Cite this Essay
MLA:
Mudiganti, Usha. “Sarojini Naidu and Indian Womanhood.” Indian Writing In English Online, 7 November 2025, https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/sarojini-naidu-and-indian-womanhood-usha-mudiganti/ .
Chicago:
Mudiganti, Usha. “Sarojini Naidu and Indian Womanhood.” Indian Writing In English Online. November 7, 2025. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/sarojini-naidu-and-indian-womanhood-usha-mudiganti/ .
Sarojini Naidu celebrated India through her words. She started writing poems about Indian life and culture at the age of thirteen and continued to write poetry during her years of deep involvement in public work as a leader of India’s struggle for freedom. Her engagement with Indian culture is evident in her poetry and in her speeches as a social worker, freedom fighter and administrator. Through her speeches Naidu advocated for modern reforms to reach the common people of India, while her poems celebrated many of its ancient traditions. The seemingly contradictory ideological locations that she placed herself in with her life as an activist and as a poet do not seem to have affected Naidu’s commitment to either of the causes. She romanticised traditional culture through the image of the Indian woman in many of her poems while persistently demanding in her public speeches and political writing that the benefits of modernity reach her. By making Indian women and women’s cultures the focus of her creative and social work, Naidu was presenting Indian femininity as a significant culturally accepted ideal that could contribute to social progress in the colonised nation.
Born in 1879 in the Nizam ruled province of Hyderabad, Sarojini was the first of eight children of Dr Aghorenath Chattopadhyay and Baradasundari Debi. Being progressive in thoughts and practices, her parents worked towards encouraging formal education for Indian girls and frowned upon child-marriage, polygamy and sati. They encouraged her to appear for the matriculation examination at the age of twelve, which she cleared with distinction. They also supported her creative leanings by privately publishing her juvenilia in 1896 as “Poems by Miss S. Chattopadhyay” (Ash 147). Earlier, as a thirteen-year-old Sarojini had written a poem based on a Persian romance titled “Mehir Muneer” (Paranjape x). She was sent at the age of fifteen to London and to Girton College, Cambridge, on a scholarship from the Nizam of Hyderabad (Alexander WS68). Her parents had hoped that she would progress towards working in the developing areas of physical and natural sciences. Sarojini, however, stuck to her interest in literature. She had attended some literary soirees held by Edmund Gosse and had shown her early verse to him during her three-year stay in England. Her work had been noticed and encouraged by Arthur Symons too. In Sarojini’s unpublished autobiographical work titled “Sunalini: A Passage from Her Life”, written in Switzerland during her journey back to India, the young woman recorded “her sudden realisation that she was a poet with ‘new irresistible, unutterable longings and sensations’” (Ash 147).
As a teenager, Sarojini had fallen in love with Dr. Govindarajulu Naidu, ten years her senior in age and a widower from a different caste and linguistic community. The young couple persevered in the face of parental resistance and eventually convinced her parents to agree to their union. In one of the early inter-caste marriages in India that was solemnised through the Special Marriages Act (Paranjape x), Sarojini got married at the age of eighteen. The young Naidu couple had four children in quick succession and Sarojini devoted herself to a domestic life (Ash 147). Although her choice of domestic bliss over her parents’ career goals for her seems counter-productive, Sarojini’s desire for love, marriage and the life of a householder was in sync with the lives of the majority of women her age at that time. Considering the fact that the Age of Consent Act in colonial India raised the age of consummation of marriage for girls from 10 to 12 years in 1891, marriage and conversations about it would have frequently figured in women’s lives in that period. Her contemporaries in families that had access to colonial modernity were divided between allegiance to traditions and adapting to the modern ways introduced by anglicised men. Women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries like Kashibai Kanitkar, Tarabai Shinde, Rokeya Hosain Sakhawat, and Lakshmibai Tilak record the struggles of women who navigated the radical split between the worlds of women, including child-brides, within traditional households and the expectations their modernised husbands or fathers had of them. (Kosambi ix, 1-57; Tharu and Lalita 221-234, 275-280, 309-319, 330-340, 340-315). While these predecessors and contemporaries of Sarojini Naidu poignantly recorded their pyrrhic arrival into a twentieth century Indian modernity for women, Naidu’s body of work can be read as an attempt at closing the gap between the home and the world. Her poems recorded the quotidian joys of Indian women, and her speeches earnestly called for social reforms to reach the world of women in Indian homes.
Naidu’s awareness of herself, as an individual with the freedom to make choices, is evident from her early diversion from the path her parents had chalked out for her. Further, she made time for creative writing and for public service while bringing up four children. From her location in the domestic sphere as a wife and mother, she observed the life of the common people around her in the bustling metropolis of Hyderabad. She recorded it in her poems as an insider, in colonial India. Her exposure to England and the colonial education system informed the form of her poetry (Chaudhuri, 2016, 69) but the content was mostly a celebration of Indian culture. She compiled her first collection of poems and gave it the title The Golden Threshold. She then sent it to England, to William Heinemann, who published it in 1905. Naidu also got Arthur Symons to introduce her poetry and dedicated it to her mentor, Edmund Gosse. Symons declared that the poems had “an individual beauty of their own (n p, 1905)”. Within a decade of her first book of poems, she had published two more collections of poems: The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917). Many years later, her eldest daughter, Padmaja Naidu, compiled a posthumous collection of her mother’s poems, titled The Feather of the Dawn (1961)—these were poems that Naidu had probably written in her spare time after she had donned the mantle of an activist.
Naidu’s first collection of poems carried a sketch of the young poet made by J B Yeats, the father of the poet W B Yeats (Reddy 571). Sheshalata Reddy remarks that the drawing presented her as “precocious, prepubescent Victorian poetess captured within a private setting” (571). Further, she comments that the “blurred sketch echoes Naidu’s own ambiguous position at this time: she is neither wholly Indian not wholly English, and she navigates uneasily between the roles of naïve student of poetry and accomplished poetess” (571). While the visual representation of the author and Symons’s introduction presented Naidu as a talented but exotic young woman of the East writing in English could complicate the perception of Naidu’s position as a poet, Chandani Lokuge argues that Naidu was “an astute dialogist who strategically and expediently manipulated her way through the colonizer’s myopic ways of seeing” (115). Lokuge posits that “Naidu’s poetical and political careers would be steered by three major ideals: Romanticism, internationalism and overriding both, the deepest patriotism” (117).
K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar lists Naidu among the writers who wrote in English “but only as Indians” (20) would do. He elaborates that the Indian poet of the time drew “inspiration from the opulence of national or regional myths or the reserves of his [sic] spiritual heritage” (21). Further, Iyengar describes the lyric form, which Naidu often uses in her oeuvre as “a sudden surge of consciousness that apprehended ‘the pure thrust of life in its ideality’” (188). Naidu’s depiction of the ideals of traditional Indian culture might seem like a glossing over of the hardships of life while focusing on a celebration of India’s traditions and culture. However, her poetry also served the purpose of representing the joys of Indian life during the colonial period when most sympathetic representations of India focused on the despair of the people. Rosinka Chaudhuri argues that women poets in colonial India, writing in English, engaged with “multiple literacies and complex cultural exchanges as they negotiated distance and belatedness with respect to the metropole” (78). She goes on to point out that these women worked against the odds to make “poems that attest to cosmopolitan sensibilities forged within or against the constraints of religious dogma, British paternalism, and domestic labor” (78). Although Naidu was among the miniscule educated, upper-class, upper-caste women in India of the time, who could outsource much of the domestic work of household management and child care, she was a wife and mother in early twentieth century India. She would have greater familiarity with the lives of women within the domestic sphere than with the engagements of men in the public sphere.
Ranjana Sidhanta Ash describes Naidu’s poetry as “celebrations of women and womanhood” and elaborates that her poems “revel in metrical variations and in highly embellished images and lilting cadences akin to song, all of which are used to put on show a romantic India of myth and legend. There are also fanciful recreations of rural and city life and poems of patriotism” (147). Ash quotes Arthur Symons’s opinion that in Naidu’s verse there is “‘the temperament of a women [sic] of the East finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences’” (148). She records Symons’s advice to Naidu to show through her poetry “‘some revelation of the heart of India’” (148). She then declares that “Naidu heeded his advice and ‘Indianised’ her verse with delight” (148). Ash also mentions that Naidu “described some of her poems as ‘folk-songs’ and it is easy to see why” (148), especially in her reading of “The Palanquin-Bearers” because the anapestic metre of the poem is likely to “conjure up the rhythmic movement of the men carrying palanquins” (148). The poem’s form conjures the image of common folk singing while working but its content is a romanticised image of Indian womanhood. The description of the woman in the palanquin swaying as a flower while being carried in comfort presents the Indian woman as a delicate person who is carefully borne by strong men. While the sentiment of care the men exude for their fragile charge is reiterated through the repetition of the words ‘lightly’ and ‘softly’ and with the onametapoeic exclamation “O” punctuating the phrases, Naidu carefully shifts the perspective to the perceived emotions of the woman in the palanquin – a bride. Although the woman’s voice is not presented in the poem, the men’s song includes a sensitive recognition that a woman experiencing a life-altering moment will feel the turbulence of the change. The palanquin bearers are aware that their contribution to her journey should be done with care and sensitivity. The cultural significance of this journey is recognised in songs of bidai1 that are sung during weddings in many regions of India.
Naidu’s celebration of the Indian bride must have sounded a discordant note for readers of English when the British were publicising the subservient status of Indian women through articles like “The Hindu Woman” in the very first volume of Girls Own Paper (1880) and the American press was advertising Pandita Ramabai’s fearless representation of the plight of her contemporaries in The High Caste Hindu Woman (1887). However, Naidu was presenting the tradition of caring for the bride, which is a practice that transcends demographic divisions of class, caste and religion among most families in India. Naidu records the loving care with which girls are prepared to enter the state of matrimony in her poem “In Praise of Henna”. The poem describes a traditional springtime activity among women in rural India— the gathering of henna leaves and grinding them to a paste to draw designs on palms and to dye hair. She brings in the aesthetic as well as the purported medicinal value of henna “for lily-like fingers and feet” (16). By noting that the “tilak’s red” is for the bride’s brow and the “betel-nut’s red for lips that are sweet” Naidu not only describes the traditional shringar for the bride but also indicates that betel leaves and nuts were essential symbols of eros in the shringar rasa of Indian aesthetics.
Many women-centric and bridal rituals within the Indian wedding ceremony showcase the simple pleasures of Indian women and give voice to women’s concern for each other. Songs of older women often include a careful gaze at a growing daughter who will soon be sent away to make a home among strangers and advice to the young woman on adapting to married life. Naidu’s “Village Song” presents the complexity of the mother’s anxiety-laden recognition of the daughter’s blooming sexuality. The mother’s loving entreaty to her “Honey-child” (14) to stay within socially sanctioned processes of preparing for matrimony is disrupted by the girl’s perception of the sensuality of springtime. Naidu evocatively depicts the daughter’s pull towards the haunting calls of the koel, the strong smell of the champa and the tropical breeze of the “koel-haunted river-isles where lotus lilies glisten” (14). The daughter declares, “The voices of the fairy folk are calling me: O listen!” (15) In her rejection of her mother’s gentle training towards marital sexuality for the exuberant sensuousness of the natural, the daughter establishes her awareness that “[T]he bridal-songs and cradle-songs have cadences of sorrow/ The laughter of the sun to-day, the wind of death tomorrow” (14-15). The knowledge of the gritty realities of the lives of married women by an unwed woman reveals that Naidu did not perceive young Indian girls to be docile and innocent people who would uncritically accept the attempts of older women to mould them into containing their sensuousness. The village girl does not expect to be gently borne by palanquin bearers to her marital home. She rejects the contained sexuality of marital bliss with the declaration: “Far sweeter sound the forest-notes where forest-streams are falling;/ O mother mine, I cannot stay, the fairy-folk are calling” (14-15).
In Naidu’s poetry, it is not just the village girls who are aware of the sensuality of growing into womanhood. Girls and women in urban areas too are drawn by the call of the “Bangle – Sellers” who are hawking “delicate, bright/ Rainbow-tinted circles of light” that the sellers describe as “Lustrous tokens of radiant lives/ For happy daughters and happy wives” (63). This romantic depiction of Indian womanhood is based on the symbolism of glass bangles that are markers of marriage and fertility. They are an integral part of shringar for Indian women. However, as Ash points out: “[F]or all her Romanticism, [Naidu] was aware of the oppression a Hindu woman lived under – the symbols of woman’s married life, the bangles of Naidu’s poems, were broken almost at the very instant of her husband’s death” (149). Naidu’s poems such as “Suttee” and “The Old Woman” depict the loss of a woman’s status in Indian society when she loses her husband. Naidu was keenly aware of the precarious position of Indian women whose safety and status were largely based on marriage and motherhood. She also romanticises the Indian mother in “Cradle Song” (1905) in which the mother tells the baby “For you I stole/ A little lovely dream” (20) and places much faith on the shoulders of brave and strong men to ungrudgingly carry Indian girls into womanhood with the care with which the palanquin bearers say that they do: “Lightly, O lightly we glide and we sing/ We bear her along like a pearl on a string” (11). However, in poems like “Village Song” and “Slumber Song for Sunalini”, Naidu presents a world of women where they bond with each other due to gendered experiences. In The Broken Wing (1917), the last collection of poems that she compiled herself, Naidu invites her young daughters to cherish the sensuousness of nature by dedicating “The Call of Spring” to them. Through her depiction of folk traditions and use of lyrical forms such as the lullaby, Naidu presents the world of Indian women. In her 1905 poem “Wandering Singers,” she shows that women’s awareness of folk and oral narratives helps them access the “laughter and beauty of women long dead” (12). Although Ash opines that the “claims of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity are not contesting ones in her poetry” (148), many of Naidu’s poems and speeches present the heterogeneity of Indian womanhood and she clearly establishes that women’s lives were significantly different from the perceptions of Indian womanhood in Britain and the United States of America.
While presenting women who were celebrating cultural roles in her poetry, Naidu frequently spoke for ensuring honour and dignity for Indian women within domestic spaces. At her first meeting of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in December 1904 Naidu advocated education and careers for Indian women. She also spoke for focused work towards improving the social status of women; discouraging the practice of polygamy; stopping the then widespread tradition of child marriage; and encouraging remarriage of widows. In consonance with the work she was doing in India, Naidu apprised herself of the struggles of the suffragettes in the UK and USA. Speaking at the Lyceum Club in London on 5th March 1914 she declared: “‘Women’s movement is one the world over. Women in this country are asking for the vote yet the fundamental principle underlying every stage of the movement is that women are demanding their right.’” (Banerjee 24). She was also among the earliest proponents of suffrage rights for Indian women. During the discussions on electoral reforms in British India, Naidu had led a deputation of fourteen women to meet the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Samuel Montagu in December 1917 to propose that franchise should be extended to include Indian women too. The memorandum stated that “members of the Council should be elected by the people and the franchise should be extended to the people. Women should be recognised as ‘people’ and there should be no sex disqualification. Local self-government should be granted and women should be represented” (Banerjee 62). Within a few years, though, she started drawing a clear distinction between the identity struggles of women in the West and the aspirations of Indian women for better lives.
Having met Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1906 and 1914 respectively, Naidu started regarding the former of the two leaders as her mentor and the latter as an extraordinary human. Meena Alexander states that Naidu’s “first meeting with Gandhi helped set the tone of her political life” (WS68). She channelised her incredible oratory skills to convince many people to pledge themselves to Gandhi’s three-pronged strategy of Swadeshi, Satyagraha and Ahimsa to gain freedom from British suzerainty (Banerjee 1998 and Paranjape 2022). As a committed practitioner of non-violence, Naidu told the West Minister Gazette that she “disliked militancy though sympathising with the militant women in England” (Banerjee 60). She then went on to proclaim: “the vote means nothing (to Indian women). Here no doubt it is a symbol of standing for the ideal of equality. There it is an empty word suggesting a foreign ideal” (Banerjee 60). She explained the difference between the two cultures to the British press as: “ours is an absolute unbroken tradition, overlaid and obscured but still so real that it has prevented the raising of anything like the sex barrier I find in this country” (Banerjee 60). Naidu was convinced that India’s ancient tradition held within its voluminous folds some remnants of a golden age of Indian womanhood, in which women were not subordinates to the men in their lives but shared equal but distinctly different rights and responsibilities. This belief in the significant role of Indian women in upholding Indian traditions and culture is evident in Naidu’s poetry too. In her poems that depict rituals of an agrarian community, for instance, “Harvest Hymn” in The Golden Threshold and “Hymn to Indra, Lord of Rain” in The Bird of Time, Naidu presents disparate voices of men and women joined in prayer to the gods for blessings.
In many of her public lectures, Naidu invokes the archetype of womanhood in Indian culture by recalling the women from the Upanishads, the Puranas and the epics of the land with Sita and Savitri as her ideals, and Gargi, Maitreyi and Damayanti as exemplars of erudition and wisdom (Tharu and Lalitha 1991). With much faith in an image of the Indian woman as a wise, competent and compassionate person who was traditionally accorded a significant role in the family, Naidu drew a clear distinction between Indian women and her contemporaries in Britain and America. Therefore, Naidu believed that the Woman Question in India was very different from that in the Anglo-American nations. Her ideal for Indian women was education, care and the dignity of an equal partnership with their husbands within the home. She thus combined a nativist form of nationalism and a certain proto-feminism when speaking of Indian women.
Among the demands made in the memorandum to Mr Montagu by the delegation that Naidu led were the following attempts to ensure that the gap between the genders would be bridged through electoral reforms:
Compulsory free primary education was demanded for boys and girls, and secondary education to be extended. The number of training colleges for women had also to be multiplied, scholarships were to be provided and widows’ homes constructed. A strong memorandum was tendered for more medical colleges for women and short maternity courses and other medical facilities. (62)
To the incredulous query by Mr Montagu: “do you think that men of India will allow for such a thing”, Naidu responded with her firm belief that “far from objecting to the right being granted to women, they would support it” (63). The following year, at the eighth session of the Bombay Provincial Conference in Bijapur, during the passing of the resolution on women’s franchise, Naidu rose to add that, “the word ‘man’ should include politically ‘Woman’ in all discussions of rights of the citizen, and women should form a part, of the set-up of all talks when the Congress-League scheme would come into existence” (63-64). Although she espoused complete faith in Indian men’s perceived intention to treat Indian women as their social and political equals, Naidu ensured that all resolutions recorded women’s participation in public life in the nation’s struggle for freedom.
With her frequently mentioned faith in Indian coupledom as a lifelong journey towards a common goal, Naidu brought her poetic sensibilities into her public orations on social reform in India. She was chosen as a spokesperson for an ancient civilisation and sent on her first trip to the USA in 1928 by the leaders of the Indian independence movement. Dressed in a silk sari accessorised with gold jewellery, Naidu began her introductory address on that trip with the traditional Indian gesture of namaskar and spoke in English to address a purported incredulity at meeting an educated and articulate Indian woman. Although she presented herself as a representative of Indian womanhood, Naidu’s life and work are testimony to her being unique among her contemporaries. However, she had been sent there to counter the idea of Indian womanhood that was circulating in the West on account of the publication of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927). Mayo had presented a bleak picture of womanhood in the land whose political leaders were glorifying the image of mother as a symbol of divinity while many women could not access the gains ushered by new technology. Through the trip, Naidu faithfully stuck to her long-cherished image of the ideal Indian woman as a strong and knowledgeable person who confidently articulated her cultural moorings. During a farewell address in India, on 18 August 1928, Naidu described that the objective for her trip was to be a cultural ambassador who was “on a mission to interpret the doctrine of Shakti through an Indian woman to a foreign young country” (Banerjee 54). She hoped that she would be able to suggest to the American people: “To the ancient radiance of the womanhood of yesterday, you should not add darkness. You should understand [the] truth of love and sacrifices” (Banerjee 54).
While interacting with the American press at her various halts through the length and breadth of the USA, Naidu firmly discouraged second-hand perceptions of the deprivations faced by Indian women that were described in Mayo’s book. She “questioned the right of other nations to interfere with her country’s desire to follow its own tradition and condemned their propaganda of strife, sectionalism and inferior status of women the existence of which she denied. Among other points, she stressed the most important was woman’s equality with man and establishment of equal rights for all classes” (Banerjee 49). She spoke to the Americans on an equal footing and pointed out the differences between the two cultures and hoped that they would not continue with their fault-finding mission. She also requested for “international decency” (Banerjee 50). In December 1928, The Post commented that “the Hindu Poetess interpreted the immemorial East for the young West” (Banerjee 51) thereby declaring Naidu’s mission a success.
Naidu too thought that she was successful in her task of presenting a powerful image of Indian womanhood. She had honestly conveyed to the world the ideal of Indian womanhood projected by Indian leaders of those times. To this end, Naidu invoked some archetypal feminine figures from Indian literature and located herself among the women of India who see their role in their families and communities as complementary. She had often stated that she was ‘not a feminist’ (Allender 235) and explained that “the phrase ‘feminist’ did not characterise the social context of Indian women, who she considered were psychologically and spiritually different from men” (235). In her speeches and poems, Naidu presented pithy descriptions of some of the available archetypes, such as Shakti and Durga, for Indian women to emulate in their journeys through their homes and the world. With bold declarations in the course of her work as a woman leader, poet and ambassador of Indian womanhood, Naidu not only spoke for an essential plurality in the perception and representation of Indian femininity but also portrayed dignified images of Indian womanhood.
In a tribute to Sarojini Naidu, Mathangi Subramaniam begins her 2015 novel for children, Dear Mrs. Naidu, with a short and powerful epigraph, quoting a 1930 speech of Naidu’s where she tells young girls to “not think of yourselves as small girls” and goes on to remind them that they “are the powerful Durgas in disguise” and proclaims: “Forget about the earth. You shall move the skies” (n p, Subramaniam 2017). Through her public speeches, she regularly reminded Indian young women that there were powerful ideals within Indian literary and cultural texts for them to emulate.
While Naidu invoked feminine archetypes as ideals and exemplars, she was not oblivious to the realities of the women around her. In reminding young girls that each one of them was Durga and advising young women in schools and colleges to harness the Shakti within to progress in their lives, Naidu was presenting the immense possibilities for Indian women to reach their potential without losing their cultural linkages. For Naidu the women who delight in traditionally feminine articles of women’s shringar are also capable of channelling themselves to serve Indian society. Through various depictions of womanhood in her poems and speeches, Sarojini Naidu presents Indian culture as one that recognises the dignity of femininity and cherishes the feminine, but also seeks autonomy and agency.
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