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Sarojini Naidu
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363 Sarojini Naidu d D Sarojini Naidu’s encounter with the English language is perhaps the most curious of any Indian poet’s. In a letter to Arthur Symons—her British friend and poetic mentor—Naidu (1879–1949) recounted her childhood obstinacy. Her siblings, she said, were taught English at an early age. “I,” she writes, “was stubborn and refused to speak it. So one day when I was nine years old my father punished me—the only time I was ever punished—by shutting me in a room alone for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to me in Hindustani” (Golden Threshold, 11). This story, though surely apocryphal in its details, betrays the kind of stubborn resolution that characterized the young Sarojini’s study, her voyage to England, her marriage, and even her later political career. From the room where she resolved to speak English to the prisons she endured years later during the movement for Indian independence, Sarojini’s path was her own. Born to a Bengali Brahmin family living in Hyderabad, Sarojini Chattopadhyay had an unconventional upbringing. Her parents were members of the Brahmo Samaj, the religious ofshoot of Hinduism that both inluenced and in some ways resembled Unitarianism. Her father, Agorenath, received his medical education in Aberdeen and found employment at the court of the nizam of Hyderabad. At the nizam’s request, Agorenath established a school, and his home became the meeting place of an extraordinarily cosmopolitan group of intellectuals and poets. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay was noted for his work in education and social reform , his love of literature, and a strong religious (perhaps mystical) streak that resulted in a dedication to alchemy. Rabindranath Tagore afectionately satirized him in his story “The Hungry Stones.” Sarojini’s mother, Barada Sundari Devi, studied in a Brahmo school for women while her husband studied in Scotland; a singer and storyteller, she wrote many lovely Bengali lyrics that Sarojini fondly recalled in her correspondence with Symons. The family was freethinking, breathing art and politics together. Sarojini’s seven siblings were a talented lot as well— her brother Virendranath became an internationally known revolutionary later forced to live abroad; a sister, Mrinalini, studied at Cambridge and became the principal of a girls’ college in Lahore; her youngest brother, Harindranath, became a poet, actor, dramatist, and member of Parliament; and her youngest sister married a trade unionist and was active in the independence movement. 364 d Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India The youthful Sarojini was an intellectual and poetic prodigy. At the age of twelve, she passed the Madras University matriculation examination. In her early teens, she composed long poems, a volume of which her father published. She fell in love at about fourteen with her father’s colleague Govindarajulu Naidu— unsuitable in her parents’ eyes because of his caste and age and because he was not Bengali. Partly to separate the two, Sarojini’s father persuaded the nizam to ofer her a scholarship to Cambridge. She left for London at age sixteen and subsequently studied at Girton College, Cambridge, though without taking a degree . During her three years in England, Sarojini spent much of her time moving in literary circles. Edmund Gosse, a promoter of Toru Dutt’s poetry, and his family befriended her. She also became close friends with Arthur Symons, the Decadent poet and critic, which led her into the same orbit as the Rhymer’s Club, a group including W. B. Yeats, Ernest Rhys, and Lionel Johnson, as well as Symons. In a 0ctional autobiography, written while she was on a European trip about this time, Sarojini described her alter ego, Sunalini, this way: “Unlike the girls of her own nation, she had been brought up in an atmosphere of large unconvention and culture and absolute freedom of thought and action; her education had been based, chiely on European models, and yet she was totally unlike any European girl: she was not a type. She was a personality” (“Sunalini,” 9). Sarojini’s letters to Symons testify to the accuracy of this portrait, for she was both brilliant and in many ways unconventional. Symons published one of her poems, “Indian Dancers,” in his short-lived but inluential magazine, The Savoy. In 1898 Sarojini returned to India following a di2cult but passionate epistolary courtship with the man her father had sent her to England to forget, Govindarajulu Naidu...