The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

The Central Sarojini

INDEED we have lost many things with the passing of Sarojini Naidu, but what exactly was her central quality, what constituted the very heart of her genius? It is always desirable to ask such a question, for in answering it we get clear of the plethora of conventional or merely emotional panegyric, arrive at the true nature of our loss and, by arriving at it, are best enabled to keep astir in ourselves what the departed greatness had most attempted to evoke.

The central Sarojini is summed up in the words: happy visionary. The description must not mislead us. It does not mean a dweller in either the ivory tower or the fool's paradise. Sarojini was always possessed of a finely shrewd practical sense and she knew also the humiliations and sorrows that are inseparable from life, especially the life of a nation like India which had been so long subject to foreign rule. Perhaps she was too keenly alive to common reality and the general misery of man; else she would never have launched from poetry into politics. What is meant by being a happy visionary is simply that even in politics she always remained a poet.

A poet is primarily a seer of hidden perfections at once beckoning earthly things to their own luminous harmonies and reaching out to earth with those high rhythms. The thrill which accompanies this seerhood is a strange happiness that is never complacence and that, while full of laughter and love amidst the creatures and objects of the dust, is yet a creative criticism of them and, while acknowledging their value, points ever higher and often combines affection with irreverence, enthusiasm with a witty perception of frailties and foibles. Sarojini was very clearly and very uncomplicatedly poetic in mind and character. Hence the constant call of luminous dreams in all her public speech and gesture, the presence as of a colourful torch lifted above mortal heads though held in mortal hands. Whoever came into touch with her felt the delight of her beautiful conceptions, the charm of the

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splendid image she conjured up of India and the spirit in man and the objective of national and human labour. She did not have the master-secret of the political nation-builder, much less the power of the spiritual epoch-maker. But she could be a keen inspirer, and fill our hearts with a courageous glowing gaiety. This gaiety was a gift she alone could bring. None of our public leaders had anything like it to offer. Gandhi could instil great strength of moral purpose, Pandit Nehru a fine and wide idealism, Sardar Patel a bold dynamic drive for liberty. But the visionary intoxication which seemed to make all burdens drop was peculiar to Sarojini. And even leaders greater from the constructive and energetic point of view were avid of this intoxication, for it took the edge, off difficulties which the reasoning mind could not help taking too seriously. Sarojini did not overlook difficulties but she rendered them transpicuous, as it were, and showed a refreshing and resplendent future beyond them.

Her courageous glowing gaiety made her independent also of dull formalities, awed restraints, long-faced puritanisms. She was on the alert to find occasions for wit and did not bother if it drew the blush to anyone's cheek. A crowd of students pressed around her at the Madras Station some years ago and many asked for her autograph. One enthusiast came up and said proudly, "Mrs. Naidu, I am thoroughly acquainted with your biology. It is so thrilling." He meant, of course, biography. Sarojini looked up, winked at him and said, "But don't you go and tell my husband." Perhaps her most characteristic stroke of inhibitionless wit was her description of Gandhi: "My Micky Mouse of a Master." There is in it, in a familiar mood, the whole happy visionary that she was. Though the purple of the singing robe is not openly there, the central poetic imagination is in marked play. The sharp seeing eye has taken in the physical appearance with intense originality. There is also the sense of how the earthly form of things is so often a travesty of the inner being. And yet the recognition is present of even a caricature's capacity to transmit the brightnesses and nobilities of the soul if a harmonious and integrating imagination is brought to bear upon it. Somehow that comic phrase catches Gandhi's presence with a warm intimacy because

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of the very incongruity of the term "Micky Mouse" with the term "Master", and the alliteration serves to telescope the two and reveal an underlying oneness which gives a piquant yet dignified depth to whatever resemblance Gandhi's anatomy bore to Walt Disney's creation. Perhaps the playful child-vein in Gandhi is also underlined most vividly and disclosed as being part and parcel of all that was venerable in him.

If we can keep alive Sarojini's happy visionariness in both its majestic and mischievous aspects we shall have saved much from the funeral pyre.

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