Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.
Sarojini Naidu
B. 1879 D. 1949
“The gifts we enjoy from the past may be denied us tomorrow. But the heritage of influences that a great poem gives us remains forever.”
Biography
Sarojini Naidu, famously known as ‘the Nightingale of India,’ was a remarkable female political activist and freedom fighter in pre-colonial India. Her poetic works are celebrated for their lyrical romanticism, capturing the beauty and diversity of Indian culture with sweetness and depth. Writing in the rich, multicultural literary tradition of 18th-century India, she contributed to the canonical works of Kasiprasad Ghosh, Toru Dutt, Anna Maria, and Henry Derozio, combining uniquely Indian themes with the stylistic influences of Western poets, creating a cosmopolitical cross-cultural dialogue.
Born into a Bengali family, Sarojini Naidu was the daughter of Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, the principal of Nizam’s College in Hyderabad. At the age of sixteen, she received a scholarship from the Nizam of Hyderabad to study literature at King’s College London and Girton College, Cambridge. During her years in England, Naidu engaged with the women’s suffrage movement and interacted with intellectual, literary and decadent circles of England. These experiences shaped her as both a writer and an activist, broadening her perspective and deepening her commitment to social and political causes. Her meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in 1914 marked the beginning of her illustrious political career. Five years later, she became the first female president of the Indian National Congress, playing a key role in leading movements such as the Salt March and the larger Non-Violent movement, inspiring thousands of Gandhian volunteers. Her fearless participation in the Quit India Movement led to repeated imprisonments, during which she endured physical and emotional hardships. Despite her struggles, her vision of nationalism remained inclusive and cosmopolitan, rejecting narrow provinciality like Bengali, Hyderabadi, or Madrasi, and embracing an identity, borderless and free.
Although she was raised in an environment steeped in Bengali and Urdu traditions, her creative expression took root in English, the language of the colonizer. This linguistic complexity is highlighted by Meena Alexander, who describes Naidu’s work as navigating a "complex linguistic situation." In one of her letters, mentioned by Arthur Symons in the introduction to The Golden Threshold (1905), she writes of how English was imposed on her during periods of childhood confinement. Ironically, this imposed language became her tool for resistance and subjective self-expression.
Her poetry combines vivid imagery, mystical themes, and emotional depth, drawing heavily from Indian life and landscapes. In works like The Palanquin Bearers, she portrays the ephemeral beauty of women, elevating them as symbols of nature, while in Cradle Song, she embodies the voice of a mother yearning to give her child the beauty of the world she herself never experienced. Naidu’s verses are imbued with longing, loneliness, and a perennial youthfulness reminiscent of Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley. Despite being celebrated by literary figures like Arthur Symons and W. B. Yeats, who describes her in an oriental poise, her poetry transcends the doubly colonial state of being, using language to subvert patriarchal and colonial narratives. In 1917, Sarojini Naidu largely withdrew from writing to dedicate herself to public life. Her final poetic offering, Awake (Invocation to India, Her Children Speak), delivered at a National Congress meeting, is a stirring call for India’s liberation from colonial bondage. Through her poetry, Naidu intertwined the personal and the political, merging her vision of national freedom with the quest for female selfhood. Her life and work continue to inspire female freedom fighters and poets across generations, cementing her legacy as a trailblazer in both literature and politics.
The recordings were taken from the British Library Archive and was stored on the 10” shellac discs, Columbia LBE 51, recorded in 1931, UK.