THE SONGS OF SAROJINI NAIDU

MRS Y. SATYASREE

Long ago a poet prayed. “Let me be the maker of my nation’s songs. I care not who shall make its laws”. Fortunately Sarojini Naidu was in the happy position of making the nation’s songs as well as its laws. Sarojini Naidu was one of Mother India’s most gifted children, who is enthroned in the hearts of all the Indian people. She distinguished herself in both the fields of politics and poetry which are as different as chalk and cheese. Her political career was a brilliant record of self-less patriotism. She was a rebel who fought for the progress of the Feminist movement and freedom from the foreign rule. Sarojini’s lilting songs with the added charm of her personality, ministered to the mirth and political awakening of the people. The twirls of rhythm and music, impart a subtle aura to her poetic work. Here we can quote John Gunther’s phrase that she had a ‘beautiful pen’. She had the graceful and mellow suavity that glides like her own palanquin in a rhythmic manner, borne by the people in a swinging movement.

‘Lightly, O lightly, we bear her along.

She sways like a flower in the wind of our song;

She skims like a bird on the foam of a stream,

She floats like a laugh from the lips of a dream,

Gaily, O gaily we glide and we sing,

We bear her along like a pearl on a string.’

She conforms to a cult of beauty which is more or less Keatsian. These lines from ‘Princess Zeb-un-nissa’ reveal this aspect. They are unmatched in delicacy and fancy that touches the heart-strings of any sensitive person.

‘When from my cheek I lift my veil

The roses turn with envy pale

And from their pierced hearts, rich with pain

Send forth their fragrance like a wail.

Or if perchance one perfumed tress

Be loosened to the wind’s caress,

The honeyed hyacinths complain

And languish in a sweet distress.

“Languish in a sweet distress” is the quint-essence of lyricism!

Sometimes this fanciful mood changes into sorrow and borders on tears as in the following lines -

Would you tear from my lintels these sacred

green garlands of leaves?

Would you scare the white, nested,

Wild pigeons of joy from my leaves?

“Tarry a while, O death, I cannot die

With all my blossoming hopes unharvested,

My joys ungarnished, all my songs unsung,

And all my tears unshed.”

The bitterness of tears is carried to the tragic climax in the following lines which are a curious amalgam of pathos and music.

“What comfort can we give

For joy so frail, for hope so fugitive?

The yearning pain of unfulfilled delight,

The moonless vigils of her lonely night,

For the abysmal anguish of her tears.

And flowering spring that mock her empty years.”

Perhaps no other poet could give more touching expression to heartbroken love and romantic sentiment. It is fine frenzy. There is something in her song “The Hussain Sagar” which reminds us of Byron’s passionate attachment to the ocean. Hussain Sagar is a mini - ocean of Hyderabad which is a potential mega-city.

“What secret purple and what subtle rose

Responsive only to the wind, thy lover.

Only for him thy shining waves unfold

Transculent music answering his control:

Thou dost, like me, to one allegiance hold.

O lake, O living image of my soul”.

There is a beauty allied with reverence for the past in her majestic tribute to “Imperial Delhi”.

“Thy changing kings and king doms pass away

The gorgeous legends of a by gone day,

But thou dost still immutably remain

Unbroken symbol of proud histories;

Unaging priestess of old mysteries

Before whose shrine the spells of death are vain”.

She is pre-eminently a poet of love and Nature-description. In the following passage we feel as though we are taking a leisurely stroll in Nature or a bird sanctuary!

“I hear the bright peacock in

glimmering wood lands

Cry to its mate in the dawn;

I hear the black koel’s slow

tremulous wooing.

And sweet in the gardens the

calling and cooing

Of passionate bulbul and dove...

But what is their music to me,

papeeha

Songs of their laughter and love,

Papeeha.

to me forsaken of love”.

There is a fine piece of landscape painting and ample evidence of descriptive flair in the following

“See how the speckled sky

burns like a pigeon’s throat

Jewelled with embers of opal and

peridote.

See the white river that flashes

and scintillates.

curved like a tusk from the

mouth of the city gates”.

In these specimens of sweet description. Nature is brush-painted with vividness and fidelity coupled with telling phrase. Spring has a fascination for her and her songs of springtime abound in metaphorical beauty and rich feeling.

“Wild birds that sway in the citron branches

Drunk with the rich, red honey of spring

Fire- flies weaving aerial dances

In fragile rhythms of flickering gold.

What do you know in your blithe, brief season

of dreams deferred and a heart grown old?”.

Sarojini has sympathy for the poor working class - toilers and moilers. She had deep emotion and feeling towards the hard-working Indian masses. Hence, she sang melodiously about the Snake-Charmer, the Corn-Grinders and the Bangle Sellers. These lines from the Bangle Sellers also reveal her traditional outlook towards the Indian culture and heritage of customs which are still observed in semi-urban towns and villages.

“Some are meet for a maiden’s wrist,

Silver and blue as the mountain mist...

Some are like fields of sunlit corn.

Meet for a bride on her bridal morn...

Some are purple and gold flecked grey.

For her who has journeyed through life midway.

Whose hands have cherished, whose love has blest

And cradled fair sons on her faithful breast.

Who serves her household in fruitful pride.

And worships the Gods at her husband’s side”.

She was all out for national integration and communal harmony. Some of her songs exalt the ideal of Hindu-Muslim unity and breathe a note of enlightened patriotism which envisages a united humanity welded together with unity of purpose and identity of out-look. She writes four songs each of which terminates with the prayer of a religion:

“Allaho Akbar”, “Ave Maria”, “Ahura Mazda”, and “Narayana”, She firmly believes in the concept of “Vasudhaika kutumbam” or “Global Village” as it is now talked about.

The sublime sentiment of John Donne, “The death of any man diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” is expressed in the following lines written in praise of the soldiers who laid down their lives for a good cause.

“Gathered like pearls in their alien graves

Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,

Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands.

They lie with pale brows and brave, broken hands,

They are strewn like blossoms mown down by chance

on the blood-brown meadows of Flanders and France”.

Further, the songs of Sarojini Naidu are clad in the celestial light associated with the ancient seers and saints whose ideas form the warp and woof of Indian philosophy. There is a spiritual under-current in some poems. The heaven-ward hunger of the soul is found in “To a Buddha Seated on a Lotus.”

“The wind of change forever blows

Across the tumults of our way

Tomorrow’s unborn griefs depose.

The sorrows of our yesterday.

Dream yields dream, strife yields strife

And death unweaves the webs of life”.

In these lines the profundities of philosophical thought and Vedanta are expressed in poetry.

Even her philosophy is a product of composite culture, the best elements of all the religions. These lines from “A Song from Shiraj” reveal her condemnation of social antipathies. She sings one hymn of national integration and universal peace, where the discords are delightfully resolved into a choric harmony.

“The singers of Shiraj are feasting afar

To greet the Nauroz with sarang and cithar,

But what is their music that calleth to me

From glimmering garden and glowing minar?

From the mosque towers of Shiraj ere day light begin

My heart is disturbed by the loud muezzin

But what is the voice of his warning to me

That waketh the world to atonement of sin”.

Her lilting musical lines are iridescent with oriental imagery. The streak of mysticism that sometimes makes its way into her poetry, is but a manifestation of her love that “teases thought out of eternity”.

“You held a wild flower in your finger tips

Idly you pressed it to indifferent lips

Idly you tore its crimson leaves apart

Alas I it was my heart”.

Back