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Unit 12: Indian Weavers by Sarojini Naidu

Malgudi (1961) and The Vendor of Weets (1967) are famous; his work has a wider circle of Notes
readers outside India than within. Other Indian novelists in the English medium are Santha
Rama Rao, Manohar Malgonkar, Kamala Markendeya and Khushwant Singh. The most popular
is Raja Rao, whose novels Kanthapura (1938), The Cow of the Barricades (1947) and The
Serpent and the Rope have attracted a wide audience.

12.1 Introduction to the Poet

Of all the celebrated women of modern India, Mrs. Sarojini Devi Naidu’s name is at the top.
Not only that, her birthday is celebrated as ‘Women’s Day’. She was born on February 13, 1879
in Hyderabad. Her father, Dr.Aghornath Chattopadhyaya, was the founder of Nizam College
of Hyderabad and a scientist. Her mother, Mrs. Barada Sundari Devi was a Bengali poetess.
Sarojini Devi inherited qualities from both her father and mother. Sarojini was a very bright
and proud girl. Her father aspired for her to become a mathematician or scientist, but she
loved poetry from a very early age.
When her father saw that she was more interested in poetry than mathematics or science, he
decided to encourage her. With his support, she wrote the play “Maher Muneer” in the Persian
language. Dr.Chattopadhyaya distributed some copies among his friends and sent one copy
to the Nawab of Hyderabad. Reading a beautiful play written by a young girl, the Nizam was
very impressed. The college gave her a scholarship to study abroad.

At the age of 16, she got admitted to King’s College of England. There she met Dr. Govind
Naidu from Southern India. After finishing her studies at the age of 19, she got married to him
during the time when inter-caste marriages were not allowed. Her father was a progressive
thinking person and he did not care what others said. Her marriage was a very happy one.
Sarojini was brought up in the liberal intellectual and imaginative milieu of her father’s home
at Hyderabad steeped in both Hindu and Muslim cultural traditions. Her vast reading in
English Literature prompted the early fluttering of the Nightingale, Hindu mythology and
Urdu and Persian folklore.
Sarojini wrote her first published poem The Song of a Dream as a college girl at Cambridge.
Subsequently, she published a series of poems exhibiting a mixture of romanticism and idealism
in the manner of Keats and Tennyson.

The early poems show a strain of melancholy born out of loneliness, a combination of fantasy
and delight and an unbelievable command over words, phrases, rhythm and rhyme–traits
which would be developed to perfection in her later poems.
The English critics, Edmund Gosse and Arthur Symons, were struck by the charm of Sarojini’s
poems. They noted her passionate delight in the beauty of the sounds and words.
However, they advised her not to be skylarks and nightingales. She was told to stir the soul
of the East to reveal the heart of India to the westerners.
Edmund Gosse asked her to set her poems firmly among the mountains, the gardens, the
temples, to introduce to us the vivid population of her own and unfamiliar province, in other
words, to be a genuine Indian poet of the Deccan, not a clever machine-made imitator of
English classics.

After her return to India, Sarojini decided to confine herself to Indian themes. The next twenty
years of her life was dedicated to writing poetry, fulfilling an ardent mission of introducing
the exotic oriental world of beauty and mystery to the English speaking world.
Though several of her themes are light and ephemeral, Sarojini’s poetry is intensely Indian.
She has poetised the sights and sounds, situations and experiences familiar to us.

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