Preface

SPEECHES AND WRITINGS OF SAROJINI NAIDU

The Nightingale of India

FIRST EDITION

G. A. NATESAN & CO., MADRAS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

Mrs. Sarojini Naidu hardly needs any introduction to the reading public. Her three volumes of Poems have been received, as Mr. Edmund Gosse says, “in Europe with approval, and in India with acclamation.”

This, however, is the first attempt to present a collection of Mrs. Naidu’s Speeches and Writings. They deal with a variety of subjects such as True Brotherhood; Personal Element in Spiritual Life; Education of Indian Women; Indian Women’s Renaissance; Women in National Life; Hindu-Muslim Unity; Ideals of a Teacher’s Life; Ideal of Civic Life; Cooperation among Communities; and Self-Government for India. There are also numerous other addresses covering a wide range of topics intimately connected with India’s advancement.

To make the collection up-to-date, her recent Madras Speeches and her addresses at the Calcutta Congress and the Moslem League are also included.

THE PUBLISHERS.

A GREETING TO SAROJINI.

The following greeting to Sarojini, the Indian poetess, is from an English writer in The Indian Magazine and Review:

Sarojini, sister, the breezes that bear The sound of thy feet through the Orient air, With tinkling of bells to the land of the West, Where thy brothers, the poets, so long have their rest, Shall waft back their brotherly greeting to thee, Our newly-found sister, Sarojini.

Nor alone to thy home shall the welcoming sound Reach Ind’s hills and its valleys around, Where the Pleiads shine brightly, the summit of fame, They shall raise to the stars thy melodious name, Sarojini, Sarojini, Our newly-found sister, Sarojini.

July, 1904. A. ROGERS.

Mrs. Naidu is, I believe, acknowledged to be the most accomplished living poet of India — at least of those who write in English, since what lyric wonders the native languages of that country may be producing I am not competent to say. But I do not think that any one questions the supreme place she holds among those Indians who choose to write in our tongue. Indeed, I am not disinclined to believe that she is the most brilliant, the most original, as well as the most correct, of all the natives of Hindusthan who have written in English.

EDMUND GOSSE.

They (her poems) treat in a delicately evasive way, of a rare temperament, the temperament of a woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that temperament: but they express, I think, its essence: and there is an Eastern magic in them.

ARTHUR SYMONS.