Sarojini Naidu

Early life and poetry

Sarojini Naidu, born Sarojini Chattopadhyay in Hyderabad, was the eldest of eight children of Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, a Bengali scientist and educator who founded and served as principal of Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Barada Sundari Devi, a poet in Bengali. Naidu showed an early aptitude for languages and verse, matriculating from the University of Madras at twelve, and travelled to England at sixteen on a scholarship arranged with the help of the Nizam of Hyderabad's diwan, studying briefly at King's College, London, and then Girton College, Cambridge. She began publishing poetry in English while still young and became known internationally, earning the epithet "the Nightingale of India" for collections including The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917), which drew on Indian imagery and themes within English romantic verse forms; the English poet and critic Edmund Gosse was an early champion of her work. In 1898 she married Govindarajulu Naidu, a physician from a non-Brahmin Telugu family, a marriage across caste and regional lines unusual for the period, which her father, after initial reluctance, ultimately accepted.

Political career

Naidu became involved in Indian nationalist politics from the mid-1900s, encouraged in part by contact with Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and was active in the Home Rule movement led by Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak during the First World War. She was a strong advocate of women's political and social rights, helping to found the Women's Indian Association in 1917 and campaigning for women's suffrage in the constitutional negotiations of the period, including making the case for it before British parliamentary committees. She rose within the Indian National Congress and in 1925 became its president at the Kanpur session, the first Indian woman to hold the post (Annie Besant, a British-born activist, had been Congress president in 1917). She was also known for extensive public speaking on behalf of the nationalist cause, both in India and on lecture tours abroad, including in the United States.

Role in the independence movement and after 1947

Naidu was an active participant in the Civil Disobedience Movement that followed Gandhi's 1930 Salt March, and after Gandhi's arrest that May she took command of the planned raid on the Dharasana Salt Works in Gujarat alongside Abbas Tyabji; when Tyabji was also arrested beforehand, Naidu led the raid herself, in which unarmed satyagrahis advanced in batches toward the salt pans and were beaten back by police, an episode witnessed and reported internationally by the American journalist Webb Miller, whose account helped turn foreign opinion against British methods. She was imprisoned for her role and was jailed on several other occasions in the course of the independence struggle. She attended the Round Table Conferences in London alongside Gandhi in the early 1930s, and was again imprisoned during the Quit India Movement of 1942, held with Gandhi, his wife Kasturba, and other senior Congress figures at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, where she remained present through the deaths in custody of both Mahadev Desai and Kasturba Gandhi. Following independence in 1947, she was appointed Governor of the United Provinces (present-day Uttar Pradesh), becoming the first woman to hold a governorship in independent India, and served in that post until her death in Lucknow in March 1949.