“Just as the Father of the Nation had infused moral grandeur and greatness into the struggle, Mrs Sarojini Naidu gave it artistry and poetry and that zest for life and indomitable spirit, which not only faced disaster and catastrophe, but faced them with a light heart and with a song on the lips and smile on the face...”
— Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a tribute to Sarojini Naidu after her death on 2 March 1949
Sarojini Naidu, a leader of the Indian national movement, the first Indian woman to become president of the Congress, and the first governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (which eventually became the state of Uttar Pradesh), was born on 13 February 1879 in Hyderabad state, then ruled by the Nizam.
Sarojini’s father, the well-known Aghore Chattopadhyay, a doctorate in science from Edinburgh, was the founder of Hyderabad College(later called Nizam’s College). She had seven younger siblings. Her mother, Varada Sundari, wrote poetry, something that the young Sarojini took a liking to from an early age. She is said to have written a 1,300-line poem at the age of 13.
In an indirect reference to her own cosmopolitan and secular upbringing as a child of Brahman parents settled in a Muslim-ruled state, she wrote in a piece of (unpublished) autobiographical fiction at the age of 17 featuring a girl called ‘Sunalini’ who represents Sarojini herself:
“Unlike the girls of her own nation, she had been brought up in an atmosphere of… absolute freedom of thought and action….Among the extraordinary influences that formed her, not the least interesting…were the moonlight gatherings that took place every night in her father’s garden…Hindu pandit, Moslem Mollah and Christian priest: and while they closed in the heart of an endless discussion, a rabid and delightful interchange of thoughts and ideas…Sunalini would steal in behind her father’s seat and breathlessly drink in the confused babel of wit.”
This liberal childhood would later make Sarojini one of the prominent spokespersons for Hindu-Muslim unity.
She cleared her matriculation from the University of Madras at a very young age. Thanks to a scholarship instituted by the Nizam, she went to England to study at the King’s College, London and Girton College, Cambridge. She was one of the first Indian girls to have been educated in Britain in that era. Before she turned 20 she married Govindarajulu Naidu, a doctor, an inter-caste marriage that her father agreed to.
Sarojini Naidu became part of the Indian national movement around the time of the 1905 partition of Bengal. She would in the years to come develop a close bond with most of the top leadership of the Indian National Congress including Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. She also became a spokesperson for the Indian cause in the West, travelling to Britain and the United States to lecture on the nationalist movement as well as women’s rights.
During the First World War in a series of lectures across India she spoke on various aspects of women’s empowerment, Indian nationalism and social reforms. She played a key role in establishing the Women’s Indian Association. She accompanied Congress leader Annie Besant to England to press for voting reforms to include women.
She presided over the Kanpur session of the Indian National Congress in 1925. Four years later in South Africa she presided over the East African Indian Congress. She took part in the in the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1931 that also had Gandhi and Madan Mohan Malaviya in attendance. A prominent participant in most campaigns launched by Gandhi, she was jailed during the Civil Disobedience and Quit India movements.
Naidu had a ready wit and a way with words. Her first meeting with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, then a 30-year-old Indian nationalist, left a strong impression on her. She later memorably described him as “[t]all and stately, but thin to the point of emancipation, languid and luxurious of habit…Jinnah’s attenuated form is a deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional vitality and endurance…the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve…masks…a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman’s…”
She once famously remarked, tongue firmly in cheek, that it took a lot of money to keep Gandhi in a state of poverty!
In her letters to her family and prominent national leaders many aspects of her personality come to the fore. In a moving letter to her daughter Leilamani on 4 March 1921, Naidu wrote: “Remember that you have to help India to be free and the children of tomorrow to be free-born citizens of a free land, therefore — if you are true to your country’s need you must recognise the responsibility of your Indian womanhood. Nothing in your speech or action should cause the progress of Indian women to suffer….”
In an inspired letter to the great Gopal Krishna Gokhale dated 24 December 1914, she wrote: “Oh, we want a new breed of men before India can be cleansed of her disease. We want deeper sincerity of motive, a greater courage in speech and earnestness in action. We want men who love this country and are full of yearning to serve and succour their brothers… O how I hate shams and prejudices: how I hate all sectarian narrowness, all provincial limitations of vision and purpose….”
But she could also be delightfully playful as in this short letter to Gandhi which she wrote when she was abroad. It begins with: “Only a line to say that the weary and way-worn Wandering Singer returns home on 22nd July and expects a warm welcome from the Stay-at-home-Spinner.” In a letter to the Mahatma on 29 February 1924, she wrote: “May I confess very privately that at odd intervals I don’t feel very Satyagrahic....”
Naidu died on 2 March 1949 of a heart attack at the age of 70, less than two years after Independence. Nehru summed up what many of those who knew Sarojini Naidu, felt about her: “She was a curious combination of so many things. She herself was a composite, both of various currents of culture in India as well as various currents of culture, both in the East and West. And so she was, while being a very great national figure, also truly internationalist….”
Also on this day:
1963 — Vidyasagar, South Indian film composer, musician and singer, was born
