SAROJINI NAIDU (1947)

"The Nightingale of India", a political activist, feminist, poet-writer and the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress and to be appointed an Indian state governor.

Sarojini was the eldest daughter of Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, a Bengali Brahmin who was principal of the Nizam´s College Hyderabad.

She entered Madras University at the age of 12 and in 1895-98 studied at King´s College London and later at Girton College Cambridge.

Her marriage in 1898 to M.G. Naidu, a Rajput (warrior caste) who rose to be principal medical officer in the Nizam´s service was frowned upon by orthodox Hindus as the breaking of Brahminical caste.

After her experience in the suffragist campaign in England Mrs. Naidu was drawn to India´s Congress movement and to Mahatma Gandhi´s Non-cooperation campaigns.

In 1924 she travelled in East and South Africa in the interest of Indiands there and the following year became the first Indian woman president of the National Congress -having been preceded eight years earlier by the English feminist Annie Besant.

She toured North America as a Congress spokesman in 1928-29. Back in India her anti-British activity brought her a number of prison sentences (1930, 1932 and 1942-43).

She accompanied Gandhi to London for the inconclusive second session of the Round Table Conference for Indian-British cooperation (1931) and served as a member of the Indian government´s delegation to South Africa on the Indian question (1932).

On the outbreak of World War II she supported the Congress Party´s policies, first of aloofness, then of avowed hindrance to the Allied cause. After the war she took part in the discussions that brought about Indian independence in 1947 when she became governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) a post she retained until her death.

Sarojini Naidu also led an active literary life and attracted Indian intellectuals to her salon in Bombay. Her first volume of poetry The Golden Threshold (1905) was followed by The Bird of Time (1912) and in 1914 she was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her collected poems all of which she wrote in English have been published under the titles The Sceptred Flute (1928) and The Feather of the Dawn (1961).