyes” see the informed India as a greater fact in world destiny. She sees India exceeding herself, her past and seeking her manifest destiny in a new patriotic dream, for India’s golden age is in the future. She visualizes her country realizing her full stature and glory, in the earnest of time, where great morning breaks: The future calls thee with a manifold sound To crescent honours, splendours, victories vast; Waken, O slumbering Mother, and be crowned,

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Who once express of the sovereign past. 16 Stressing the country’s power of regeneration, fecundity and plenitude, the poem acts out the patriotic feeling in the manner of a religious mass. “vande matram”, the historic slogan of the “National Movement”, is translated into the familiar and evocative folk-rite. The poet always cherished a great divinely destined goal of peace, prosperity and honour for her country. The traditional personification of India as a mother was dear to her. She expressed her disgust at colonialism, slavery and serfdom in her poems, speeches and pose writings. She pinned her faith in unity, since by unity alone could her land be free and rejuvenated. She was confident that if in India all men and women put in their combined efforts, renaissance would not be far-off. She was glad that this was accomplished during her own life time: Two ears are we to catch the nearing echo, The sounding cheer of Time’s prophetic horn; Two eyes are we to reap the crescent glory, The radiant promise of renascent morn.17 As a poet of the ‘National Consciousness’, sarojini takes her stand not as ideologue, but as a visionary. She believed that ‘independence’ was Yagna, a sacred baptism and creeds, “are all being consecrated in that crucible along to be-reshaped as vessels to pour the divine essence of love for india”18 Sarojini naidu was interested in study of various religions. She tried to understand them, and interpret them in her own ways. According to sarojini, religion is human recognition in super human controlling power. It is a man’s belief in one of the prevalent system of worship. Though sarojini naidu was a hindu by birth yet she respected all the systems of worship. Her ambition was to create a feeling of unity between Hindu & Muslims. The impact of hydrabad

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was deep rooted in her culture, and attitudes: “In brotherhood of diverse creeds-And harmony of diverse race.”19 Religion is the bond that unites humanity with eternity, it is the unfailing union of the soul and spirit. Man’s soul is forever in quest of salvation. The supreme source of strength is experience of tatality and suffering. In “Three Sorrows”, Sarojini Naidu shows from sufferings. For pain is regarded as a lever of conscience. Joy is meaningless without a sting of sorrow, as the radiance of golden dawn is insignificant to those who have not seen the darkness of the night. Her religious poems deal with the devotional ecstasy and eternal longing of the human soul to comprehend the mystery of life and death. Each animate and inanimate object is magnetized with the omnipresence of God. The call of “Temple Bells” 20 wrecks the sky and resounds with the “immortal cry” 21 of man’s sad lot. There are two basic qualities of Indian culture- first, the continuity of Indian tradition and culture through centuries, despite all revolution and upheavals, and secondly, the unity of spirit underlying the amazing diversity of Indian life, culture and religion. Sarojini Naidu herself experienced this unity in diversity, which she celebrates in her poetry, and tries to communicate to her readers. She loved India as a whole, India was for her a single entity, and she was wholly free from provincial, linguistic, religious and caste prejudice. Both provincialism and religious fanaticisms were equally absent. Sarojini Naidu not only had the knack of making lasting and loving friendships with individuals and her great task was to cement trust and faith between communities, creeds and races. Sarojini visualizes India as the ‘Divine Mother’ who bestows her blessings on all her children, be they Hindus or Muslims, Buddhists or Jain, Sikhs or, Christians or of any other creeds. And they adore her with equal love, though in different ways. In one of her poems, Hindu, Parsis, Muslims and Christians offer their

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glowing tribute to mother India differently, and finally all creeds hail her in harmony. In “The Call to Evening Prayer”, the followers of different religions offer their prayers, not to India personified as divine mother, but to God who is worshipped in many ways. The offering to God is made by the Muslims in these lines: From mosque and minar the muezzins are calling; Pour forth your praises, O chosen of Islam; Swiftly the shadows of sunset are falling; Allah ho Akbar ! Allah ho Akbar ! 22 The Christian prays to Mary who was the mother of the savior: Devoutly the priests at the altars are singing, O ye who worship the Son of the Virgin, Kneel soft at your prayers for the vespers are ringing; Ave Maria! Ave Maria ! 23 The Parsees singing the Praises of Ahura Mazda !: How the sonorous Avesta is flowing! Ye, who to Flame and to Light make obeisance, Bend low where the quenchless blue torches are glowing; Ahura Mazda !Ahura Mazda ! 24 The familiar voice of Hindus who were saying “Narayana! Narayana!: Naray’ yana ! Naray’ yana ! Hark to the ageless, divine invocation! Lift up your hands, O ye children of Brahma, Lift up your voices in rapt adoration: Naray’ yana ! Naray’ yana ! 25 Sarojini Naidu stood for Hindu Muslim amity. She arranged a meeting between Gandhiji, Jinnah and Ali brothers in order to sink their differences and evlove a formula for implementing, Hindu Muslim Unity. In fact, it was Gokhale who first in 1902, inspired Sarojini Naidu to devote her life to the service of her Motherland. When he rightly said, “Ah! Have you come to tell me that your

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vision was true?” 26 Sarojini Naidu was an ardent signer of patriotism and National integration in many of her poems. Her poems are permeated with the spirit of nationhood in all its manifestation. Despite the romantic, sensuous, colorful and picturesque treatment of the variegated Indian scene, Sarojini’s poetry is conspicuous for the fervent expression of secularism and national integration. In the poem “Awake” Sarojin expresses her faith in religious tolerance and emotional harmony. Sarojini emphasizes in this poem, the votaries of all Indian religious Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsees,Christians etc., who pledge the sacrifice of their life to redeem Mother India form the tyranny of the British rule and to restore her lost glory: Hindus: Mother ! the flowers of our worship have crowned thee! 27 And Parsees say: Mother! The flame of our hope shall surround thee 28 And Muslims: Mother! The sword of our love shall defend thee ! 29 Christians: Mother! the song of our faith shall attend thee !30 And all creeds pray: Shall not our dauntless devotion avail thee? Hearken! O queen and O goddess, we hail thee! 31 The prophetic message of Sarojini Naidu is that narrow prejudices and difference were whole heartedly devoted to the service of Mother India. In “Ode to H.H. Nizam of Hyderabad” Sarojini Naidu depicts the poetic, colourful and secular personality of the Nizam of Hyderabad who stood for the principles of the brotherhood of diverse creeds and rhythm of diverse races: The votaries of the Prophet’sfaith Of whom you are the crown and chief

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And they, who bear on Vedic brows Their mystic symbolsof belief; And they, who worshipping the sun, Fled O’erthe old Iranian Sea; Their mystic symbols of belief; And they, who worshipping the sun, Fled O’er the old Iranian sea; And they, bow to Him who trod The midnight waves of Galilee 32 Her ambition was to create a feeling of unity between Hindus and Muslims. In “The Hussain Sagar” She says: Thou dost, like me, to one allegiance hold, O Lake! O living image of my soul 33 The impact of Hyderabad was deep-rooted in her culture, conduct and attitudes: In brotherhood of diverse creeds, And harmony of diverse race 34 In the poem “The Call of Evening Prayer”, She present a panoramic view of Muezzins at the mosque, priest at the altar singing to worship the “Son of the Virgin” and call of devotees to worship Ahura Mazda and Narayana. After the contact with Gandhiji, she deeply plunged into politics and the achievement of freedom for her country. Prison and padyatras and processions and public platforms and ‘Hartals’ were hardly conducive for the encouragement of the poetic muse. But she expressed her deep sorrow at having to abandon her natural gift for writing verse. She wrote in the Broken Wing: Can ye measure the grief of the tears I weep Or compass the woe of the watch I keep? Or the pride that thrills thro’ my heart’s despair And the hope that comforts the anguish of prayer And the far sad and glorious vision I see

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Of the torn red banners of Victory? 35 She had a resolute faith in the indomitable soul of India, endowed with a Perennial vitality and an unmeasured power of ultimate self-renewal, able and ready after each dark epoch of political tribulations to fulfil the prophecy of her own shri Krishna and be born again and again for the establishing of her national righteousness. Sarojini rang the bell of freedom and involved her countrymen to “transcend the barriers that divided man from man” and be united in the great national cause. Sarojini took active part and was always there at the centre whether it was peace talk, or the Hindu-Muslim unity conference or the ratting battle field. After India’s independence on August 15, 1947, Sarojini was appointed the governor of Uttar Pradesh. She was given a warm welcome by the people of this state. Her biographer P. Sengupta, has recorded that she proved herself to be “one of the most outstanding governor of the first days of free India.” 36 In January 1948, when mahatma Gandhi was assassinated Sarojini was shaken, bewildered and heartbroken at this “dastardly act”. Everyone was in tears and shattered with grief. But Sarojini in a very brave manner asked: What is all this revelling about? Would he rather die of decrepit old age and indigestion? This was the only death great enough for him. 37 Sarojini did not even weep though her face was lined with grief. In her broadcast speech she cried: The time is over for private sorrow. The time is over for beating of breasts and tearing of hair. The time is here and now to stand up and say we take up the challenge with those defied Mahatma Gandhi 38 Sarojini the leader or renaissance and of the nationalist movement loved her Motherland deeply, the music of patriotism

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was heard in her songs in all its richness and variety. There was no “Chauvinism”, no “aggressive bragging” no white washing of failure of limitation. It was simply a pure abiding deep love on which any nation can feel proud. In a speed on 15th August 1947 at Lucknow, she said: “Nation of the world” I great you in the name of India, my mother, - whose home has a roof of snow, whose walls are of living seas, whose doors are always open to you. Do you seek shelter or succor, do you seek love and understanding? Come to us, come to us in faith come to us in hope come to us believing that gifts are out to give. I for the world the freedom of India, that has never died in the past that shall be indestructible in the future and shall lead the world to ultimate peace. 39 The sentiment of love and deep respect for motherland was always surging in Sarojin’s heart. She possessed reverence and sincre attachment with her land. In her poem Lakshmi The Lotus Born she expresses her intense desire: For our dear Land do we offer oblation, O keep thou her glory unsullied unshorn, And guard the invisible hope of nation, Hearken, O Lotus-born! 40 Her poem “ To India” is addressed to Mother India who is invoked as” The poetess who implores mother India to rise from the gloom of slavery and “beget new glories from the ageless womb”. The poetess wishes her country to show the light of freedom not only to her own children but also all. “The nations that is fettered darkness weep, crave thee to lead them where great mornings break”. 41 “ The Broken Wing” is one of Sarojini’s famous poems, which is highly marked with patriotic fervor. The poem is cast in question answer form and expresses the poet’s hidden sorrow which is due to the death of her beloved father and her close friend Gokhale.

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Melancholy and firmness of purpose are wedded together in this poem: Behold ! I rise to meet the destined spring And scale the stars upon my broken wing!42 These lines serve as an answer to the question of Gokhale posed in the first stanza “Song bird why dost thou bear a broken wing?” The poem ends on an optimistic note. Sarojini is a poet of national awakening. As Mira devoted her life to the service of Lord Krishna, she dedicated her life to the serviced of her nation. Her “Anthem of Love” is a patriotic poem in which patriots pledge their loyalty to mother India. They are willing to undertake any amount of strain or make any degree of sacrifice: To hands are we to serve thee, O our Mother, To strive and succor, cherish and unite; Two feet are we to cleave the waning darkness, And again the pathways of the dawning light. 43 The last stanza shows the poet’s unflinching faith and strong devotion towards the great goal of freedom. Our heart are we to love thee, O our Mother, One undivided, indivisible soul, Bound by one hope, one purpose, one devotion Towards a great, divinely-destined goal. 44 The poem is a sincere expression of the poet’s deep love and divine duty towards her land. The same theme of mother India waking up from the painful ‘long night’ and reaching the heights of glory reach in the poem ‘At dawn’ the poem appeals with its depth of passion and sincerity of tone. Poem opens with a strong note of optimism. The whole poem breathes in the air of hope and unwavering devotion towards the ultimate goal. Weak were our hands but our service was tender, In darkness we dreamed of the dawn of your splendour,

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In silence we strove for the joy of the morrow, And Wanted your seeds from the well of our sorrow, We toiled to enrich the glad hour of your waking, Our vigil is done, lo! The day light is breaking.45 Sarojini’s pure poems, adoring patriotism and nationhood, are not many but the strain continues in a large number her struggle for freedom, was closely associated with many great national leaders like Gokhale, Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak and, jinnah. Apart from writing poems on the subject of nationhood she also dedicated her verses to such great national personalities. Her songs which exalt the contemporary heroes have strong patri patriotic notes. Sarojini never forgot her debt to Gokhale and referred to him on counties occasion with deep affection. Her poem”in Gokhale Garde” is her great felt tribute to Gokhale which indicates how fondly she treasured her association wither friend. Stead afast, serene, dauntless, supremely wise In earth’s renascent bloom with prescient eyes You sought hope’s symbol and you strove to teach, My heart with patient,high prophetic speech, The parable of beauty’s brave emprise. 46 If Gokhale initatsd sarojini to the path of politics, it was Gandhiji who gave her memorable tribute to this noble soul in her sonnet “The Lotus”. The lotus symbol is sustained through out the poem and elevates the character and personality of Mahatma Gandhi to sublime heights. Her deep admiration is expressed thus: 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 47 At a time when it was a crime to utter the word ‘freedon’. Tilak inspired the whole nation by his clarion call, “Freedom is my birth

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right and I will attain it “The poet pays a fitting tribute to the” virtuous heart”: Hail dauntless soldier, hail intrepid Who taught our nation Freedom’s Gayatri ! Immutable from the redeeming flame Your ashes are our children’s heritage, And allthe epic rhythms of the see Chant your triumphant and undying name. 49 The poem shows Sarojini’s profound love and deep administration for the great political extremist and a great upholder of Hindu Culture and tradition. Sarojini conspicuously plays the role of a peace maker. Joachim Alva rightly remarks that: Sarojini is a poem personified in to flesh and bone a love lyric in human shape, with the essence of humanity embodied in her. She is maupassant’s ideal woman who has neither cast nor race. 50 Sarojini was highly influenced by the cosmopolitan atmosphere of her childhood home where she was born and brought up under the guidance of her beloved father who taught her not limit herself to being only an India but be a citizen of the world. She followed her father’s advice throughout her life. In the true sense, Sarojini was a poet and a patriot and not a politician. Mr. D.B. Dhanpal recalls, “ She talk politics but in the words of a poet”. 51 In the words of Pandit Nehru: Mrs. Naidu w as a great Nationalist and a mighty internationalist. While Gandhiji lifted politics to moral sphere Sarojini lifted it to the artistic sphere. She started her life as a poet, but when she was drawn in to politics, her whole life became a poem and a song. She infused artistry and poetry into our freedom struggle just as the father of the Nation has infused moral grandeur and greatness to the struggle. To

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conclude patriotism is a significant strand of Sarojini naidu’s poetry. She not only expressed patriotic feelings in her poetry, she loved life of a patriot and sacrificed her life on the altar of the country. 52

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

A.R. Desai, Social-Background of Indian nationalism ( Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1966), p. 287. Sarojini Naidu, “Traveller’s Song (unpublished poem), National Library , Calcutta. Sarojini Naidu,”In Gokhale Garden” The Feather of the Dawn ( Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961), p.2 Sarojini Naidu,”Awake” The Broken Wing (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 43. Sarojini Naidu, “The Lotus” The Broken Wing, p. 29. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Gift of India” The Broken Wing, p.5 Ibid, p5 Ibid Ibid Ibid, p 6 Sarojini Naidu, “Suttee” The Golden Threshold, (London: Welliam Heinemann, 1905), p.46. Sarojini Naidu, The Sceptred Flute ( Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1948),p. 159. Speeches and writings of Sarojin Naidu, ( Madras: G.A. Natesan & Co, 1919), p.17 H.N. Brails Ford, “Mrs. Naidu a Great Human Being” The Hindustan Review L vol. xxxii, ( April 1949), 212 Ibid. Sarojini Naidu, “To India” The Golden Threshold, p. 94. Sarojini Naidu, “ An Anthem of Love” The Bird of Time, (London: Welliam Heinemann, 1912), p. 89 Speeches and writings of Sarojini Naidu, ( Madras: G.A.

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19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Natesan & Co. ) 2nd ed. P. 84. Sarojini Naidu, “Ode to H.H. The Nizam of Hyderabad” The Golden Thershod (London: Welliam Heninemann, 1905),p. 59. Sarojini Naidu, “ Bells”, The Broken Wing, p.33. Ibid Sarojini Naidu, “ The Call of Evening Prayer”, The Bird of Time, p. 95. Ibid Ibid Ibid Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu, maker of Indian Literature ( New Delhi: Sahitya Academy, 1989), p. 35 Sarojini Naidu, “ Awake” The Broken Wing, p. 44. Ibid Ibid Ibid Ibid Sarojini Naidu, “ Ode to H.H. The Nizam of Hyderabad” The Golden Threshold, pp. 59-60 Sarojini Naidu, “ The Hussain Sagar” The Bird of Time, p. 78 Sarojini Naidu, “ “ Ode to H.H. The Nizam of Hyderabad” The Golden Threshold, pp. 59 Sarojini Naidu, The Sceptred Flute- Songs of Idnia, “ The Broken Wing” ( Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1969), p. 146. Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu : a Biography ( Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966),p. 35 Nayantara Sehgal, Prison and Chocolate ( London: Victor Gollanez, 1954), p.220. Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu : Makers of Indian Literature ( New Delhi: Sahitya Academy), p.70. Speech at Lucknow, 15th August, 1947. Sarojini Naidu, “Lakshmi : The Lotus Born” The Sceptred Flute, p. 150. Sarojini Naidu, “Songs of India” The Sceptred Flute, p. 58. Ibid, “ The Broken Wing” p. 145

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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Sarojini Naidu, “ An Anthem of Love” The Sceptred Flute, p. 131 Ibid Sarojini naidu, “ At Dawn” The Sceptred Flute, p. 129. Sarojini Naidu, The Feather of the Dawn ( Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961), p.1 Sarojini Naidu,” The Lotus” The Sceptred Flute, p. 167 Sarojini Naidu, The Feather of the Dawn, p. 3 Sarojini Naidu, The Feather of the Dawn, p. 63 Alva Joachim, Men and Supermen of Hindustan (Bombay: Thacker & Co., 1943)p. 270 D.B. Dhanpal, Eminent Indians ( Bombay: Nalanda Pub., 1977), p. 58 Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, “ A Tribute in India’s Parliament”, The Hindustant Review, April, 1949, p. 205.

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4

THE CRITIC OF LIFE Sarojini is a poet of eminence and looks upon poetry as a powerful medium of portraying life in its various aspects. She maintains that it is not only life that we live in life, death is also life. Death is not the end of life but the beginning and generation of another life. She subscribes to the view that it is by dying that man is born to eternal life. Therefore, one must not be afraid of death. The river of life in this world flows through the two banks of life and death. In her poems dealing with life Sarojini Naidu has embodied this philosophy of life. Hope and despair, frustration and fulfilment are the concomitants of life. They unfold and enrich the ever expanding horizons of life. Life is a kind of exhortation. It gives an inspired message that life is not a rosy dream but a perpetual struggle. The poet says to children that life is not very easy, it is not a “lovely stalactite of dreams, or carnival of careless joys” 1 as it may seem to them. They merely “exist”. Perpetual struggle, ups and downs, despair and hope, agony and ecstasy are the other names of life all which make up the rich rainbow of life. Life becomes life when it is woven with warp and woof of joy and sorrow, hope and despair. The poet does not seek

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to present life as a metaphysical abstraction but as a harsh reality. It is the stark reality of life that gives meaning to life. The poet has beautifully poetized the grim and dismal aspects of life. “Transience” 2 is a reflection on the flux of life. The eternal law of this creation is the alternation between joys and sorrows. This cycle will go on forever and forever. The poet suggests that one should not grieve though life be full of sadness, because nobody can really share somebody else’s sorrow. Neither nature not its seasons will “veil” their “splendor” for one’s grief. Again, she advises that one should not pine though life be dark with trouble, because time does not wait. Sorrows problems, fever and fret do not last. They may not have any place in life, so one must be willing to lad a hopeful, peaceful and carefree life. Bad days and bitter memories are not permanent. They will soon be forgotten. The poet consoles us by saying that one’s should not weep because new hope, new dreams, new faces and unspent joy of the coming years will make tears and sorrow strangers to one’s eyes and heart. The poet believes that bad days are short-lived. After a bitter today a better and sweet tomorrow is certain to come, because time does not tarry on his way. This belief makes the poem a song of robust hope. It inspires the reader to be bold enough to undergo the difficulties and hardships of life, keeping his spirits high in the hope of better and brighter tomorrows. The poem seeks to deliver a philosophical message to muster moral courage to face the present. The clouds of adversity will disappear and make room for the starry sky. In the poem Death and Life death comes and whispers tenderly in the poet’s ear, making an offer to redeem her form her pain, renew her joy and promises to give her joy and renascent ecstasy instead, but the poet replies: “Thy Gentle pity shames mine ear”3 The poet asks Death: is she so purposeless thing, “Shall” her “soul falter” or body fear in “Poignant hour of bitter suffering?”

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She averse that she has enough courage to undergo the difficulties of life. She is not an escapist. She is possessed of indomitable soul which cannot be vanquished by “bitter sufferings”. She will live on; she will not die till she is able to perform her” destined deed. She knows that she is destined to serve her country and countrymen by her songs, which is the need of the hour; by her songs she will inspire her countrymen to free themselves from the shackles of slavery. So she is not a “purposeless thing”. Sarojini accepts and represents things as they really are in India. The women of Sarojini wear such things as the fillet, the girdle, as the veil, the bride wears the marriage veil and has a tilak on her forehead. Her queens and kings have splendid regalia-crowns or turbans, an ivory bed or ebony seat, jeweled scepter, canopies, armies, forts, heralds, vassals. She mentions a number of precious stones.... agate, amber, amethyst, gem, jade, jewel, onyx, opal, paridot, porphyry, sapphire, ruby. She writes of various musical instruments…. String instruments life the lute and the sitar, wind instruments like the flute and the pipe, percussion instruments like the drum. The colours that occur frequently-blue, green, purple, red saffron. Her weavers are real person; they earn their honest bread by weaving all kinds of clothing, the robes of a new born child, the marriage-veils of a queen, the funeral shroud of a dad man. There is graphic reality in Sarojini’s artistic treatment of the customs of Indian society. The maidens in her poem send their pitchers afloat on the tide and hasten away to gather the leaves of the henna-tree; in their opinion the red of the tilak looks beautiful on the brow of a bride, the red of the henna tree. There is a realism in the attitude of an Indian who sees the moons: A cast-mark on the azur brows of Heaven The golden moon burns sacred, solemn, bright.4

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In the following lines there is no idealization of life, but an intense awareness of the distinction between “being” and “existence”: Till ye have battled with great grief and fears, And borne the conflict of dream-shattering years, Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife, Children, ye have not lived : for this is life. 5 Sarojini is a relist and writes faithfully not only of prices but also of beggars. She signs not only of canopies and forts but of the wind and the rain, not only of gems and jewels but of poverty and hunger. Her beggar-woman is an old creature, bent and blind, sitting under the banyan tree, holding a battered begging bowl in her hand: In hope of your succor, how often in vain, So patient she sits at my gates, In the face of the sun and the wind and the rain, Holding converse with poverty, hunger and pain, And the ultimate sleep that waits…..6 In the hope of a passerby’s help she sits at the gates of the poet. While facing severities” of the weather, she is in communion with “hunger, poverty and pain” and death. She has not been a beggar all her life, nor has beggary been her profession. She had her heyday once upon a time. In her youth she “Comforted lover and son”. But alas; she is alone and helpless. Being a destitute, she has been driven to the desperate and disgraceful state of begging. She is forced to beg under compelling circumstances. People may not tarry to help her, but it is her faith in the Almighty that has sustained her. That is her consolation and solace in times of distress and poverty. She is battered in body not in spirit. She is an exalting figure of a woman who is broken by poverty and yet her spirit is unbroken. She is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Leech Gatherer” who, in spite of extreme old age and utter poverty, is an embodiment of fortitude, endurance and inspiration.

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In the following lines there is a faithful representation of an evening scene in an Indian Village: An ox-cart stumbles upon the rocks, And a wistful music pursues the breeze From a shepherd’s pipe as he gaters his flocks Under the pipal-trees. 7 Sarojini’s poetry is a pure and intense aspiration advocating the hatred of tyranny, the overthrow of the tyrant, the love of liberty, the regeneration of her country. She believes that she cannot die as long as her youth is fair and her life burgeons with its spring. She wants to fulfil all her human hungers. She is convinced that she cannot die: With all my blossoming hopes unharvested, My joys ungarnered, all my songs unsung. 8 She wants to participate in the: Laughter of children and the lyric dawn, And love’s delight, profound and passionate, Winged dreams that blow their golden clarion, And hope that conquers immemorial hate.9 Her insatiate soul insists on draining earth’s utmost bitter utmost sweet”. She prays to God: Spare me no bliss, no pang of strife, Withhold no gift or grief I crave, The intricate lore of love and life And mystic knowledge of the grave. 10 Sarojini wants to be “ a thought-worn singer in life’s high and lonely places”. She wants to sing “songs of the glory and gladness of life, of poignant sorrow and passionate strife, and the lilting joys of the spring”. The songs she wants to sing are : Of hope that sows for the years unborn, And faith that dreams of a tarrying morn, The fragrant peace of the twilight’s breath,

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And the mystic silence that men call death. 11 She is convinced that neither will her soul falter nor her body fear its poignant hour of bitter suffering”, and that she will not fail: Or fail ere I achieve my destined creed Of song or service for my country’s need? 12 Sarojini’s whole nature rises up against the famed bird’s eye view of life. She asks her third child Ranadheera to be lord of love and chivalry, inspiring him with these words: Learn to conquer, learn to fight In the foremost flanks of right. 13 She revolts against the attitude that makes her down cast and downhearted: But soon we must rise, O my heart, We must wander again In to the war of the world and the strife Of the throng; Let us rise, O my heart, let us gather The dreams that remain, We will conquer the sorrow of life with The sorrow of song. 14 She challenges fate. Fate may strike her blind, enfeeble her memory, render her short of hearing, rob her power of speech. But she asks: Say, shall my heart lack its familiar language While earth has nests for her mellifluous birds? Shall my impassioned heart forget to sing With the ten thousand voices of the spring ? 15 She was a lover of life. Much of our ancient literature preaches the ideology of renunciation. But to be a runaway from life is an effete, medieval ideal. It runs counter to modern thought. Sarojini regards life as truly worth living.

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Life, in spite of its bitterness, it yet sweet to her. There are many passages scattered throughout her poetical works wherein she speaks of universal joy. Her pieces from the pageant of life offer enough incentive and justification for the leading of a full life. One such piece is a Kashmir song. In the heart of a slave, she says, there is fear, but in the heart of a lover there is hope. In the grieving bosom there is doubt, but there is faith in a heart at rest. In her poetry there is calmness and serenity, sweetness and joy. In the poem “ The Bird of Time” Sarojini calls herself, figuratively, the bird of time. The poem is important in so far as Sarojini indicates the subject matter of her poetry and the source where form she has learned the changing measure of her songs. Asked about the nature of her songs, “ The Bird of Time” replies that her songs deal with life’s glory and gladness, sorrow and conflict, joy and hope and faith, twilight and death. Problems of life and death are eternal problems. They haunt the imagination of every poet, and every poet tries to find a solution to them. Life and death are beyond the control of man, but, so far as he can, he makes his own efforts in shaping his life according to his heart’s desire. The sonnet “Death and Life” helps us in understanding Sarojini the poet and patriot. The poet imagines herself to be dying. Death strokes her hair and tenderly whispers into her ears. It may be recalled that ‘yama’ once took pity upon Savitri and gave her back her husband. Now ‘yama’takes pity upon the poet. He wants to redeem her from pain. He wants to renew her joys. He will have her born again. He asks the poet to choose her next incarnation. The poem “ The Soul’s Prayer” reveals the indomitable spirit of the poet. In the pride of children, she said to her master: Give me to drink each joy and pain Which Time eternal hand can mete, For my insatiate soul would drain

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Earth’s utmost bitter, utmost sweet. 16 Sternly and in low tones, the Lord answered her: .... thy unconquered soul shall known All passionate rapture and despair. Thou shalt drink deep of joy and fame, And love shall burn thee like a fire, And pain shall cleanse thee like a flame, To purge the dross from thy desire. 17 The sights, sounds, colours and scenes of nature are no doubt very fascinating. But the living being in her stirs in to activity. She does not want any mercy form death. It shames her ear to hear this, she is like Robert Browning who said of his acute pain of death: No; let me taste the whole of it, Fare like my peers. The heroes of old, Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears of pain, Darkness, and cold. 18 Sarojini wanted a soul that could remain unconquered. She was as dauntless as the poet who, in spite of being a permanent cripple, could still declare her firm optimism. The poem throws light on Sarojini’s ideas on life. God tells her: Life is a prism of My light, And death the shadow of My face. 19 Those who consider Sarojini an escapist entertains a mistaken idea. She did not shrink from the realities of life. She did not seek sanctuary in the golden glory of any lotus land. The forces of life did not oppress her spirit. The thought of toil and trial was never repulsive to her. Her soul was the symbol of restless activity. The poet’s keen desire to serve her country shows her patriotic zeal and instils the same feeling into the heart of the readers. The

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poet is not tempted by the offer of death which asks her to “renew” her “joy” and issue her “again”, she is resolved to accomplish her “destined deed” before the inevitable hour comes. This determination is indicative of the heroic heart of the poet. It is the exaltation of the spirit that the poem seeks to celebrate. The poem “The Poet to Death” exhales the poet’s insatiable thirst for all things for things of life in the world, all that belongs to the earth. She does not want to die because fair is her youth and vibrant are the “echoing boughs” on which “dhadikulas sing”. Life is burgeoning in its full vigour and splendour. Death must wait as all her “blossoming hopes” are “unharvested”, her joys “ungarnered”, her songs “unsung” and her “tears” “unshed”. Tarry a while, O Death, I can not die While yet my sweet life burgeons which its spring Fair is my youth, and rich the echoing boughs Where dhadikulas sing. 20 Her life is still budding and blooming and she longs to reap a rich harvest with all its beauty and bounty. Showing her defiant attitude towards death, she says that she would not like to die till she is fully satisfied with all that life proffers, “Love”, “grief”, “earth and altering sky”. She refuses to die till “ all her human hungers” are fulfilled. It is abundantly clear that she is not an escapist. She is ready to welcome joys and sorrows of life with equal grace. She wants to live life fully and passionately with all pleasures and pains. Zest for life embodied in the poem raises it to the level of the sublime and we are overwhelmed with ecstasy. We are raised to a higher plane unawares. In some poems there is a load of anguish agonizing grandeur, a wistful longing, the desire to speak the tears and shattered dreams. She is the poet of the moment, of its splendor and transience, its burden and its grief. She complaint that her heart is weary and sad

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and alone, for its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone. She complains of the heavy burden of dreams that are dead and wants to scatter their ashes away. She asks the fire flies: What do you know your blithe, brief season? Of dreams deferred and a heart grown old? 21 She likens her heart to the fallen flower and the faded leaf, plucked by the wind of sorrow, and “to every lone and withered thing that hath foregone the kisses of the spring” she writes: Pain-weary and dream-worn I lie awake, Counting like beads the blazing stars o’erhead;22 She complaints that her weary heart of late has fallen from its high estate of laughter and has lost all the vernal joy it knew. In many of her somber poems the greys are flecked here and there with gold. Her wandering singers point to the message of the part and, by implication, contrast its large vitality and freshness with the jaded commercial restlessness of today: Our lays are of cities whose lustre is shed, The laughter and beauty of women long dead; The sword of old battles, the crown of old kings, And happy and simple and sorrowful things. 23 The exquisite poem “To the God of pain” is profoundly melancholic, yet there is nothing mundane, nothing cowardly about it; Let me depart, for my whole soul is wrung, And all my cheerless orisons are sung; Let me depart, with faint limbs let me creep To some dim shade and sink me down to sleep.24 She give us greyness to counterbalance the glut of rose pink: O glowing hearts of youth, how shall I sing to you Life’s glorious message form a broken lyre? 25 She portrays the victory of sorrow long endured: Nay, do not pine, tho’ life be dark with trouble,

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Time will not pause or tarry on his way; To-day that seems so long, so strange, so bitter, Will soonbecome forgotten yesterday 26 There is no whining, no luxury of grief, no sentimental pessimism. Neither is there any joy, and real peace, but these is the serenity of a brave and troubled spirit: The wind of change forever blows Across the tumult of our way, Tom-orrow’s unborn griefs depose The sorrows of our yesterday. Dream yields to dream, strife fallows strife, And death unweaves the webs of life. 27 The suavity of Sarojini’s method, the wistfulness of her muse, and the serenity of her outlook are peculiarly individual: Time liftsthe curtain unwares, And sorrow looks into her face… Who shall prevent the subtle years, Or shield a woman’s eyes from tears? 28 The pessimistic note is by no means despairing in Sarojini and cheerfulness breaks through at times: O I am tried of strife and song And festival and fame, And long to fly where cassia-woods Are breaking into flame. Love, come with me where koels call from Flowering glade and glen, Far from the toil and weariness,The praise and prayers of men 29 But there is more clouds than sunshine: Men say the world is full of fear and hate, And all life’s ripening harvest-fields await The restless sickle of relentless fate. 30

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Some of her poems are of wistful melancholy, which crystallize in to a more or less pessimistic criticism of life: The bridal-songs and cradle-songs Long cadences of sorrow. The laughter of the sun to-day, The wind of death to-morrow. 31 And Earth’s glories flee of human eyes unseen, Earth’s kingdoms fade to a remembered dream. 32 The mature poet leaves us with a large charity and with a deeper faith in humanity: Yet will I slake my individual sorrow At the deep source of universal joy… O Fate, in vain you hanker to control My frail, serene, indomitable soul. 33 Sarojini Naidu had a rich field of legends and mythology of the orient to draw from but she never attempted narrative verse. She merely presented India in her own inimitable manner to please and enthrall her readers in lyrics. Her frequent recitations often sent her audience ni to ecstasies of delight, especially her popular lyrics based on folk songs, such as “Palanquin-Bearers”. At times we hear the throb of the tom-tom playing from a village nestling in the midst of mango or coconut groves, or the more sophisticated beat of the Mridangam and Tabla. The fisher folk are awakened in their villages and asked to go to sea. Perhaps they have been indulging in a feast or wedding, and the tom-tom throbs with their waking. Sarojini’s first collection ‘ The Golden Threshold’ begins with “Palanquin-Bearers”, a characteristically Indian poem, which depicts a rite common enough not only in Hyderabad, butin the whole of India, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The

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whole setting of the poem is romantic. A soft music leaps up in the air as the palanquin-bearers bear the blooming beauty along: 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 poem of a stream, She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream. Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing, Webear her along a pearl on a string. 34 “ The Faery Isle of Janjira”, depicts a conflict raging in the mind of the poet between beauty and truth, dream and reality. The world of Janjira is really a faery isle, full of the beauty and bounty of nature. Janjira is such a wonderful place that anyone would be fascinated by its splendour and magnificence. The poet was invited by her highness Nojli Raffia, begum of Janjira to visit her place. Here she gives expression to thoughts and feelings that arose in her heart when she found herself in the faery-like island of Janjiraa: Fain would I dwell in your faery kingdom, O faery queen of a flowering crime, Where life glides by to a delicate measure, With the glamour and grace of a far-off time. 35 But the beauty of the isle of Janjira alone is not enough to captivate and hold in thrall the heart of the poet; she is painfully conscious of the world of suffering beyond the precincts of the beautiful isle of Janjira. She is, of course, fascinated by the beauty of the isle of Janjira, but only for a while. She is actually conscious of the world of harsh reality outside. It is in this world of stark reality that the poet would like to be because her heart prefers to dwell there permanently. She finds peace and solace in the midst of turmoil. The world of dreams can not afford to keep under fascination the poet’s heart and she would like to go out to the loud world which beckons her: Yet must I go where the loud world beckons,

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And the urgent drum-beatof destiny calls, Far from your white dome’s luminous slumber, Far from the dream of your fortress walls.36 She would like to go away from “ white dome’s luminous slumber” and dream of your fortress walls” to the world of struggle, where the urgent drum beat of destiny summons her. In other words, the poet would not like to while away her time by reveling and luxuriating in the world of beauty, bounty and luxury in a place like the isle of Janjira. The poet would like to plunge headlong into the thick of the struggle of life. She would like to join the battle of love against. “ Folly and wrong”: In to the strife of the throng and the tumult, The war of sweet Love against folly and wrong; Where brave hearts carry the sword of battle, ‘Tis mine to carry the banner of song. 37 Her destiny is not to beguile an idle hour in the blessed world of Janjira but to launch her struggle where “brave hearts” are required to fight. She would prefer to carry “the banner of song” rather than be lost in cloud-cuckoo to land. By showing the contrast between the world of dreams and bitter reality the poet has expressed her philosophy of life, which is one of love, kindness and compassion. She would prefer to be a fighter and be the carrier of the banner of truth, peace, hope and faith rather than be a dreamer in a blissful land like isle of Janjira. This is reminiscent of Keat’s differentiation between the philosopher and the poet. The philosopher is a dreamer, a visionary, an escapist whereas the poet is a realist, a physician. He hears the “giant agony of mankind”. 38 The poem is highly inspiring in the sense that it lays greater stress on the struggle of life though hard and bitter than on a life of bliss though full of beauty, sweetness, comfort and luxury. It is

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this philosophy of perpetual and relentless struggle for the abolition of iniquity and wrong that has imparted grandeur to the poem. The romantic view of life has been relegated to the background and the pitiless and ceaseless struggle of life has been brought in to focus. “In the forest” depicts the two moods and phases of man’s life hope and despair, drooping spirits and renewal. The poet is overwhelmed with despair. In utter despondency she desires “to burn the dear dreams” as they are “dead” :Here, O my heart, let us burn the dear dreams that are dead. 39 There are no rosy dreams; she pictures the total devastation of the happy days of her life. She wishes: Here in this wood let us fashion a funeral pyre Of fallen white petals and leaves that are mellow and red 40 The poet longs for res offer burning the dead dreams for the load of dead dreams they were bearing have made them weary: We are weary, my heart, we are weary, So long we have borne The heavy loved burden of dreams that are dead Let us rest. 41 The first two stanzas show the poet’s pessimistic mood boom of despair. The dreams she had dreamt. Could not be realized, hence they are cumbersome for her. There is no hope for their realization. In sheer frustration she wants to burn them. In the last stanza the poem rises from despair. It holds out prospects of hope. The poet feels inspired to “wander again in to the war of the world and the strife of the throng”. The poem gives and ennobling and lofty message to dejected person to try to “Conquer the sorrow of song”. The poet’s inspiring message lifts us out of the slough of despair and exhorts us to gird up our loins to face the odds of life with courage and determination. The exhortation is akin to the sublime.

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“Solitude” reflects the poet’s lure for solitude. The poet is weary of hurly-burly of life. Let us rise, O my heart, let us go where the wilight 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. 42 She yearns to go “far away from the sound of this lonely and menacing crowd”, in the lap of nature “where the magical darkness is falling”. She wants to move away from “this throng and its tumult of sorrow” to a place where there is rest and peace “from the pang of its manifold strife”. She desires to climb “rocky grey ledger” where “eagles keep guard” and lie beneath the palms. She hopes that she will be able to find out the bosom of the Almighty there. She wishes to escape from the hustle and bustle of life for rest and peace in nature. I should however, be borne in mind that the poet is not an escapist. The place where she is going to find solitude is not without struggle. There life is hard and the way is rough and rocky: Let us climb where the eagles keep guard on the rocky grey ledges, Let us lie’neath the palms where perchance we may sten, and reach A delicate dream from the lips of the slumbering sedges, That catch from the stars some high tone of their mystical speech. 43

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She welcomed the hard life in the lap of Nature in contrast to the strife in social life. In the midst of solitude and struggle she hopes to “gleam a far glimpse of the infinite Bosom”, so that She is able to “worship the lord of the world”. The poem is song of hope and urges us to cherish love for nature. It reveals the narrow-mindness and smallness of social struggle in the lap of Nature. If we want to understand large-heartiness, we must be in the midst of nature, the poet wants to abandon social strife. This will enable her to concentrate on her efforts to see the Almighty. This inspiring message of the poem is a kind of balm to sorrowing heart of man, floundering and drifting in the struggle of social life “Conquest”44 expresses the conflict between the life of joy and the life of sorrow. Sorrow remains unwelcome and human nature is more inclined towards joy. How to conquer joy and sorrow is the underlying idea of the poem. The poet was happy in her life with the joyous gifts of nature “laughter”, “grace”, “shining fame” and the like. She was full of “hope like a forest tree in flower” and “dreams with reverberant wings of flame”. “God troubled” to see her happy in “his high domain” and sent love from “starry spheres” to “teach” her “tears” for life without tears in incomplete: God troubled in his high domain Sent you, O love, from starry spheres With quick an ardent gifts of pain To teach me tears, to teach me tears. 45 God took away her cup of life which was full of joy and “Spilt” its “honey in the sands of drought”, stole from her song its “silver lilit/smote lyric laughter on the mouth”. Thus he inflicted all sufferings on the poet. She also took away from her “fame’s beacon torch”, “plucked base” the boughs of “hope” and “slew” her “winged dreams”. The poet points out that she deprived her of the torch of fame that kindled her path when groped in the dark.

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Sorrow played havoc in her life. It marred the joy and loveliness of her life, and she stood “uncomforted”, “alone” and vanquished with woe”. He was elated with pride. Beholding her “distress” God smiled from “His bright throne and live” “towered above” her grief and cried : I am his chosen instrument Tobreakyour pride , To break your pride. 46 Further, God sent love as his “Chosen instrument” to teach her lesson of pain and “break her pride” in order that she does not feel too proud of her life of joy. The poet means to point out that the joy does not teach man as pain does. Man, in his pride, expects obeisance from the world but does not realize that without suffering life is incomplete. Tears bring out the best and the noblest in man. Love has its place in the heart. So God sent love as an instrument for breaking her pride. He held her proud heart “Captive in fee”. The world had surrendered itself to her, but now love commands her to surrender herself to him. This kind of conquest is real conquest. Love is the greatest conqueror. All must submit to it. God created love as an instrument to break pride. “Vasant Panchami” is a pathetic poem, portraying the plight of widower in Indian social ethos. The underlying idea is contrary to what the little signifies. Vasant Panchami as the name suggests, symbolizes the coming of vasant, spring, the king of all seasons. The occasion marks the culmination of abundance and except, of course, for a few unfortunate persons called widows. Hindu widows cannot take part in any festival, and festive ceremony. Their portion in festivities in sorrow and austerity. In the poem, “Lilavati”, a widow laments at the feast of spring. She, like any other young woman, asks the “dragonfly” to go and fold up her wings, for she heralds the coming of spring. But it

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causes anguish to her heart. She wishes ‘ Champa’, ‘Gulmohors’ and ‘ Sirisha’ trees not to blossom: O quench your flame, ye crimson gulmohors, That flaunt your dazzling bloom across my doors 47 Because the blossom of these trees remind her of her blessed past. Her deprivation has made her negative in her attitude. Tragically enough, she entreats “joyous girls” and brides to lower down their voices when they sing songs while carrying “Silver lamps” and new blown wheat”. These songs and festivals are not meant for her because she is a widow. She is a mute and helpless viewer of all these festivities. Spring, holds out no rosy dreams, no charm for her, because a widow is forbidden to celebrate it. This custom is inhuman indeed. She has nothing to do with “nesting birds”, “lotus honey”, ivory curds”, and “rose-wreathed lintels”, “lighted shrines” and “altar fires” have no significance for her, as they are meant for married woman only. They can go to temple to pray for the fulfilment of their wishes. “Nesting birds” symbolizes the mating season, the season of love and creation. Lilavati has been forced to be indifferent to these nesting birds because the days of her married life have vanished into oblivion. She is not supposed to respond to life’s natural passions because of her widowhood. The superimposition of cruel customs over natural impulses does not meet with the poet’s approval. Divested of all her ornaments and colourful customs and even simple joys of life, Lilavati is a symbol of deprived and destitute widowhood. She is kept far removed from the festivities and ceremonies of spring; by being shut away from these joyous occasions she feels deeply fraustrated. She is like a “fallen flower” which in its full bloom fell from the stalk, or like a “faded leaf”: For my sad life is doomed to be, alas, Ruined and sere like sorrow-trodden grass, My heart hath grown, plucked by the wind of grief,

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Akin to fallen flower and faded leaf, Akin to every lone and withered thing That hath foregonethe kisses of the spring. 48 Lilavati’s lament at the feast of spring is deeply poignant and pathetic. It moves our heart in sheer sympathy for her. The poet seeks to arouse people’s social and moral conscience against this cruel custom. The poem delineates barriers and bottlenecks of customs and rituals imposed on Hindu widows in Indian Society, which makes them feel degraded and hopeless. There is deep pathos in the poem. It touches the tenders and most sensitive chords of our hearts. By sheer power of its pathos the poem rise to superb heights. Sarojini Naidu has written many poems which bring our destitution, deprivation of social rights and place of Hindu widows in India society. It is thousand pities that a Hindu wife ceases to be recognized and respected as a human being after her husband’s demise. In the poem “ The Pardah Nashin” the poet pictures in a moving manner the agony of a lovely young lady kept in Purdah. No men are allowed to see her except women around her. Her life is apparently full of comforts and luxuries. She wears colourful costume and ornaments of gold and gems. “Her raiment is like morning mist Shot opal, gold and amethyst. 49 But she is deprived of the gifts of nature. She is kept away from “thieving light of eyes impure”, from the “Coveting sun”, and even kept away from” caresses of the wind. She is kept guarded in the house like “jewels in a turbaned crest” and “secrets in lover’s breast.” Though no men are permitted to see her grace, yet it is ‘Time’ which “lifts the curtain unwares”. She might have been a paragon of beauty at one time but she has now turned into old woman with

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a wrinkled face. Her life appears to be joyous but that is not true. In fact, she lives the life of a bird in a cage who is not allowed to come out into the open and live a free life in her own way. Life of a woman kept in Pardah is a life of deprivation of all that is human. She is not given what is her due. Though no hand is permitted to “unveil which the mysteries of her grace”, yet it is slow and steady march of Time, without letting her know, unveils the mysteries of her grace. This is the height of pathos in her life. She has all but the human touch which throbs the heart and gives meaning to life as full and blossoming woman is not there. The poet has tried to show pathos thorough the touching portrait of a Pardah Nashin. One may have all the luxuries of the world but if he/she is kept deprived of the gifts of nature, it would be a great tragedy. Instead of a loving man getting a chance to unveil the mysteries of her beautiful face, time an luxuriance and intensity. But when that is not allowed to happen, the inscrutable force called time would appear on the scene and imprint its indelible marks, savages of Time and wrinkles of old age. Pathos is the crowing element of the poem. Sarojini’s poetry is inseparable from her temperament. She combined in her poetic personality what was best in eastern and western culture. She was a woman of lofty ideals, and her life was a constant endeavor to live up to them. She went forward with confidence, continuing those things of her country which were good, and yet eager to learn from other. She supported neither the purely old customs of India nor a slavish imitation of foreign models. She was an upholder of liberty and was intolerant of the forces which aimed at suppressing it. Almost half of her life was dedicated to the muse. She wrote to Edmund gosse: While I live , it will always be the supreme desire of My soul to write poetry one poem- - , one line of Enduring verse even. Perhaps I shall die without

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Realizing that longing which is at once an exquisite joy And an unspeakable anguish to me50 Long years of continues struggle, on doubt, diminished the rapture of her heart. But whatever she lost in gaiety, she gained in gravity. She became a little sad, but vastly wiser this produced concentration of power, which proved to be a source of her heart into a lute. She therefore cherished pains as something precious, and out of it she attempted to fashion and forge “- - a deathless sword , to serve my stricken land.” 51 This transition to sorrow, has been apply reasoned out by gosse : She has known the joy and also the despair of consolation. The sight of much suffering, it may be, has thinned her jasmine-garlands and darkened the azure of her sky. It is known to the world that her labours for the public weal have not been carried out without deep injury to her private health. But these things have not slackened the lyric energy of Sarojini, they have rather given it intensity she is supported, as a true poet must be, by a noble ambition. In her childhood she dreamed magnificently; she hoped to be a Goethe or a keats for India. This desire, like so many others, may prove too heavy…. But the desire for beauty and fame, the magnificent impulse, are still energetic within his burning soul. “ 52

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Sarojini Naidu, “life” The sceptred flute, (Allahabad; kitabistan,1948), p.35. Sarojini Naidu, “transience” The sceptred flute, (Allahabad; kitabistan,1948), p.125. Sarojini Naidu, “Death and life” The sceptred flute, p.119 Sarojini Naidu, “leile” The sceptred flute, p.31. Sarojini Naidu, “life” The sceptred flute, p.35. Sarojini Naidu, “the old woman” The sceptred flute, p.126 Sarojini Naidu, “June sunset” the sceptered flute, p.192 Sarojini Naidu, “The poet to death” the sceptered flute, p.49

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Sarojini Naidu, “At twilight” the sceptered flute, p.78 Sarojini Naidu, “ The Soul’s Prayer” The Sceptred Flute, p. 123. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Bird of Time” The Sceptred Flute, p. 65. Sarojini Naidu, “ Death and Life” The sceptered Flute, p. 119. Sarojini Naidu, “ To My Children” The Sceptred Flute, p. 52 Sarojini Naidu, “ In The Forest” The Sceptred Flute, p.p. 32-33. Sarojini Naidu, “ A Challenge to Fate” The Sceptred Flute, p. 135. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Soul’s Prayer” The Sceptred Flute, p. 123. Ibid. Robert Browning, “ Prospice” Sarojini Naidu, “ The Soul’s Prayer” The Sceptred Flute, p. 124. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Poet to Death” The Sceptred Flute, p. 49. Sarojini Naidu, “ A Song in Spring” The Sceptred Flute, p. 88 Sarojini Naidu, “ The Garden Vigil” The Sceptred Flute, p.172 Sarojini Naidu, “ Wandering Singer”The Sceptred Flute, p.4 Sarojini Naidu, “ The God of Pain” The Sceptred Flute, p. 37 Sarojini Naidu, “ Farewell” The Sceptred Flute, p.163. Sarojini Naidu, “ Transience” The Sceptred Flute, p.125. Sarojini Naidu, “ To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus” The Sceptred Flute, p. 61-2. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Pardah Nashin” The Sceptred Flute, p.53. Sarojini Naidu, “ Summer Woods” The Sceptred Flute, p.190. Sarojini Naidu, “ In Salutation to The Eternal Peace” The Sceptred Flute, p.137. Sarojini Naidu, “ Village Song” The Sceptred Flute, p.12 Sarojini Naidu, “ Damyanti to Nala” The Sceptred Flute, p. 43. Sarojini Naidu, “ A Challenge to Fate” The Sceptred Flute, p. 135. Sarojini Naidu, “ Palanquin –Bearers” The Sceptred Flute, p.3 Sarojini Naidu, “ The Faery Isle of Janjira” The Sceptred Flute, p.121. Ibid, Ibid John Keats, Hyperion, A Dream.

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Sarojini Naidu, “ In The Forest” The Sceptred Flute, p.32 Ibid. Ibid. Sarojini Naidu, “ Solitude” The Sceptred Flute, p.132 Ibid Sarojini Naidu, “ Conquest” Feather of the Dawn, p. 32 Ibid Ibid Sarojini Naidu, “ Vasant Panchami” The Sceptred Flute, p.90. Ibid p. 91 Sarojini Naidu, “ Pardah Nashin” The Sceptred Flute. P. 53. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Bird of Time (London: Welliam Heinemann, 1912),p.8. Sarojini Naidu, “ Three Sorrows” The Sceptred Flute, p. 176. Sarojini Naidu, “ The Bird of Tome (London: Welliam Heineman, 1912),p.7

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5 HER CRAFTSMANSHIP Sarojini Naidu definitely created a new style of verse and fashioned a new school of thought. The diverse cross currentsDecadent, Edwardian, Georgian, the Hulme-Eliot Pound tradition of her times did not suit her taste. She disliked the formlessness of modern poetry and its “lack of her concept of beauty”. She said “….but why must I write according to modern standards”.1 She is a “song bird”, whose songs are bathed in melody and thoughts. Tara Ali Baig gives an apt assessment of Sarojini’s poetic art : “ In some ways it is fortunate that her poetry was published before the birth of modern poetry, with its harsh emphasis on truth without philosophy and meaning without lyricism. Her era was that of the sonnet and its disciplines of form, the ode with its call to higher thought and small gem of verse with its emphasis upon imagery and colour. It has been said she wrote at a time when English poetry had touched the rock bottom of sentimentality and technical poverty and it is certain that her gem like use of words would at a time like that have touched many chords particularly in England, not only because they had intrinsic merit but because they came from a very young woman from a very old country. She was convinced…

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That modern poetry had no future and the trend would inevitably return to the discipline and beauty of the metrical form of lyrics. Such a statement did not imply that she had greater prescience about the future of poetry than others, but that she sincerely believed modern permissiveness and lack of form to be a passing phase. What is more, like many people of her generation who find modern art hideous simply because it is not visually beautiful, so did she feel that modern poetry honestly lacked her concept of beauty. 2

Sarojini aimed at perfection and excellence in art. She wanted to offer something of lasting value, something wrought with fine artistry, something aglow with vigorous imagination and youthful fancy. She did realize that longing by composing enduring verses, and has shown that her early sad apprehension was “needless”. There are so many lyrical out pouring which intoxicate the lovers of poetry. Sarojini writes with passionate intensity; her language overflows with feelings. She exalts in flamboyant and highly figurative diction. Her language burns with fluent and fiery thoughts. Her poems are written with words, not ideas. Most of her poems can be enjoyed just for the sake of words and their swinging rhythm. Her colourful and radiant diction creates a gorgeous, rich and splendid world of sweet odours, dulcet music of koel, bublbul, dove and variegated colours… crimson, vermilion, red, silver, blue, white etc. Her images are graphic, sensuous and colourful, bearing a close analogy to a painter’s style. In “Spring”, the advent of spring can be felt with its eyecatching colours, beauty and freshness: Poppy squander their fragile gold In the silvery aloe-brake Coral and ivory lilies unfold Their delicate lives on the lake Kingfishers ruffle the feathery sedge And all the vivid air thrills

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With butterfly wings in the wild rose hedge And the luminous blue of the hills. 3

She has a miraculous power of communicating her responses to any kind of sense impression in a language which burns with passion and is as sweet as the song of a bird. In “Indian Dancers”, the poet beautifully recreates the beautiful movement of the dancers in a dance sequence. Now silent, now singing and swaying and swinging Like blossoms that blend to the breezes or showers Now wantonly winding, they flash now they fatter, And, lingering, languish in radiant choir; Their jewel-girt arms and warm, wavering, lily long Fingers enchant through melodious hours Eyes ravished with rapture, celestially painting What passionate bosoms a flaming with fire.

Being a woman she possessed a ‘woman’s partiality’ for words. Armand Menezes stresses her feminine sensibility and writes: And she had a woman’s love of words. They were not, to her, just convenient instruments of expression, they were things; precious lovely things, like jewels. She rejoices in polysyllables that roll and rumble, or rattle like long burnished swords; in phrases like “lovely stalactite of dreams”, or “in the long dread, incalculable hour. 5

The words and phrases issue from her imagination and are aglow with fire and meaning. Her countless treasures of words and phrases like ‘ Silver tears of sorrow’ ( Silver Tears) ‘ Lyric bloom’, ‘ melodious leaves’ ( Ashoka Blossom) ‘ a carnival of lights’ Sanctuary of sorrow’, ‘a spectre in the rose encircled shroud’, ‘echoing bough’, ‘blossoming hopes unharvested’, ( The Poet to Death), ‘ the wakening skies’, ‘the leaping wealth of tied’, ‘the kiss of spray’, the dance of wild foam’s glee ( Coromandal Fishers) etc. simply charm the reader.

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The combination of simplicity with sophistication is another distinctive feature of Sarojini’s diction. Lines of extreme simplicity run parallel with exuberant and luxuriant metaphors and images. The last stanza of “The Time of Roses” can be placed as superb example of her simplicity combined with sophistication: Hide me in a shrine of roses, Drown me in a wine of roses Drawn from every fragrant grove! Bind me on a pyre of roses, Crown me with the rose of Love!?6

The madness of spring festivity and love-loyalty is presented in a simple poetic style which is Sarojini’s own distinctive way of expression. She is well accorded in using different styles with different themes and situations. R.R, Bhatnagar observes: “Most of her poems have a highly strung diction which sometimes makes of artificiality”. 7 This statement may be partially true but her diction always conveys her meaning exactily, precisely, sweetly and beautifully. Her poems never lack in passion and appeal. “ Her lyrics usually have a refrain, which constitutes the soul of the poem”8, remarks A.N. Dwivedi. The same refrain goes in several stanzas which adds beauty and charm to the poem. She also frequently uses the device of contrast or comparison to provide variety and strength to her poetic art. In this reference, the poem ‘ Life’ can be quoted here: Children, ye have not lived, to you it seems Life is a lovely stalactite of dreams, Or carnival of careless joys that leap About your hearts like billows on the deep In flames of amber and of amethyst. Children, ye have not lived, ye but exist Till some resistless hour shall rise and move Your hearts to wake and hunger after love

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And thirst with passionate longing for the things That burn your brows with blood red sufferings Till ye have battled with great grief and fears, And borne the conflict of dream shattering years Wounded with fierce desire and worn with strife, Children, ye have not lived; for this is life.9 The selfless and highly devoted love of an Indian woman is beautiful expressed in the whole poem through clear and suggestive metaphors. Likewise, in “Indian Weavers” the three definite pictures of dawn, dusk and night emphasize upon the whole expanse of life. The comedy and tragedy of man starting from birth to death is piled up in the short poem of three stanzas. The device of contrast or comparison or repetition of ideas is made most by her and creates an irresistible charm. In order to increase rhythmic beauty in her poems, she frequently employees a device of triplicity— the use of a set of three images, or symbols, ideas, idioms or states of mind in the same poem. This device helps in making the carpentry neat and also imparts a colouring of omniscience to her poems. In ‘Indian Weavers’ the weavers weave the robes of a new born child’, ‘the marriage veils of a queen’ and a ‘deadman’s funeral shroud’. In “Guerdon” she yearns for “The rapture of love”, “the rapture of Truth” and “The raptures of song”. In “Coromandal Fishers”, the life of a fisherman is described at the break of day, during the day and at the ‘fall of the sun’ i.e. the time when ‘the low sky mates with the sea’,. The ‘Corn Grinders’ expresses the sorrow of a ‘little mouse’, ‘little dear’ and a ‘little bride’. In “Bells” we hear the music of “ Anklet-Bells! Frail anklet-bells!” Deep temple bells! In ‘Bangle Sellers’ the bangle sellers sell their “bright rainbow tinted circles of light” 10 ‘ for a maiden’s wrist’, ‘ for a bride on her bridal morn’ and ‘for her who has journeyed through life midway’. And in “The song of Radha, the milkmaid” the river flows ‘softly’ ‘gaily’ and ‘brightly’. As a sincere artist Sarojin conveys her meaning clearly and precisely employs her own style of expression. She has a rare power of transforming the worst into the best, coal to gold. Just by

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a soft touch of her imagination the ordinary idea appears in a new light and becomes attractive and interesting. Most of her verses are ornate with one or the other figure of speech. She generally makes use of similes and metaphors. Apart from these she employs other figures of speech too. Several striking similes are to be seen in “ Palanquin-Bearers” : The noble maiden sitting in the gaily veiled ‘palkis’ ‘sways like a flower’, ‘skims like a bird’, ‘floats like a laugh’, She hangs like a star in the dew of our song; She springs like a beam on the brow of the tide, She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride. As they “ bear her along like a pearl on a string”.11 Coromandal Fishers’ captures the subtle atmospheric beauty of the wind at dawn in the evocative image of a sleeping child : The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn Like a child that has cried all night.12 It sets a beautiful example of a simile, a metaphor, a personification and an apt image, all combined in one. “Indian Love Song” sets another example of simile when the lover cries: Like the perfume in the petals of a rose Hides thy heart with in my bosom, O my Love! 13 And “On the ripe boughs of many coloured fruits/Bright parrots cluster like vermilion flowers”. Again in the “Autumn Song” we find “the sunset hangs on a cloud”, “like a joy on the heart of a sorrow”. 14in “Humayun to Zobeida” the lover tells her beloved “ You haunt my waking like a dream, my slumber like a moon/ pervade me like a musky scent, possess me like a tune.” 15 In the “Alabaster” the heart is “frail as a cassia flower” 16. In “The Queen’s Rival” the seven queen shown found queen’s ivory bed are : Like seven soft gems on a silken thread, Like seven fair lamps in a royal tower, Like seven bright petals of Beauty’s flower.17 Then we have in “Pardha Nashin”, a veiled Muslim beauty whose girdles and fillets gleam ‘like changing fires on sunset seas’, and ‘Her days are guarded and secure behind her caravan lattices’,

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Like jewels in a turbaned crest, Like Secrets in a lover’s breast.18 There is a long list of her use of similes and one can find their presence in most of her poems. Use of metaphors can also be seen in her poems in abundance. Few glimpses are presented here. In “The Snake Charmer” the snake is the ‘ Subtle bride of my mellifluous wooing’ -‘Silver-breasted moon beam of desire!’ In “Bangle Sellers” the bangles are -‘Rainbow-tinted circles of light’ -‘lustrous tokens of radiant lives’. In ‘In Praise of Gulmohur Blossoms’ the lovely hue is -‘ The glimmering red of a bridal robe’ -‘Rich red of the wild bird’s wing’. In the ‘Golden Cassia’ the ‘Brilliant blossoms’ are -‘Fragments of some new fallen star’ -‘Or golden lamps for a fairy shrine’ -‘Or golden pitchers for fairy wine’. In ‘ A Rajput Love Song’ a ‘wild stallion’, ‘wild bee hours’, ‘wild parrot day’ and ‘wild deer hours’ are some metaphorical expressions. One can also see along with these it possesses a starting of highly suggestive metaphors. For example, the beloved thinks her lover to be -‘ a basil wreath to twine among my tresses’ -‘ a jewelled clasp of shining gold to bind around my sleeve’ -‘the keora’s soul that haunts my silken raiment’. -‘a bright, vermilion tassel in the girdles that I weave’. -‘the scented fan that lies upon my pillow’ -‘ a sandal lute or a silver lamp that burns before my shrine’. The lover also wishes his beloved to be -‘the hooded hawk upon my hand that flutters’ -‘a turban spray or floating heron feather’ -‘the radiant’ swift unconquered sword that swingeth at my side’ -‘a shield against the arrows of my foeman’ -‘and amulet of jade against the perils of the way’

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In fact, there is an unending list of metaphors. Apart from these Sarojini has also employed a few illustrations of synecdoche, metonymy, oxymoron, Hyperbole and Personification. She makes use of antithesis too. In the poem “Suttee” the line ‘shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone?’ Presents a unique example of synecdoche; here the “flesh” (a part) is substituted for “body” (the whole); here the word ‘flesh’ is more powerful and effective than the use of the word ‘ body’. Likewise, in the poem “ The Queen’s Rival”; the Queen Gulnar’s daughter is said to be “two spring times old”; the word ‘spring’ is used in the place of the word ‘ year’. Sarojini possess here own choice of words which are more suggestive and apt. here the word ‘spring’ is more apt as it conveys the freshness and charm of the young girl, which the word ‘year’ cannot. The poem “Suttee” also provides a subtle example of metonymy. In the line “shall the blossom live when the tree is dead”; the ‘blossom’ is substituted for ‘wife’ and ‘tree’ for husband; likewise the whole clause “till the shadows are grey in the west” is substituted for ‘evening’ in the poem “In The Forest”. In the phrase “Sweet Distress” she makes an intelligent use of Oxymoron in the poem “The song of Princess Zeb-un-Nissa in the Praise of Her Own Beauty” and in the same poem the lines: When from my cheek I lift my veil, The roses turn with envy pale 19 Set a fine example of Hyperbole (exaggeration). Along with these, the skillful handling of ‘personification’ imparts artistic beauty to her poems. There are several examples where Sarojini has addressed Love, Pain, Death, Life etc. as if they were living beings. In her poem ‘Death and Life’ she personifies ‘Death’ : Death stroked my hair and whispered tenderly; Poor child, shall I redeem thee from thy pain, Renew thy joy andissue thee again Enclosed in some renascent ecstasy… 20 In ‘ A Challenge to Fate’ she addresses ‘Fate’ as ‘Foolish’: Why will you vex me with your futile conflict Why will you strive me, O foolish Fate? You cannot break me with your poignant envy

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You cannot slay me with your subtle hate; For all the cruel folly you pursue I will not cry with suppliant hands to you.21 In ‘welcome’ she welcomes ‘fiery Pain’, ‘tranquil Death’ and ‘vast unknown’ and in ‘The Poet to Death’ she cries ‘Tarry a while, O Death I Can not die” 22 So there are abundant examples of personification and one can wonder how powerfully and effectively she has used them in her verses. The frequent attribution of human traits to non-human objects provides enormous charm to her poems. Her honeyed hyacinths complain and languish in a sweet distress, her winds are ‘wise’ and dance in the forest-temple, her bulbul sings the songs of love and life, her gulmohurs are valiant with joy and her roses turn pale with envy. In fact, the major portion of her verse are woven with “Dreams and delicate fancies” which “Dance thro’ a poet’s mind”. 23 Her poems are the treasure-houses of her uncommon creative energy and her endless variety of gorgeous images. Her impressive and impressionistic images are like “The dance of the dew on the wings of a moonbeam” 24. Her poems take us to the fascinating world of dreams where “—the speckled sky burns like a pigeon’s throat jeweled with embers of opal and peridot”. 25 Her songs ‘Caravan with delicate dreams’ take us to the majestic aura of ‘springtime’ That captures the heavens and conquers to blossom The roots of delight in the heart of the earth. 26 In her world of ‘delicate fancy’ the quick night’ descends ‘like a black panther from the caves of sheep’; the stars gleam ‘ in the golden night’; the morning sows her tents of gold in the field of ivory; ‘the wild fire flies dance through the fairy neem’. Sarojini’s poetry abounds in innumerable images. Images that are varied and sublime, highly original and startling, vivid and graphic, visual and picturesque, sensuous and romantic. The fusion of colourful pictures highly delight and surprise the reader. The most striking feature of her imagery lies in its Indainness. They are mostly drawn from purely Indian sources. She explored nature,

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myth, legend, country scenes and the fairy kingdoms for finding out highly scintillating images. These images can be appreciated by those who have retained their sensitivity to the subtle stimuli which comes from the Indian environment, and who still have a feeling for aspects of Indian life now rarely experienced in our modern cities. 27 “Past and Future” is a short lyric presenting beautiful and graphic images which can only be given by an Indian poet or a person highly attached to the Indian culture. The first stanza presents a concrete and picturesque image of a hermit living in an old mountain cell. Words like ‘lone’, ‘apart’, ‘old’ and ‘retires’ evoke the familiar figure of an Indian hermit: The new hath come and now the old retires And so the past becomes a mountain cell Where lone, apart, old hermit memories dwell In consecrated calm,…… 28 Again, in the second stanza, the poetess compares human soul with the newly married bride who is greatly confused about the future. Only an Indian poetess could compare the ‘vague; and ‘intese’ feeling of a soul with the newly wedded bride who is ‘yet unknown’ about her ‘timid future’: And now the soul stands in a vague intense Expectancy and anguish of suspense, On the dim chamber threshold…lo! He sees Like a strange, fated bride as yet unknown, His timid future shrinkingtherealone, Beneath her marriage-veil of mysteries. 29 “ Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad” brings a series of lovely eye-catching images. We have first the picturesque image of the ‘speckled sky’ shining brightly like a multicolored pigeon throat. Sometime it is seen in the courtyards of Indian temples, a species of a large pigeon with dark green and yellow green specks. A beautiful picture painted in native colours: See how the speckled sky burns like a pigeon’s throat, Jeweled with embers of opal and peridote. 30

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hen we have a memorable picture of river Music flowing through the city gates of Hyderabad: See the white river that flashes and scintillates Curved like a tusk from the mouth of the city gats. 31 Then comes the sounds of “Muezzin’s call” which “floats like a battle flag over the city wall” 32 and sights of ‘faces gleam, veiled in a splendor voluminous’ from the “trellised balconies”. Finally, the majestic approach of Night herself, imbued with human attributes: a supreme example of pathetic fallacy: Over the city bridge Night comes majestical, Born like a queen to a sumptuous festival. 33 In ‘Leili’ Sarojini again takes us to the world of mystic silence of the night when ‘ the serpents are asleep among the poppies’, the fireflies light the calm and quiet path of the panther, the parrot plumes ‘Outshine’ in the light of the ‘dying day’ : O soft! The lotus buds upon the stream Are stirring like sweet maidens when they dream.34 The beautiful and vivid description of ‘nocturnal romance’ catches the attention of the reader and takes him to the forest where night is enshrined as a Goddess in a Temple and the winds are seen dancing and swooning at the ‘holy feet of Night’. The superb power of imagination of our poetess comes to light when she presents an image of moon shining as a caste mark on the brow of Heaven: A castemark on the azure brows of Heaven, The golden moon burns sacred, solemn, bright, The winds are dancing in the forest temple, And swooning at the holy feet off Night, Hush in the silence themystic voices sing And make the gods their incense offering. 35 J.H. Cousins highly praises the poem and gives a rapturous response especially to the ‘Castemark’ metaphor. The caste mark is a saffron coloured Sandal paste or kumkum mark which the orthodox Hindus put on their forehead at the time of worship. The figuring of the moon as a caste mark on the forehead of heaven is

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in itself a unique achievement of imagination in the English language”, writes J.H. Cousins: It lifts India to the literary heavens: it threatens the throne of Diana ( the goddess of moon in Greek mythology) of the classics; it realizes Luna from the work of asylum keeper and gives her instead the office of the remembrance that the Divine is imprinted on the open face of Nature.36 And about the “dancing winds” he writes: “ The symbolism in Mrs. Naidu’s poem of the dancing winds as devotees in the temple of nature must surely stand among the fine things of literature”. 37 thus emerges the fine specimen of Sarojini’s art where the English, Persian and Sanskrit conventions are blended imaginatively to produce a highly individual piece of peculiar strength and richness. The image of ‘caste mark’ may be a “fairly common-place illustration of ‘Utpreksha’ (metaphor) occurring again and again in Hindu traditional poetry, particularly in the copy book poetics of the Reeti and Prabandha schools” 38 but it will always be placed as a unique specimen of imagery expressed in English language by an Indian poetess. In a simple fold song ‘ Palanquin-Bearers’ one finds a sumptuous feast of both concrete and abstract images. A soft and delicate music leaps up in the air as the palanquin-bearers bear the veiled blooming beauty along ‘like a pearl on a string’. The images like the maiden floating like a laugh from the lips of a dream, swaying like a flower in the wind of a song and hanging like a star in the dew of a song creates a dream –like atmosphere. The whole poem sets a complete rapport with the heartbeats of beauty inside and they use fine kinetic images like ‘swaying’, ‘skimming’, ‘floating’, ‘hanging’, ‘springing’ and ‘falling’ provides lightness of touch and buoyancy to the poem. The noted critic, James H. Cousins remarks that the poem “… is without the slightest suspicion of literature, yet its charm is instantaneous and complete”.39Not only the readers but even the poetess seems to be lost in the memory of bygone days.

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‘ A Rajput Love Song’ offers a number of delicate romantic images drawn from a tender world of a royal beauty as well as the strong world of warriors. In ‘Dance of Love’ a string of sensuous and romantic imagery brings forth the passionate world of lovers with their strange feeling of joy and pain of love. It is hard to deny the effect of melodious music and rhythmic movements of the dancers on the heart of lovers: The music sighs and slumbers, It stirs and sleeps again… Hush, it wakes and weeps and murmurs Like a woman’s heart in pain; Now it laughs and calls and coaxes, Like a loverin the night, Now it pants with sudden longing, Now it sobs with sudden delight.40 The swift and the rhythmic movements of dancers are ‘like bright and windblown lilies’ and the ‘subtle feet of dancers’Wakes in the heart of lovers Love’s ecstasy and pain.41 In “The Offering”she compares her beauty with a ‘rare blossom’, ‘youth’ with ‘rich pearl’, the ‘radiant gifts’ of ‘glory and fame’ with camphor and curds proffered before the love-bright and sacrificial flame. In India ‘ camphor’ and ‘curds’ are greatly used as offering in temples and the readers familiar with such mode of Indian worship will certainly be impressed by the apt imagery. In this context J.H. Cousin remarks: To the untraveled western readers, ‘camphor’ as a figure of speech will carry queer shades of meaning built up out of clothing and moths and ‘curds’ will be flavourous only of dining rooms or convalescence. But one who has stared the offering of the substance of life to some power of inner worlds, or who has passed his hands through the smoke from camphor, that burns to nothing in the flame of Divine, will find through such figures an entrance to the strongest place in the life of India, the place of religious devotion and the perpetual presence. 42

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The opening lines of ‘Ecstasy’ rejoice the reader with the fantastic images of the beautiful spring season. The palash trees compared with the ‘blossoming brands of fire’ present a visual picture which becomes more attractive when the south valleys are shown waking ‘with rods of budded flame’. Then there comes a perfectly romantic image when the poetess addresses the love as ‘the miraculous flower of my desire’ whose lips have been crushed between hers. The lines represent the highly sensuous image: But I have plucked you, O miraculous Flower of my desire And crushed between my lips the Burning petals of your mouth.43 Sarojini is a poetess of high poetic sensibility and delicate imagination. Even her patriotic poem “ Gift of India” offers a bunch of striking images in describing the condition of the heroic sons of India who sacrificed their lives in the First World War: Gathered like pearls in their alien graves Silent thy sleep by thePersian waves, Scattered like shells on Egyptian Sands, The lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands, They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance On the blood brown meadows of Flanders and France.44 “The Lotus” is one of the very fine symbolic specimens of high artistic flavour. Sarojini’s fascination for lotus and her love for Gandhiji are beautifully drawn in this superb work of art. The symbol runs throughout the poem and very minutely elevates Mahatma’s character to a supreme height. The selection of words is highly intellectual and serves the dual purpose of the poetess. Every epithet makes the subject (Lotus: Gandhi) clear in the mind of the reader and the implied mythology at once becomes vulnerable: 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 a far off clime.45

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Lotus gains a mystic significance along with the mystic saint; “sacred” and “sublime”. Lotus possesses a religious and mythological value in Indian literature and is associated with the sacred Gods and Gandhi is not a common man but a “PuranPurusha”, who is “coeval with the Lords of life and Death”, the Creative man in apotheosis, set up as an avatar of Vishnu, or Krishna in his cosmic presence ( Visvarupa); “deep rooted in the waters of all Time”, a mythological implication, the sacred flower deeply rooted in the first waters out of which creation sprang up; In relation to Mahatma it means his deep rootedness in the universal wisdom; both are unruffled by ‘transient storms’. A similar undercurrent of serious thought runs in Sarojini’s exquisite symbolic poem “ Indian Weavers”. It adds an additional feather to her cap without any aid of metaphysical gravity or technical sophistication. We are made in realize (in the poem) that the web of our life is of a mingled yarn, grave and gay together. The whole comedy and tragedy of life is concentrated in the three stanzas of the poem each representing the three stages of life. Prof. C.D. Narasimhaiah observe: “Here in twelve line is an elliptical, allusive and symbolic representation of life’s journey from birth to death…”46 The weavers remind us of the three fates or sisters of Greek Mythology, weaving the mingled web of human life. The poem also gives a convincing proof of Sarojin’s deep awareness and understanding of the Hindu thought and conception of trinity of Brahma (the God of creation), Vishnu (the God of prosperity, marriage, wealth and splendour), and Mahesh (God of destructiondeath). Their process of creation is continuous like the weaving of the weavers from morning till night. It is a poem rich in high philosophical strain along with the simplicity of a folk song. In this context, C.D. Narasimhaiah observes: …. It is not merely a competent poem, but a very distinguished one, for the poet here is in full possession of rare gifts—a profound awareness of her own tradition, admirable poise, economy and an ear and eye for striking rhythm, image

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and symbol, all used to fine advantage to make the poem most evocative. 47 There is a vast variety of material measures- iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic or their permissible combinations, successfully practiced by her. She never tried her hand on blank verse. Her poems are mostly ‘short swallow flights of fancy’ free from every bondage of poetic rules of her times. She is in love with music and longs I n her own words, to be “wild free things of the air like the birds with a song in my heart”. She does not imitate any particular English Poet or belongs to any one thought of school or follows any particular literary technique. “Her poems exhibit a delicate sensitive ear trained in the best poetic tradition”. 48 Besides the skillful use of these metirical measures, Sarojini’s command on native tunes is superb. Lines of “An Indian Love Song” remind us of a love duel sung by a lover and his beloved in the particular native tune. How shall I yield to the voice of they pleading, How shall I grant thy prayer Or give thee a rose-red silken tassel, Ascended leaf from my hair ? 49 “Street Cries” and “In The Bazars of Hyderabad” present a realistic picture of life in the Indian streets and markets by reproducing its tunes: What do you cry, O ye fruitmen? Citron, pomergranate and plum What do you play, O musicians? Sithar, Sarangi, and drum. What do you chant, O magicians? Spells for the aeons to come. 50 The swinging movement of “Palanquin-Bearers”, the vernacular cries of “ Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!” of the ‘muezzins’ from mosque and minar ; the chanting of “Govinda! Govinda!” In the “Song of Radha, The Milkmaid”; the “Lira! Liree! Lira ! Liree!” of the Kokila; and then the twice repeated notes of “pi-kahan, pikahan” of papeeha in “ A Love Song From The North” impart an exquisite variety and richness to the rhythm.

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Sarojini’s poetry is in fact a gorgeous and artistic medium chosen by her for representing the whole gamut of her fairy fancies and supreme imagination. The special charm of her poetry lies in her selection of words, music and apt imagery. She is primarily a music maker, “a dreamer of dreams”, a singer by birth and aptitude and not by vocation. She would have been untrue to herself if she had forced her inspirations to write poetry of pure intellectual vigour and philosophical depth. One can say that she was influenced by ‘The symbolist Movement in Literature’ aroused by Arthur Symons or it might be the effect of her mystic father or her environment. Whatever may be the reason, but her symbolic poems are undoubtedly ‘ fine cut jewels of beauty’. No doubt, Sarojini is a melody maker. She is a lyricist, a free born poet who has a strange craving for sound and melody.

REFERENCES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Padmini Senguta, Sarojini Naidu (New Delhi: Sahitya Academy,1981), p.91 Dr. Satish Kumar, Sarojini Naidu: The Poetess, ( Bareilly: Student Store, 1989),p.74 Sarojini Naidu, “Spring” The Sceptred Flute, ( Allahabad: Kitabistan, 1969), p.87 Sarojini Naidu, “Indian Dancer” The Sceptred Flute, pp. 39-40 Armand Menezes, Lights than Air, (Dharwar, Samykta Karnatka Press, 1959), p. 46 Sarojini Naidu, The Time of Roses” The Sceptred Flute, pp. 194195 R.R Bhatnagar, Sarojini Naidu: A Poet of a Nation,(Allahabad: Kitab Mahal) p.50 A. N. Dwivedi, Sarojini Naidu and her poetry(Allahabad; Kitab Mahal, 1887, pp. 136-7 Sarojini Naidu, “Life” The Sceptred Flute, p.35 Sarojini Naidu, “Bangle Sellers” The Sceptred Flute, p.108 Sarojini Naidu, ‘Palanquin Bearers” The Sceptred Flute,p.3

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Sarojni Naidu, “Coromandel Fishers” The Sceptred Flute, p.6 Sarojini Naidu, “Indian Love-Song” The Sceptred Flute, p.16 Sarojni Naidu, Autumn Song” The Sceptred Flute, p.23 Sarojini naidu. “ Humayun to Zobeida” The Sceptred Flute, p. 22 Sarojini Naidu, “Alabaster The Sceptred Flute, p.18 Sarojini Naidu, “The Queen’s Rival The Sceptred Flute, pp 4647 Sarojini Naidu, “Pardah Nashin” The Sceptred Flute, p.53 Sarojini Naidu, “The Song of Princess Zeb-Un-Nissa in Praise of Her Own Beauty The Sceptred Flute, p.38 Sarojini Naidu, “Death and Life” The Sceptred Flute, p.119 Sarojini Naidu, “A Challenge To Fate” The Sceptred Flute, p.134 Sarojini Naidu, The Poet to Death” The Sceptred Flute, p.49 Sarojini Naidu, “Medley The Sceptred Flute, p.138 Sarojini Naidu, “The Joy of Spring Time” The Sceptred Flute, p.89 Sarojini Naidu, “Nightfall In The City of Hyderabad The Sceptred Flute p.55 Sarojini Naidu, “The Joy of Spring Time” The Sceptred Flute, p.89 VS. Narvane, Sarojini Naidu: An Introduction to Her Lite, Work and Po- etry New Delhi; Orient Longman, 1980, p.139 Sarojini Naidu, “Past and Future” The Sceptred Flute, p.34 Ibid. Sarojni Naidu, “Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad” The Sceptred Flute, p.55 Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Sarojini Naidu, ‘Leilir The Sceptred Flute, p.31 Ibid. James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India, Madras; Ganesh and Co.1918, p.265 Ibid. PV. Rajualakshmi, The Lyric Spring, New Delhi; Abhinav

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39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

Publications 1977, p49 James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India, Madras, 1918, pp 259-60 Sarojini Naidu, The Dance of Love” The Sceptred Flute, p.73 Sarojini Naidu, The Dance of Love The Sceptred Flute, p.74 Sarojini Naidu, Cousins, op. Cit., p.256 Sarojini Naidu, “Ecstasy The Sceptred Flute, p.212 Sarojini Naidu, “Gift of India” The Sceptred Flute, p.146 Sarojini Naidu, Lotus” The Sceptred Flute, p.167 C. D. Narasimhaiah, The Swan And The Eagle of. cit., p. 22. lbid pp. 22-23 Gupta, A. N. and Gupta, Satish, Sarojini Naidus Selected Poems, Barelly, Prakash Book Depot, 1996, p.11 Sarojini Naidu, “An Indian Love Songs” The Sceptred Flute, p.16 Sarojini Naidu: ‘in The Bazars of Hyderabad The Sceptred Flute, p. 107

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6 THE SUMMING - UP The foregoing discussion makes it quite evident that Sarojini Naidu did not take to rhymes as mere literary luxury characteristic of a stray pastime or a diversion; far from this, there was present in her a spirit so terribly in earnest about the purposiveness of life as never to spend itself on “the idle song of an empty day. Her poetic output reveals expressions of genuine sentiment resonant with melody. The happy harmony of her sweet, simple, sylabic strains bear messages of elevated emotion and entranced imagination.

In Sarojini’s poetry one comes across yearning and dream action and suffering, laughter and song. Rarely has the world seen women who have combined in themselves such diverse qualities: an intense poetic temperament, sensitive to beauty in all forms; a gift of language overwhelming in its richness; and vivacity and wit and oratorical eloquence. Sarojini was not only an aesthete wallowing in sensation but one who showed a certain sanity balance of purpose in her poetry. The range of her poetry may be limited, but she, like Jane Austen, moved within that range with grace and skill. Through her poetry, Sarojini articulated the dream of a rising nation against the imperialistic forces. In it one may

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witness a beautiful blending of Western culture with Eastern idealism. One may also witness in it that widespread upheaval of thought and feeling capable of affecting the future of mankind. Sarojini projected an aspect of Indian sensitivity at that level of creative synthesis where tradition and individuality respond to the human predicament without any sense of hiatus. Be it love of nature, death or dreams, temples or dancers, festivals or fishermen, her poems reveal her own awareness of the distinct connection between the self and the world. Whatever the theme and mood of her poems, Sarojini remains mainly a “Songbird twittering melodiously in the Muse’s bower. Sarojini’s poems tell us of her fancies and longings, her moments of ecstasy and moments of loneliness. In her thoughtprovoking poems she speculated on the transitoriness of life and the caprice of fortune, the purpose of life and the mystery of Death. She is attracted to the great religions of the world: Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam. Mythology interests her and she sings of the gods and goddesses of her own ancient land, Krishna and Lakshmi and Kali and others. She creates beautiful word-portraits out of her close association with distinguished persons of her own dayMahatma Gandhi, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Nizam of Hyderabad. In the humblest of professions, she sees the beauty of life. Her strong gaze is constantly focussed on Palanquinbearers and bangle-sellers, singers and dancers, corn-grinders and weavers, gipsies and snake-charmers, fishermen and beggars. Even when she deals with the social customs of IndiaSati and Purdah- she gives us a penetrating criticism of life which is artistic in its essence. Sarojini chooses fascinating subjects from the history of her own land and reproduces the love of Humayun to Zobeida

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and the beauty of Aurangzeb’s daughter princess Zeb-un-nissa. She writes of kings and queens who lie silently asleep at Golconda. The legends of the past provide her with themes for poems and she writes on Damyanti addressing Nala in the hour of his exile. Her poetical works include poems on Indian festivals-Basant Panchami, Nag Panchami and Muharrum and also poems on Indian flowers: the red gulmohar the fragrant nasturtium, the golden cassia, the rich champak, the lovely ashoka. She sings of the seasons of her land-autumn and its sadness, spring and its joys. She faithfully captures the scenery around her-dawn over fields full of harvest, blossoming woods in summer, sunset in June, twilight over hills, nightfall in the city of Hyderabad. Sarojini’s poetry is fused with the rich pattern of the life around her; it does not fail to depict the life of the Indian people in terms of its various aspects: economic, social and religious of particular interest are the songs which deal, either in a direct or in a symbolic form, with the occupations of non-urbanised agricultural people- ploughing, seeding, harvesting, grinding. Some of them are concerned with love, death, rejoicing, mourning. health and illness, while others deal with activities connected with the flux of seasons. The theme of some of these songs are agrarian work processes like sowing, reaping and harvesting, or other routine chores like the fetching of water from the river, or the sentiments of gratitude to the gods for successful operations, or plaintive appeals to them for their fruition. Her poetry draws its themes and imagery from new sources. The travails of the individual struggling against the pressures of a rigid social system touch her deeply. Some aspects of the Indian society of her times are laid bare when viewed through the prism of her poetry. Her poems portray the Indian people, their struggle, their dreams, their aspirations.

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The themes of Sarojini’s folk-songs are the product of the free play of a vital energy that creates intuitively. In some of them we feel the loneliness of a village girl; in others the spaciousness of open places; in still others joy and sadness, wild vitality and emotions, love and veneration, or the longing and despair of the Indian rural people. All these emotions and images are expressed in beautiful tunes, quite different from the urban expressions of the same emotions in Sarojini’s other poems. These folk song are marked by great richness, which may be symbolised by a meadow covered with red, blue, white, green and purple flowers. We rarely see the monotony of grey, brown and dark colours, so characteristic of a modem industrial metropolis. Sarojini gives us true Indian pictures in English verse endowed with the clear ring of originality. The India of Sarojini is not the exotic India of god-like sahibs and abject natives, but the India in which she lived and died. She looks at things straight with her eyes and sets down faithfully what she has seen, with perfect fidelity to details. She is quick in appraising the value of local colour. She has wide knowledge of Indian birds and animals, flowers and fruits, articles of dress and decoration, kings and queens. Even precious stones and musical instruments are rendered animate through the touch of her pen. She mentions a number of precious stones-agate, amber, amethyst, gem, jade, jewel, onyx, opal, peridot, porphyry, sapphire and ruby. Her Kings and queens have splendid regalia-crowns or turbans, an ivory bed or an ebony seat, jewelled sceptre, canopies, armies, armour, forts, vassals. She writes of various musical instruments like the flute and the sitar, the cymbal, and the drum. The colours that occur frequently are blue, green, purple, red, and saffron. Her weavers are real persons: they eam their honest bread by weaving all kinds of clothing- the robes of a

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new born child, the marriage-veils of a queen, the funeral shroud of a dead man. Sarojini accepts and represents things as they really are in India. The note of realism in her poetry makes it alive and vibrant without reducing it to a medium of social propaganda. She has been criticised for writing about the colourful land of romance and mystery, the India of the common western imagination with the essential reality- real experience, real landscape and the real people being blurred into mystified sentimentality. It is rather unfair to use the blanket term “romantic” as a kind of automatic reflex to describe her poetic temperament, without the basic generosity of attention to some of the ways in which her individual sensibility operates in the poems themselves. Sarojini’s poetry belongs to the romantic school, but it is a romance which is never far away from ground reality. She is Sarojini Naidu, with her own distinctive qualities. Keats and Shelley were undoubtedly her early models; in her impassioned lyrical outpourings she is very close to Shelley, and in her perfectly sensuous apprehension of thought and feeling she is close to the heart of Keats. She seems to have been inspired by the glorious idealism of Shelley without, of course, losing touch with the pain and pleasure of the short and simple annals of the poor. All her work exhibits a marked strain of the sensuous and the mystical, a sense of the flesh and a sense of the spirit. Whatever may be her shortcomings as a poet, she has few peers in Indo-Anglian poetry. It is remarkable indeed that Sarojini Naidu could blend her commitment to the cause of India’s independence with her profound engagement with the Muse’s calling. Itis praiseworthy that Sarojini emerged as the passionate advocate for India, an ardent champion endowed with deep sincerity of motive, great courage in speech and

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earnestness in action; one who hated all shams and prejudices, all sectarian narrowness, all provincial limitations of vision and purpose, all the arrogant sophistries of man-made divisions and differences-attributes which not only went into the making of a staunch patriot but also contributed immensely to the shaping of a great poet whose message will always remain contemporary in keeping hope alive in an age of despair.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.PRIMARY SOURCES 1. Naidu Sarojini, The Bird of Time. London : William Heinemann, 1912. 2. Naidu Sarojini, The Broken Wing. London: William Heinemann, 1917 3. Naidu Sarojini, The Feather of The Dawn. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1961. 4. Naidu Sarojini, The Golden Threshold. London : William Heinemann, 1905 5. Naidu Sarojini, The Sceptred Flute. Allahabad : Kitabistan, 1948 6. Naidu Sarojini, Speeches and Writings of Sarojini Naidu. Madras: G. A. Natesan &Co., 1919

B. SECONDARY SOURCES 1. Abbas K. A, Sarojini Naidu. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1980

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2. Alva J., Men and Supermen of Hindustan. Bombay Thacker, 1943. 3. Anand, Mulk Raj, The Golden Breath. London: John Murry, 1933. 4. Ansari, A A, The Poetry of Sarojini Naidu. Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan, 1977 5. Ayyar, P A Subrahmanya, Sarojini Devi Second Edition. Madras: Cultural Books, 1957. 6. Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, India Wins Freedom. Bombay: Orient Longmans, 1957. 7. Baig, M. R. A, In Different Saddles. Bombay : Asia Publishing House, 1967. 8. Baig,Tara Ali, Sarojini Naidu. New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Government of India. 1974. 9. Basham, A. L, The Wonder that was India. London Sidwick and Jackson, 1954. 10. Basu Lotika, Indian Writers of English Verse. Calcutta: University Press, 1933. 11. Bemays Robert, The Naked Fakir. London: Victor Gollanez, 1931. 12. Bhatnagar, Ram Ratan, Sarojini Naidu :the Poet of A Nation Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, New Delhi. 13. Blunden Edmund, Nature in English Literature. London: Hogharth Press, 1949. 14. Brecher Michael, Nehru. London: Oxford University Press ,1959 15. Cambridge History of English Literature, 1951.

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16. Campbell Johnson Alan, Misson with Mountbatten. London Robert Hale, Ltd. 1951. 17. Catlin George, In The Path of Mahatma Gandhi London Macdonald &Co., 1948 18. Chattopadhyaya Harindranath, Life and Myself. Dawn Approaching Noon. Bombay: Nalanda Publications, 1948. 19. Cousins Margaret E, Indian Womanhood Today. Allahabad: Kitabistan 20. Cousins Margaret E. The Awakening of Asian Womanhood, Madras: Ganesh & Co, 1922 21. Cousins James H. New Ways in English Literature. Madras: Ganesh & Co., 1917. 22. Cousins James H., The Poetry of Sarojini Naídu. Calcutta: The Modern Review, October, 1931. 23. Cousins James H. The Renaissance in India. Madras: Ganesh & Co.1918 24. Das Harihar, Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. London. 25. Desai A R., Social Background of Indian Nationalism. Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1954 26. Dhanpala D. B, Eminent Indians London: David Marlowe Ltd. 1947. 27. Dubois J. A, Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906 28. Dunn T. O. D., Bengali Writers of English Verse. Calcutta: Thacker Spink 1918 29. Dustoor P. E., Sarojini Naidu. Mysore: Rao & Raghavan, 1961.

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30. Dustoor P. E, Stout Hearts and Open Hands. Bombay: Ed. P. D. Tandon. Jaico, 1958 31. Dwivedi Amar Nath, Indo-Anglian PoetryAllahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1979. 32. Encyclopedia of Literature, Vols. I & II, London: Longmans, 1946 33. Fanon Frantz, The Wretched ofthe Earth. Penguin Harmondsworth, 1967 34. Farren Robert, Towards an appreciation of Poetry Dublin: Metropolitan, 1944 35. Fitzgerald, E. Tr. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Bombay: Jaico, 1948, 36. Gandhi M. K. An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Edited by Mahadev Desai, Ahmedabad : Navajivan Publishing House, 1940. 37. Gangopadhyaya Satya, The Poems of Sarojini Naidu, The Modern Review, July. 1957. 38. Gupta A. N. And Satish, Sarojini Naidu Select Poems, Bareilly: Prakash Book Depot, 1976. 39. Gupta J. N., Life and Works of Ramesh Chunder Dutt. London: J. M. Dent. 1911. 40. Gupta Rameshwar, Sarojini The Poetess. Delhi: Doaba House, 1975. 41. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth. London: Bell and Sons, 1945. 42. Hutheesingh Krishna, With No Regrets. Oxford: University Press, 1952. 43. Huxley Aldous, Jesting Pilate, The Diary of a Journey, London: Chatto and Windus, 1948.

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44. lyengar K. R. Srinivasan, Indo-Anglian Literature. Bombay International Book House, 1943. 45. lyengar K. R. S., Literature and Authorship in India. London: Allen and Unwin, 1943. 46. lyengar K. R. Srinivasa, The Indian Contribution to English Literature Bombay:Karnataka Publishing House, 1945. 47. yengar K. R. Srinivasa, Indian Writing in English. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962 48. Jayakar M R, The Story of My Life, Vols I &II. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 49. Jha Amarnath, Sarojini Naidu: a Personal Homage. Allahabad: Indian Press 1949, For Private Circulation only. 50. Kabir Humayun, Our Heritage. Bombay: National Books, 1946. 51. Kamladevi, At the Cross-Roads. Bombay: National Books, 1947. 52. Kotoky P. C., Indo-English Poetry Guwahati: Department of Publication, University, 1969 53. Meherally Yusuf, Leaders of India, 6th Edition. Bombay: Padma Publications Ltd., 1946. 54. Mehrotra K. K, Essays and Studies. Allahabad: Ed. The University of Allahabad. Lokbharti Publications, 1970 55. Morton Eleanor, Woman Behind the Mahatma. London: Max Reinhardt, 1954 56. Munshi K. M., The End of an Era. Bombay: Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957.

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57. Naik M. K. (Ed.), Indian Response to Poetry in English. Macmillan 58. Nanda B. R. The Two Nehrus. London: Allen and Unwin, 1962. 59. Narsimhaiah C. D, The Swan and the Eagle. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1969 60. Nehru J. L, Discovery of India. Calcutta Signet Books 61. Nehru J. L, Independence and After. New Delhi: Publications Division, 1949 62. Prasad Rajendra, An Autobiography Bombay: Asia Publishing House 1957. 63. Punekar Shankar Mokashi, Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English, Ed M. K. Nak, S K. Desai & G. G. Amur. Second Edition, 64. Dharwar Karnatak Universty, 1972. 65. Rajyalaxme P V. The Lyric Child, The Poetic Achievement of Sarojini Naidu. New Deihi: Abhinav Prakashan, 1977 66. Sampson George, The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: The University Press, 1945; Elbs Ed. 1961. 67. Sehgal Nayantara, Prison and Chocolate Cake. London: Victor Gollanez, 1954. 68. Sengupta Padmini, Pioneer Women of India. Bombay Thacker & Co, Ltd 1944 69. Sengupta Padmini, Sarojini Naidu-A Biography Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1966. 70. Subrahmanya Ayyar P. A., Sarojini Devi. Madras: Cultural Books, 1956.

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71. Talookdar B.K., The Poetry of Toru Dutt. Bombay: University Journal, May, 1936. 72. Thompson Edward, Tagore Poet and Dramatist. 73. Vaughan, The Romantic Revolt. 74. Wells H.G., A Short History of the World. Penguin Middlesex, 1946 75. Wiser C.V., Madam President in the Chair in India, Asia: July, 1926.