Evolving India

The inspiration of Sarojini Naidu

A Defence against Colour-blind

and Tone-deaf "Debunkers"

"Debunking" is the favourite sport of our time —often a healthy necessary sport; but futile and thankless is the attempt to "debunk" skylarks and nightingales and Sarojini Naidu! Critics have begun to find her work void of true emotion; they see no real creative drive in it. Mere colour, vague imagery, tinsel sentiment—these sum her up in their view. The sole compliment they pay her is that she has an attractive command over language and a consummate skill in poetic form. That is, her technique is impressive but the inspiration is no more than fantastic, fevered and artificial.

It is quite natural that her work should convey an impression of exuberance and heat, for, on the whole, Sarojini the poet lives not in high reflective moments nor even in profoundly emotional ones but in a brilliant beauty of suggestive sensation. Yet to deny genuineness to poetry of such a character is to conceive the aim of inspiration too rigidly. Sarojini loves to be luxurious; she has a texture of rich warmth, because she deals with tangibilities,

Page 57

---

her genius is predominantly visual and auditory— sight and sound and vibrant palpableness are the constituents of her soul. But we must not forget that poetry is basically sensuous. The varieties of it depend on whether sensuousness is subdued or spurts out or keeps a-quiver in the forefront. Where rhythmic speech is employed to catch the light of thought or an emotional incandescence, there is of sensuousness either a controlled power as in Wordsworth or an intensity that rushes and recedes as in Shelley. Where, on the other hand, the motive-force is neither aspiring thought nor ecstatic emotion, it is inevitable that the sensuous nature of verse should hold the field almost altogether and act on the reader's consciousness directly, a thrill of iridescence and melody weaving an imaginative spell without any strong desire to ennoble the mind or spiritualise the heart. A typical instance is from Indian Dancers:

The scents of red roses and sandalwood flutter and die in the maze of their gem-tangled hair,

And smiles are entwining like magical serpents the poppies of lips that are opiate-sweet

Their garments of purple are burning like tremulous dawns in the quivering air,

And exquisite, subtle, and slow are the tinkle and tread of their slumber-soft feet.

This provides no ideas worth living out, no emotions worth dying for. What it gives is an

Page 58

---

aesthetic joy pure and sheer, an enchantment laid upon us by word-painting, bold figures of speech and a rhythm-movement that answers marvellously to the meaning. Call it art for art's sake if you like; but one point must be remembered: here is an inspiration as authentic as any of your majestic rolls or edifying tremolos. Art for art's sake is barren only when the language is used with a hollow decorative effect, when the words are in excess of their substance, when the glitter and luxury are on the body of a corpse.

We cannot affirm that Sarojini never indulges in fruitless verbiage; yet how can her occasional defects of effusive and hectic emptiness wipe off the living flush or the haunting witchery she exhibits at her best? Her success lies in her using the sensuous basis of poetry for the one legitimate aim all poetic language must have: the revelation of realities not quite of the earth earthy. She is, in the main, no spiritual teacher, no penetrating idealist, but her poems do draw aside the veil of the gross world and show us brief vistas of some subtle, more abiding, more perfect sense-existence—the colour and cry of a dream-plane which is a kind of magic background to the earth and an intuition of which spreads strangeness over the sense-responses of daily life. Take the Palanquin Bearers:

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.

Page 59

---

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.

Softly, O softly, we bear her along, She hangs like a star In the dew of our song; She springs like a beam on the brow of a tide, She falls like a tear from the eyes of a bride. Lightly, O lightly, we glide and we sing, We bear her along like a pearl on a string.

There we have not so much an actual scene as an imaginative essence of rhythm and colour behind the physical act of carrying a princess in a palanquin. It is material movement heard by an inner ear bent on catching a dream-echo of the outer sense-experience. To be more correct, we should say "dream-original" instead of "dream-echo", since a poet's descriptions are always tinged by some sort of perfect model or archetype felt by him as pre-existing somewhere. All authentic poetry goes beyond the crude data of life and if Sarojini touches a picturesque lucency behind the surface rather than a significant luminosity, she fails to be like Wordsworth or Shelley but she does not fail to be a genuine poet in her own way.

In addition to her flair for the shiningly picturesque, Sarojini has a style in which simple feeling blends a graceful pity, a delicate sadness, with the pervading colour-pomp. The best example I can recollect is Purdah Nashin;

Page 60

---

Her life is a revolving dream

Of languid and sequestered ease;

Her girdles and her fillets gleam

Like changing fires on sunset seas;

Her raiment is like morning mist,

Shot opal, gold and amethyst.

From thieving light of eyes impure,

From coveting sun or wind's caress,

Her days are guarded and secure

Behind her carven lattices,

Like jewels in a turbaned crest,

Like secrets in a lover's breast.

But though no hand unsanctioned dares

Unveil the mysteries of her grace,

Time lifts the curtain unawares,

And sorrow looks into her face. ...

Who shall prevent the subde years,

Or shield a woman's eyes from tears!

Surely these lines give the lie to those critics who credit Sarojini with mere technical triumphs. Vision and language, matter and form have been fused into a single glowing whole. Nor does any touch creep in of the gaudy lavishness of a mind trying to poeticise. Beautiful and sparkling words are indeed used, but without self-conscious effort: a sense of proportion holds together the bright effects in a significant interpretative play, and there is restraint in the midst of richness, pointing in the most natural undidactic manner the unavoidable pathos of life. All the phrases strike the imagination

Page 61

---

like concrete gestures: some have a sweep about them while others are softly suggestive. Of the latter type the last stanza is beyond praise, especially the concluding four lines where every turn and semi-turn come with a fine-edged felicity, the inner and the outer absorbing each other's vividnesses and values with a pictorial cunning most gentle yet penetrative. Yes, these lines are the best in the art of the simple and the subtle combined, just as the first stanza is the best in that of the magnificently meaningful; but the closing couplet of the middle stanza introduces, with also a subdued indirect emphasis worth noting, the presence and power that rules this "revolving dream" of concealed splendour and precious indolence, the lord and master who cherishes the Purdah Nashin. He is hinted first by a simile bringing in the "turbaned crest", emblem of stately manliness; soon after, the mere man is revealed as the lover who himself lives in the open but creates the harem because it is his heart's jealously treasured secrets that are, as it were, embodied by him in the hidden beauty of a wife on whom he has imposed the Purdah.

The whole poem is flawless, with an appeal. that is human as well as aesthetic. It must be confessed that Sarojini has not given us such work in abundance, but whenever she has mingled the exuberant verve with an exquisite sympathy her very choicest successes have been achieved.

She has also tried her hand at shaping the spiritual

Page 62

---

imagination of her race into poetry, and though it is not her most characteristic vein certain lines of a high tenor stand to her account. The verses To a Seated Buddha have throughout a dignity and weight which will assure them a place in anthologies; but to my mind the most striking snatch of intuitive language from her in the spiritual mood is in The Soul's Prayer. The divine answer comes to the praying soul:

Thou shalt drink deep of joy and fame,

And love shall burn thee like a fire,

And pain shall cleanse thee like a flame,

To purge the dross from thy desire.

So shall thy chastened spirit yearn

To seek from its blind prayer release,

And, spent and pardoned, come to learn

The simple secret of My peace.

I, bending from My sevenfold height,

Will teach thee of My quickening grace,

Life is a prism of My Light And

Death the shadow of My Face.

There is in the lines a lift of tone and a depth of insight culminating in a scriptural revelation at the close. Words cannot express more compactly the wisdom of that serene state which solves all problems by an inner aloofness from the changes of time and yet discovers in time's varied phenomena a play of gleam and gloom subtly suggesting the same ineffable Beauty. In that grand finale, the

Page 63

---

nightingale and the skylark in Sarojini have for once turned eagle and shown a power to look the sun of spiritual truth in the face !

It is probable that with the passage of years she would have more often made such superb flights. Even 1f there had been no mystical development, we we should have been her exploring with wurd-rnagie the thousand and there pathways of her country's day-t o-day consciousness, the many- hued crises-cross of majesty and misery and mystery that makes up the external life of the East. But she deserted poetry for politics : the platform and the loud- speaker have routed the lyric cry, the "fairy fancies". I recall a talk long ago with one of her daughters, in which that young lady inveighed against the the "sacrosanct " view of inspiration., T he poet, according to this view, takes his work \0 seriously that he makes a cult of it, invoking the muse in quiet and concentration, keeping himself aloof from all hubbubs in the heads with things like politics produce. A cult of this kinds is, no doubt, a lop-sided exaggeration: the poet cannot completely cut himself off from the roots of common life, especially when his genius is secular and not philosophies or spiritual. But I believe that to be true to his inspiration he must be prepared for creation sacrifices.

After all, poetic utterance, however spontaneous,is the rarest kind of expression, and if that particular part of [he mind which is 'its fount is not

Page 64

---

granted clear passage for its activity with the help of a serious sustained concentration on one's art, the mere ordinary brain-currents are liable to muddy the nectar-flow, if not quite submerge it. Poets may be born and not made; but they are often unmade by self-negligence and die while still alive. Public activity with its glaring limelight is life's prose with a vengeance: it does little short of murdering the poetic impulse by sparing it neither the quiet nor the leisure to flower in. Perhaps Sarojini has by some miracle escaped the usual doom, and literary gems sparkle, like the Purdah Nashin's less valuable jewels, in unpublished privacy. I for one have grave misgivings: at most, extremely brilliant speeches are all we may expect to be in her desk. Yes, speeches that are flashes of eloquence and yet one line like that famous description of the crescent moon, evoking a solemn and sacred atmosphere—

A caste-mark on the azure brows of heaven—

is worth a hundred bursts of rhetoric. What rousing speech will equal the strange pictorial spell of

The moon-enchanted estuary of dreams?

Or take these verses—

Feed the sweet flame with spice and incense rare, Curds of rose-pastured kine.

If one wanted an example of what poetry is in

Page 65

---

quintessence, those five final words would suffice. They have a concrete vision, an arresting play of shape and colour; they have a lovely varying harmony, with a shifting stress, a balance between the initial "c" and the almost terminal "k", a well-arranged modulated sibilance, a deft echo from an unaccented "urd"-sound to the same sound accented; above all, they have the suggestion of a wonder beyond the world we know—the kine we see day after day become, by being "rose-pastured", parts of a blissful paradise, strayed denizens of a realm of rapturous beauty.

A somewhat similar transformation, leading to quintessential poetry, is effected in the stanza from Summer Woods:

And bind your brows with jasmine sprays and play on carven flutes,

To wake the slumbering serpent-kings among the banyan roots,

And roam at fall of eventide along the river's brink,

And bathe in water-lily pools where golden panthers drink.

Lines 2 and 4 immediately bewitch us: the one brings an unusual half-occult glimpse; the other by its juxtaposition of lilies and panthers, by the luminous epithet for the latter and by combining their drinking with the bathing of humans conjures up a "brave new world" of delicacy wedded

Page 66

---

to strength, power to happiness and safety, in one fluent yet diversified glow. Not openly pictorial of such a world but as felicitous in disclosure of strange potencies is the apostrophe—

Temple-bells! deep temple-bells! Whose urgent voices wreck the sky!

Mark the justness in both sound and sense of the adjectives "deep" and "urgent", the accurate force of the verb "wreck" with its implication of bursting through the blue distance and silence, of taking the kingdom of heaven by storm. There are also strange potencies let out, with what Arnold calls "natural magic", in that couplet about coloured bangles:

Some are aglow with the bloom that cleaves To the limpid glory of new-born leaves.

And a poignant wonder-working vagueness invades us through the imagery and emotion in A Song from Shiraz, most in the quatrain which answers the query about the worth of the music of Shiraz's feasting singers:

The stars shall be scattered like jewels of glass,

And Beauty be tossed like a shell in the sea,

Ere the lutes of their magical laughter surpass

The lute of thy tears, O Mohamed Ali!

We do not bother to know what precisely is meant and who bears that name at the end; something

Page 67

---

surprising and unforgettable is happening, intense chords are struck in our heart, a reverie that presses ecstasy out of pain comes upon us—and we touch poetry neat and fresh. One thing, of course, we do know: the Mohamed Ali spoken of is neither the brother of Shaukat, famous in the old days of the Khilafat controversy, nor Mr. Jinnah addressed in a mood of familiarity. No, there is no politics here: Sarojini Naidu's genius cannot flower from a political soil, at least not when she herself is an active mover to and fro on it.

Far better than her losing her enchanted gift it would have been if she had turned even into a recluse from life's thrilled richnesses and yet kept singing as she does in those three lines from In Salutation to the Eternal Peace:

What care I for the world's loud weariness, Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost blessWith delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

How shall we be consoled for the cessation of such faultless song? Sarojini the poet deserves to be defended against colour-blind and tone-deaf critics; but for so prematurely ceasing to be a poet, not even her own passionate rhetoric from the Congress's platforms can provide a satisfying defence.

Page 68