The Cosmopolitan Nationalism of Sarojini Naidu, Nightingale of India

Abstract

Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949), the English-language Indian poetess and politician, appears before the viewer in the frontispieces to her first two collections of poetry, The Golden Threshold (1905) and The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring (1912). She presents herself in print, as in her oratory, as both a figure of nineteenth-century verse culture and a cosmopolitan nationalist. The Golden Threshold includes a now well-known introduction by Arthur Symons and a sketch of a young Naidu by J. B. Yeats (father of W. B. Yeats). [See Figure 1.] Arrayed in a voluminous and ruffled white dress, distinctly “Western” in style, with hands clasped together, Naidu's youthful yet grave face stares directly at the viewer. She appears here as a precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting. Yet when this volume was published in 1905, the picture, drawn during Naidu's sojourn in England in the mid-1890s when much of the poetry included in the collection was composed, must have been almost a decade old. The only sign of racial difference in the sketch is her lightly shaded skin and dark hair. The blurred sketch echoes Naidu's own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian nor wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess.

Senses and Sensibilities in Sarojini Naidu’s Poetry

“…92 As Reddy argues, Naidu 'explicitly links politics and national life to poetry' here. 93 And as I have shown throughout this essay, understanding the role the senses play in Naidu's poetry allows us to understand her poetics in the context of her anti-imperialist nationalism.…”