Today, February 13, marks the birth anniversary of Sarojini Naidu.
We record our homage and deep admiration for the womanhood of India who, in the hour of peril for the motherland forsook the shelter of their homes and, with unfailing courage and endurance, stood shoulder to shoulder with their men folk, in the frontline of India’s national army to share with them the sacrifices and triumphs of the struggle.
– Congress resolution passed on January 26, 1931
The history of the freedom movement is replete with the sacrifice, sagacity and courage of great men and women. This struggle which gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century threw up stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, C. Rajagopalachari, Dadabhai Naoroji, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai and many more.
But it was not a men’s movement. Many women played a proactive and prominent leadership role which became most visible when Annie Besant was elected President of Indian National Congress (INC) in 1916. However, it was the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi on the national scene and his unique method of mass mobilisation – the non-cooperation movement (1920), salt satyagraha (1930) and the Quit India Movement (1942) – that helped women discover themselves and play a leading role in the independence movement. One such woman was Sarojini Naidu, who rose through the ranks to become the president of INC in 1925 at the young age of 46.
She was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her father, Aghorenath Chatterjee, originally from East Bengal, was a brilliant scientist as well as a poet in Urdu and Bengali. Her mother, Varda Sundari, was a renowned singer and wrote her own lyrics in Bengali. Sarojini passed the matriculation examination when she was only 12, standing first in the Madras presidency. However, her love for poetry came in the way of achieving any degree, despite being sent to London and Cambridge for higher studies. She wrote afterwards how she inherited the poetic instinct from her parents. “One day when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in Algebra; it wouldn’t come 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—1,300 lines in six days.”
Sarojini Chattopadhyaya (maiden name) married Govindarajulu Naidu in 1898 after returning from England and settled down in Hyderabad. The marriage became a landmark in social reform as inter-caste marriages were almost unknown at the time. Sarojini was deeply influenced by the Hindu-Islamic culture of her town and gave expression to it in her poems. Some of her collection of poems which took the English world by storm were The Golden Threshold, The Feather of the Dawn, Bird of Time and The Broken Wing. Few of her poems were also translated into French. Sarojini’s innate longing for the ‘rapture of song’ could not prevent her from being drawn into the social and political life of the country.
It was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the leader of the moderates, who persuaded her to step out of her ivory tower. She met Gandhi and Nehru at the Lucknow session of the INC in 1916, and developed friendship with Rabindranath Tagore and C.F. Andrews. Earlier, at the INC session in Bombay (now Mumbai), Sarojini recited the following poem composed by her:
Awaken, O Mother! Thy children implore thee,
who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!
The night is a flush with a dream of the morrow,
why still dost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow?
Awaken and serve the woes that enthrall us,
and hallow our hands for the triumphs that call us.
Sarojini was deeply troubled by the rift between Hindu and Muslim communities. As much as Hindu culture she admired Islamic culture and Muslim way of life. At the 1916 Lucknow session of the INC, she played a notable role in bringing about cooperation between Congress and the Muslim league under the guidance of Lokmanya Tilak. Her friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Ali brothers made the Tilak’s task much easier.
She wrote that Lucknow sessions of INC and Muslim League marked a new era and inaugurated new standards in the history of modern Indian affairs. Hindu-Muslim unity became a passion in Sarojini’s life mission. Addressing the seventh All India Women’s Conference, she declared: “No Indian could be loyal to the country and yet be narrow and sectarian in spirit… No matter whether it was temple or mosque, church or fire shrine, let them transcend the barriers that divide man from the man.”
In July 1919, Sarojini went to England as a member of the deputation of the All India Home Rule League, where she pleaded for the rights of women. In 1924, Sarojini visited Kenya, South Africa and East Africa as a Congress delegate and inspired Indian settlers in these colonies to fight for their rights non-violently.
In 1925, she was elected president of INC, inspiring women to join public life. She was the second woman president of INC after Annie Besant, but the first one of Indian origin. In her presidential address, Sarojini declared, “No sacrifice is too heavy, no struggle too great, no martyrdom too terrible, that enables us to redeem our Mother from the unspeakable dishonour of her bondage….in the battle for liberty, fear is the one unforgivable treachery and despair the one unforgivable sin.”
Sarojini took a leading part in the salt satyagraha of 1930 and was sent to jail. In 1931, she accompanied Gandhi to London for the Second Round Table Conference. She was imprisoned for the third time during the Quit India Movement and was put in the Aga Khan Palace along with Gandhi. After India became independent, she became the first woman to be appointed as a governor. On March 2, 1949, she breathed her last at the Lucknow Raj Bhawan.
Mourning her death, Sardar Patel, then deputy prime minister and home minister, recalled her great contribution in the freedom struggle and said, “She represented in her person the grim determination and the heavy sacrifices of Indian womanhood. She strode the stage like a heroine and never wavered in her faith in India’s destiny and in the ultimate success of that miraculous weapon (nonviolence) which was Bapu’s gift to India.”
Nehru, in his homage, said, “Here was a person of great brilliance – vital and vivid. Here was a person with so many gifts, but above all some gifts which made her unique. She infused artistry and poetry into our national struggle…she represented in herself a rich culture into which flowed various currents which have made Indian culture as great as it is.”
Naidu desired that her epitaph should be: “She loved the youth of India”. Perhaps it may be more fitting to say of her that the youth of India loved her. Nevertheless, this would be an inadequate epitaph according to her biographer C.D. Narasimhaiah: “For not only the youth of India but everybody in India loved her – and was charmed by her.”
Praveen Davar is a columnist and author of Freedom Struggle and Beyond.
