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2 March 1949: Sarojini Naidu, Congress leader and Independence activist, died

YB WEB DESK. Dated: 3/2/2021 12:17:44 PM

Just as the Father of the Nation had infused moral grandeur and greatness into the struggle, Mrs Sarojini Naidu gave it artistry and poetry and that zest for life and indomitable spirit, which not only faced disaster and catastrophe, but faced them with a light heart and with a song on the lips and smile on the face...” Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a tribute to Sarojini Naidu after her death on 2 March 1949 Sarojini Naidu, a leader of the Indian national movement, the first Indian woman to become president of the Congress, and the first governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (which eventually became the state of Uttar Pradesh), was born on 13 February 1879 in Hyderabad state, then ruled by the Nizam. Sarojini’s father, the well-known Aghore Chattopadhyay, a doctorate in science from Edinburgh, was the founder of Hyderabad College(later called Nizam’s College). She had seven younger siblings. Her mother, Varada Sundari, wrote poetry, something that the young Sarojini took a liking to from an early age. She is said to have written a 1,300-line poem at the age of 13. In an indirect reference to her own cosmopolitan and secular upbringing as a child of Brahman parents settled in a Muslim-ruled state, she wrote in a piece of (unpublished) autobiographical fiction at the age of 17 featuring a girl called ‘Sunalini’ who represents Sarojini herself: “Unlike the girls of her own nation, she had been brought up in an atmosphere of… absolute freedom of thought and action… .Among the extraordinary influences that formed her, not the least interesting…were the moonlight gatherings that took place every night in her father’s garden…Hindu pandit, Moslem Mollah and Christian priest: and while they closed in the heart of an endless discussion, a rabid and delightful interchange of thoughts and ideas…Sunalini would steal in behind her father’s seat and breathlessly drink in the confused babel of wit.” This liberal childhood would later make Sarojini one of the prominent spokespersons for Hindu-Muslim unity. She cleared her matriculation from the University of Madras at a very young age. Thanks to a scholarship instituted by the Nizam, she went to England to study at the King’s College, London and Girton College, Cambridge. She was one of the first Indian girls to have been educated in Britain in that era. Before she turned 20 she married Govindarajulu Naidu, a doctor, an intercaste marriage that her father agreed to. Sarojini Naidu became part of the Indian national movement around the time of the 1905 partition of Bengal.