UNLIT LAMPS OF INDIA.
Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, replying to the address of the people of Guntur in the A. E. L. M. College Hall, in July, 1915, said: —
I can hardly tell you how deeply honoured I am to-day by the heartfelt and truly fraternal welcome you have accorded to me. I have learnt to feel that this generous and spontaneous welcome that awaits me wherever I go is not at all a personal tribute but stands as a symbol of what the womanhood of India represents when the men of India give them the same chances as I have had. Go to Bengal and there you see the women with their great spiritual ideals, are like water lilies in their ponds. Go to Bombay or to any other part of India, do you think there is a single house where it does not survive in the richest vitality, all those living ideals that make the names of the women of our country and literature so immortal.
There is not a single home in the length and breadth of India, no matter rich or poor, where womanhood is not as great to-day as in the days of Sita and Savitri, greater perhaps in potential powers because we have gathered a great deal of world experience, of high civilisation and growing responsibility. The whole world-spirit is richer by so many centuries of experience. It is your duty which you have not recognised to fulfil the task of giving the women those very opportunities which you yourselves had, which are necessary for their equipment, to fully realise all these hidden virtues that lie within their souls. The power of Rome has been quenched. That is because the underlying conditions animating their ideals and their civilisation were not of the spirit but of the intellect. The glory of the Greeks and the grandeur of Rome could not be revitalised after centuries because they were not spiritual. All their greatness died and became merely historic memories, things that we try to reconstruct from a broken stone in a foreign museum.
But believe me when I say that those who kept alive that fire are not the men who go to earn money, the men who become a little blurred, as it were, in the clearness of vision for mere existence but rather it is their spiritual entity that they kept at home, that spiritual comradeship that stands at home and tends the family fire. And so it is to them that you must give the opportunity of so equipping themselves and make themselves capable of realising their higher ideals and then it will certainly be never said that our women are backward.
They are backward because they have not the lamps to light, not a flame to kindle because you will not give them what is called the daily oil—the opportunity that brings that flame to the lamp. There are many little books with beautiful titles. But I do not know of any that is more symbolic than the “Seven Lamps of Architecture” of Ruskin. But we have seven hundred thousands of lamps in the architecture unlighted because you have refused to give them the things that kindle the flame. If the “Seven Lamps of Architecture” illumine the whole civilization of the West, friends, think of the dazzling illumination that shall light the whole world with a conflagration and radiance that cannot be quenched when the 700,000 Lamps in our national structure are lit for the glory of humanity. I am only one little lamp of clay.
But there are thousands of lamps of gold hidden away for want of opportunity. Instead of thanking you for this I should reproach you for being content with lamps of clay when there are lamps of gold. Let me beseech you not to be content with such small ideals as are represented by any successes that I may have achieved. India will not be great with her ancient greatness. It is only in your hands to give the illumination and it is only by that illumination that we can wake up our sleeping Mother.