As a celebrated daughter of modern India, Sarojini fell in the long tradition of Indian women writers since the Vedic age: in the tradition of singers like Vishveshwara and Ghosa, of Gargi, Maitreyi and Sulabha, the debators in the Upanishads; of Sumana, Shyama, Sangha, Multa, Sumangala, Sanghmitra and Rajyashri and many others. Sarojini has been hailed “as an ardent, versatile and dynamic genius”. Sarojini’s four volumes of poetry reveal a steadily maturing poetic personality and a steady growth of her poetic sensibility and imagination. Initially, her verses were English in form and content, but the wise suggestions of Sir Gosse diverted her from it to native land for themes and raw materials. Sarojini’s poetry presents a kaleidoscope of Indian scenes, sights, sounds and experiences transmuted into a fantastic vision of colour and rhythm. Her themes are mostly familiar and even insignificant but for the fact that they are vivified through the magic glass of her imagination. We find in her poems common men and women, dancers and wandering singers, weavers and fishermen, palanquin-bearers and bangle sellers, snake-charmers and flower-girls, street vendors and merchants, milkmaids and boatmen, and many other personalities, festivals, and gods. Sarojini Naidu was fascinated by the diversity of India’s religions and tried to understand each of them with sympathy. She believed, like Mahatma Gandhi, that the fundamental message of all religions was the same. They all awarded the highest value to love. But the external expressions of different religions in customs, festivals, rites and modes of worship also interested her. Hinduism was, naturally, the dominant influence on her spiritual evolution. In reading her poems one feels again and again that only a Hindu (perhaps only a Hindu woman) could have written them.
P.G. Department of English Magadh University, Bodh-Gaya
