THE NIGHTINGALE OF INDIA: SOME MEMORIES

K. P. S. MENON

Much has been written about Mrs. Sarojini Naidu in this, the centenary year of her birth, as a poet, “The Nightingale of India.” Much has also been written about her as a patriot and politician and a friend of politicians, including the greatest of them all, Mahatma Gandhi. This article merely contains some personal memories about her.

I met Mrs. Sarojini Naidu first exactly sixty years ago in 1919 in England where I was a student. She was the guest of honour at an all-England Indian Students’ Conference at Swanwick. Mrs. Naidu was the life and soul of the conference. She took part in all its activities, indoor and outdoor, literary, debating and dramatic. Once, at a fancy dress ball, she dressed me up in her own sari. She dressed up two others, too, N. R., subsequently Sir N. R. Pillai, who rose to be Secretary General, and Mohammad Mujeeb who was to become Vice-Chancellor of the Jamia Milia Islamia. They, being of a smaller build than myself, did not look quite so comic as I did in a sari.

With all her sense of fun Mrs. Naidu could be dead serious. She had a sharp, but not vitriolic, tongue, of which I had a taste in Swanwick. Those were the days when British women still did not have the right to vote: militant women known as suffragetted were raucously clamouring for it. At our conference we held a debate on the subject “Women do not deserve equality with men.” I was persuaded to move the resolution, largely because no one else would. There were two speakers on either side. Then came Mrs. Naidu’s speech. The full brunt of her delicious wrath fell on my head. When my turn came to reply, I tried to mollify her by paying her a compliment, “If all women were like Mrs. Naidu,” I said, “they would rule the State and I would recede into the kitchen.” “No, no,” exclaimed Mrs. Naidu. “When I am ruler of the State I shall not let you recede into the kitchen. I seat you and Chettur (a very promising undergraduate of my time) to my right and left as my Son and the Holy Ghost. Which of you is the Son and which the Holy Ghost, I shall leave it to you to guess.”

My second encounter with Mrs. Naidu was also in England. In the summer of 1921 I happened to be the President of the Oxford Majlis, and we invited Mrs. Naidu to speak at the meeting of the Majlis which was convened to celebrate the newly-won independence of Afghanistan. The new Afghan Ambassador to Russia–Russia was the first country to have established diplomatic relations with Afghanistan–was also present. The evening was memorable for the beautiful and impassioned speech made by Mrs. Naidu. She dwelt on the indignities suffered by Afghanistan, and indeed by all Asia and Africa, during the 18th and 19th centuries and predicted that the independence which Afghanistan had fought for and won was the herald of new era. Her speech was an effusion of poetry in prose. It was a precursor of the magnificent speech which she delivered a quarter of a century later as President of the Asian Relations Conferences which Jawaharlal Nehru convened soon after India became independent.

Seven years passed before I set eyes on Mrs. Naidu again. I called on her in Bombay on my way back from Peshawar where I had been serving as Under-secretary to the Commissioner. All N. W. F. P. was then humming with reports about the dare-devil exploits of two Pathan outlaws, Ajab and Gul Akbar, who had entered the heart of the Kohat Cantonment at midnight, raided the armoury and broken into the house of Col. Ellis, the Officer Commanding, who happened to be out of station, and murdered his wife and kidnapped his daughter into tribal territory. I described this and similar incidents regarding the exciting life on the Frontier to Mrs. Naidu. On my way back to Peshawar from Kerala some weeks later I called on Mr. Naidu again. She told me how thrilled she was to hear about the life on the Frontier. The evening after I left her, she said, she went into her bath and an entire poem came into her head and wrote itself down. She said banteringly that she was going to dedicate this poem “To K. P. S. from my bath.” Here is the poem.

Wolves of the mountains,

Hawks of the hills

We live or perish

As Allah wills.

Two gifts for our portion

We ask thee, O Fate,

A maiden to cherish,

A kinsman to hate.

Children of danger,

Comrades of death,

The wild scent of battle

Is breath of our breath.

Yet sweet in the dusk haze

When conflict has ceased,

When red feuds are sated

And honour appeased,

Aloft in our watch-towers

To rest, to regale

Our hearts with gay laughter

Of ballad and tale.

And sweet in the stillness

And fragrance of night

To find for our pillow

Twin moons of delight,

To find for our curtain

A tent of dark kisses,

And crowning our valour

A wreath of caresses.

Wolves of the mountains,

Hawks of the hills,

We live or perish,

As Allah wills.

For the next twenty years we used to meet Mrs. Naidu off and on in Delhi and elsewhere. She took part in all the political movements including the non-co-operation movement and often went to jail. But there was not one ounce of bitterness in her even against her persecutors. I was greatly surprised when she casually described Lord Willingdon, the Viceroy, as “a great gentleman.” She seemed to have no rancour against him for letting the engines of repression work more vigorously than at any time after the massacre of Jalianwala Bagh. After all, Lord Willingdon was doing his duty and she was doing hers. That was her attitude.

Once at a luncheon party at the Viceregal Lodge, to which she was invited soon after she was released from jail, she told Lord Willingdon that perhaps in their next births their roles might be reversed and she might have the honour of sending him to jail. “It would be a pleasure and a privilege for me”, said Willingdon chivalrously, “to be sent to jail by you. But I do not think that you will have the heart to do it.” “No”, said Mrs. Naidu, “I shall send you to jail with a heavy heart even as you did me.” The woman that she was, she always had the last word.

Once she had the last word even vis a vis the irrepressible Rajaji. When Rajaji was Governor of Bengal, Mrs. Naidu visited him. He took her round the house, including the bedroom, and pointed to the magnificent bed and trappings, and said, “But of what use is all this to me, a septuagenarian widower?” “Now, now”, said Mrs. Naidu, “I have come to your help on many occasions, Rajaji, but I cannot this time.”

In 1948 on my return to Delhi from China, I gave a talk on my overland journey from India to China. Mrs. Naidu presided over the meeting. In the course of my lecture I mentioned an amusing incident which took place at the Mintaka Pass, 16,000 ft. high, separating India from China. My companions and I wanted to make an early start before the snow began to melt and the ground became soft and slippery. But all our sixteen horses had disappeared. They were all male. A female horse in that region had enticed them away into her own jungle, and it was not till midday that the delinquents came back shame-faced.

In her presidential speech Mrs. Naidu seized on this incident and commented on it with gusto. It showed, she said, the power the female can exercise over the male. Fancy sixteen males being bewitched by a single mare! It is a lesson for human males too. If men do not treat women properly, they have at their disposal weapons which will compel their submission. “See”, she said, alluding to her first meeting with me at Swanwick thirty years earlier, “how completely an anti-feminist like K. P. S. had been tabled by a purposeful woman!”

Even Mahatma Gandhi was not immune from Mrs. Naidu’s delightful raillery. It was she who invented that lovely nickname for him, Mickey Mouse.” And it was she who once said to him, “You do not know, Mahatmaji, how much it costs the nation to keep you in poverty.” During his last incarceration in the Aga Khan’s palace in Poona, where his beloved wife and his Secretary, Mahadev Desai, met their death before his eyes, the genial company of Mrs. Naidu, who was a fellow-detenu, was a great solace to him. The nation owes a great debt of gratitude to her for having kept India’s greatest son in good humour during a life of perils and dismays, renewed and re-renewed,” spent in the service of mankind.

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