SAROJINI NAIDU IN PRAISE OF MAHATMA GANDHI
DR (Mrs)
D. V. RAJYALAKSHMI
Sarojini Naidu’s association with
Mahatma Gandhi was a saga of sacrificial companionship without a parallel in
recent Indian history. She was his companion and nurse, the licensed jester of
his little court, and the oracle and high-priestess of his holy fane. She
brought him the priceless gift of laughter to act as balm on the unreasonable
wounds inflicted on the great man by time
and circumstance as well as his own private losses and anxieties. Whenever
there was tension, she was there to relieve it by her humour, parody, mimicry, or
innocent naughtiness. She alone, among
Gandhi's circle, could see her hero in a mock-heroic light. In the course of
conversation, she would draw affectionate effigies and verbal cartoons of the
Mahatma. The cultured irreverance was aimed only at
restoring his poise and bringing him back to his spiritual bearings. The beauty
of her poetic sensibility was always matched by the beauty bf her sacrificial
community of purpose, joined
with his role as a national redeemer.
Yet
in her poem on Mahatma Gandhi, entitled “The Lotus,” she goes behind the veil
of personality to describe the character as well as capture the symbolic
essence of his innate nobility and spiritual grandeur. The lotus, a motif which
recurs throughout Indian sacred and secular literature, is the symbol of
origins as well as of spiritual epiphanies. Brahma, Budaha,
Vishnu and Lakshmi are all associated with the Mystic Lotus which represents a whole
hierarchy of religious and mythological values and functions in Indian culture.
The Mahaa-Purusha is presented in art and literature
in the Padmaasana posture (the Lotus-posture) signifying
that he has risen above the dualistic rhythm of the world-process (determined
by the interplay of pairs and opposites, or dvandvas) and attained a stage in the cosmic
curve where the regenerate man takes over from the natural man. At the
turning-point in his spiritual age, the great man has overcome casual fatality
as well as psychic ambivalence, and he attained oneness and union with the
cosmic being. As Ananda Coomaraswami
observes:
....there
is the much smaller number of great men–heroes, saviours,
saints and Avatars–who have definitely passed the period of greatest stress and
have attained peace, or at least have attained to occasional and
unmistakable vision of life as a whole. These are the “Prolific” of Blake, the “Masters”
of Nietzsche, the true Brahmans in their own right, and partake of the nature
of the superman and the Bodhisattva. Their action is determined by their love
and wisdom, and by rules. In the world, but not of it, they are the flower of
humanity, our leaders and teachers.
The
Lotus is the flower of humanity that has reached the commanding height of
divinity on the slender but firm stem of action and contemplation; although its
seed-bed is in the flux of time. Sarojini’s approach
to the Mahatma is not to portray the natural man in him but the total man (Poorna-Purusha) who is “coeval with the Lords of Life and
Death”, the Creative Man in apotheosis set up as an Avataar
of Vishnu, or Krishna in his Cosmic Presence (Visvaroopa).
O
Mystic Lotus, sacred and sublime,
In
myriad-petalled grace inviolate,
Supreme
o’er transient storms of tragic Fate,
Deep-rooted
in the waters of all Time,
What
legions loosed from many far-off clime
Of
wild-bee hordes with lips insatiate,
And
hungry winds with wings of hope or hate,
Have
thronged and pressed round thy miraculous prime
To
devastate thy loveliness, to drain
The
midmost rapture of thy glorious heart...
But
who could win thy secret, who attain
Thine
ageless beauty born of Brahma’s breath,
Or
pluck thine immortality, who art
Coeval, ,with the Lords of Life and Death?
The sonnet is a concentrated allegory in which
the purity, radiance, and transfiguring power of the mystic lotus are derived from
the ecological facts of the natural flower. Taking its rise in the waters of
all Time, the lotus stands high and aloof over the agitated surface of the
pool, detached, serene and splendorous. Even in its severe aloofness from the
swift-changing currents, the flower occupies a vulnerable position in the air.
It is the target of attack by every passing wind, and is a prey to the predatory
wild-bee hordes. But the lotus, by its innate nature, derived from the life-force,
remains inviolate and resists the ravages of mutability and time’s gross
appetite. Like Sri Aurobindo’s “Rose of God”, Sarojini’s “Mystic Lotus” has an ageless beauty born of Brahma’s
breath. The natural flower is transfigured into the sempiternal
symbol of Immortality, and of the soul’s mystic ascent. A figure from Nature is
translated into a spirit working in the world. The propitious semblance of the
lotus, opening its utmost power to the sun; upholds the poet’s vision of the
great man’s spiritual ascendancy, while taking cognizance of the anterior
struggle of the individual to remain as the moral man in an immoral world.
Gandhi came to be viewed as the father of the renascent Indian nation. As it
only became the tender, father, he appeared like “the elder clad like the folk
in glory”. The lotus-universe, in its naturalistic aspect, offers an
allegorical correspondence worth the state of the Indian nation. Even as the
beauty of the flower attracts the wild-bee hordes, so the fabled opulence of