5. Becoming Women

The Genders of Nationalism

The last chapter showed us, in part, the process of self-legitimation that (a masculine, heterosexual) Hindu nationalism deployed at a crucial moment in its imagining of itself; this chapter takes up that figure who had to be evacuated out of Vivekananda’s conception of Indian womanhood in order for the white woman to function as the proper interlocutor for the male nationalist. The swami had insisted in paradoxical fashion on the concurrent hopelessness and happiness of Hindu women, as well as on their inability to ameliorate their own melancholy condition; only a western woman-turned-Hindu could serve as a (partial) proxy for them, pending their deliverance. Nivedita, on the other hand, was more disposed to emulate the virile nationalism of the guru; unable to be a guru in her own right, she sought a route to mastery in the “public” sphere of the nation, a public sphere whose separation from the “women’s sphere” in this moment has been elaborated by Partha Chatterjee. By the turn of the century, however, these putatively discrete spheres had entered into a substantial commerce with each other, facilitating Indian women’s participation in nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; elite Indian women (Hindu, Muslim, and other) were summoned in unprecedented numbers to a range of nationalist causes in this period. This much is well known. This chapter foregrounds one among such figures; moreover, it features the Indian mimic woman, a figure undreamed of by Macaulay or Vivekananda, or for that matter Fanon.^[1] It maps—through a scrutiny of the case of Sarojini Naidu, a well-known poet, read and published in both India and England, and a prominent nationalist figure of the Gandhian period—her emergence in colonial, imperial, and bourgeois nationalist contexts and seeks to tease out the ambivalent seductions of a figure excessively and unsatisfactorily English and simultaneously never properly Indian (woman).

It is now a truism of the scholarship on nationalism’s gendering that Indian women, in addition to bourgeois males (like Vivekananda) and white women (like Nivedita), had to be remade under nationalism. Sumanta Banerjee has pointed to the ways in which the new bhadramahila (bourgeois woman or, more fittingly, proper lady) of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to be carefully marked out as such, and her production as a traditional Bengali Hindu woman had to be orchestrated in terms of her separation not only from the immodest and individualistic English memsahib in India but also from the company and mores of lower-class women like Vaishnav singers, prostitutes, and other such unsavory characters.^[2] The fashioning of the bhadramahila (a subject that an indigenous patriarchy designated as singularly and inviolably Indian, sequestered from the corrupting though obligatory westernization attending the domain marked out as public) was, however, curiously analogous to the making of a Victorian angel in the house; this is evident from Partha Chatterjee’s description (though he never articulates the connection in these terms) of the ideology of ghar (home) and bahir (the world) that, according to him, allowed nationalist patriarchies to “resolve” the woman question.^[3]

In a splendid recent essay, Mrinalini Sinha has argued that elite women in nationalism were not entirely content to be remade and that they themselves participated (albeit in terms at least partially set by others) in “the shaping of gendered national subjectivities around the nationalist construct of Indian womanhood” in their struggles for authority and influence.^[4] It is salutary to keep this in mind, even as we note that the nationalist movement had to deal with the woman question on many fronts, and it had to do so with a certain degree of flexibility and liberalism if it was to compel some kind of consensus from those subjects it sought to remake. Chatterjee points to the ways in which bourgeois nationalism’s ideology of the separate spheres functioned with a remarkable degree of metaphoricity, allowing women to function in what came to be recognized as the public domain and even to hold positions of visibility and power without compromising the notion of their gendered essence,^[5] or reconfiguring gender relationships within the patriarchal family.

The question, however, of what constitutes an appropriate and self-evident Indian womanhood, and who can be hailed as an Indian woman in the nationalist movement, especially in its later phases, is a vexed one. How does nationalism distinguish the “real thing” (Indianness, femininity) from its simulacra or its inadequate substitutes, such as white women, feminists, or otherwise improper Indian women? What is the relationship between the female nationalist struggling to signify Indian femininity (and learning to become woman) and a (male) nationalism seeking to feminize itself? How is the nationalist encounter between the (Indian) mimic woman and the (Indian) mimic man staged? And why, finally, is the career of a prominent female poet and nationalist so persistently troped in terms of spectacle, extravagance, and lack? I rehearse these questions through the case of one of the best-known female figures of the Indian nationalist movement, Sarojini Naidu. Sarojini’s case is a particular one, and yet, as I will show, it is also perhaps a test case, illuminating for the insights it proffers about bourgeois nationalism’s struggles to establish a model of Indian femininity in the register of authenticity, depth, and iconicity.

Beginning her career as a lyric poet nurtured by Edmund Gosse, Arthur Symons, and members of the Rhymers’ Club in 1890s London, Sarojini became, by her mid-thirties, an avowed disciple of Gandhi, a dedicated Congress Party worker, and an advocate of women’s causes. She came to be called the Nightingale of India in acknowledgment both of her poetic achievements and of her mellifluous oratory. Her successful poetic impersonation, first of an English identity, then of a traditionally feminine Indian one, made her a compelling figure for Indian nationalism. And yet, as we shall see, Sarojini personifies for nationalists something of the pathos of the mimic figure, who is a creature of surfaces but never quite a proper woman. Sarojini’s career as poet-politician raises certain compelling questions for our understanding of authenticity, miming, and display in a nationalist theater. In seeking to tease out the implications of these questions, the chapter takes up three interlocked trajectories. The first examines Sarojini’s production as mimic woman, as she is scripted first as the poet of Englishness and then as the poet of Indianness. I read this through the optic of what Spivak has characterized as the “enabling violation,” that which nourishes as much as it damages and which, once known, cannot be disavowed.^[6] The second explores the feminist, literary critical, and nationalist responses to the poetic corpus and to the political oratory (commonly read as an extension of the poetic gift) of the Nightingale as an uncanny reiteration of the idioms of authenticity and fakery that governed its imperial reception. The third is a meditation on style and the truth of detail for questions of identity; it ponders the existential and ethical charge of Sarojini’s and Gandhi’s femininity in order to ask: How does the nationalist moment stage the discovery of “real” femininity? What forms of femininity must be exorcised even as the (male or female) nationalist “becomes woman”?

Becoming English, Becoming Indian

The woman who was to be christened the “Nightingale of India” by Gandhi and who was to be one of the most prominent personages in Congress (and especially Gandhian) nationalist politics in the decades leading up to independence was born in 1879 in a place that was, strictly speaking, outside British India even if not outside the ambit of British paramountcy in the subcontinent. She was born into a Brahmo family, headed by Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, in the princely state of Hyderabad; and it was Hyderabad that she was to look to in later years, as a model of Hindu-Muslim unity and civilizational harmony, for the Indian nation. The state of Hyderabad had an English Resident who was the de facto authority in the kingdom, but there were far fewer of the obvious reminders of colonial rule than would have been visible to Sarojini had she grown up in, say, the colonial capital of Calcutta. This is not of course to assert that colonialism, or its not-quite-Other, nationalism, were foreign to Hyderabad, though, as Karen Leonard usefully reminds us, the princely states, which for the most part were governed by a modern Indian (not British) administrative elite drawn from outside the states, experienced tensions that were not necessarily congruent with the anti-British character of bourgeois Congress nationalism in British India.^[7]

Though Bengali, the Chattopadhyays’ cultural and linguistic affiliations were eclectic; at home, the parents spoke Bengali to each other but Hindustani to the children and—according to some accounts—Telugu to the servants. Sarojini appears to have been in some important ways the prototype of a nationalism shifting decisively away from Bengali dominance. Of the future poet’s acquaintance with English, the story is told that, upon refusing to learn the language at the age of eight, she was locked up by her father in a room for a day as punishment for her recalcitrance. She apparently emerged from the room speaking English, which was to be her language of preference from then on: “I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to him or to my mother, who always speaks to me in Hindustani.” ^[8] Curiously, this coercion into linguistic facility seems to have aroused little overt resentment either of the language or of the pedagogue—at least in her memory of it—though, as Meena Alexander perceptively points out,

It would seem crucial that the language of colonisation, English, was acquired by the young girl via the closed room, the forerunner of the countless rooms in prison she was forced to inhabit as an activist in the National movement. Nor was it merely an accident that she chose that very language to speak to both parents in, both mother and father severed from her through the deliberate choice of English—the language both of punishment and accomplishment.^[9]

There is a curious sense of predestination that seems to mark Sarojini’s account of her encounter with the unspeakable in that locked room. English seems to have functioned for the nascent poet as it did for Assia Djebar in Algeria many years later; it was the father’s gift of a colonial language that liberated her even as it wrenched her from the mother tongue.^[10] It is no surprise that the adoption of English by Sarojini had asymmetrical consequences for her father and her mother, aligning the daughter with the former, especially as the latter’s facility in the language appears to have been less pronounced than her husband’s.^[11] However, the new language proved to be of some use when, a few years later, Sarojini was able to reject partially an identity as her father’s daughter (and to invoke her mother’s poetic accomplishments) by repudiating the scientific career that Aghorenath had originally pursued and which he wished his oldest daughter to embrace: “My training under my father’s eye was of a sternly scientific character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger.” ^[12]

Sarojini, who had a brilliant academic career, matriculating in the University of Madras at the age of twelve and taking first place in the Presidency, was an autodidact; she read copiously and enthusiastically in the English Romantic and Victorian poets, speedily acquiring a modicum of fame in the Nizam of Hyderabad’s court as an extraordinarily gifted young girl. At the age of sixteen she was sent to England (accompanied by Annie Besant), where she was to remain for three years (1895 to 1898), studying first at King’s College of the University of London and then at Girton, though without taking a degree. This period proved a crucial turning point in Sarojini’s career (for she already had one), for it was here, under the tutelage of English poets and intellectuals, that she learned how to be an Indian poet and, almost certainly, how to be a female poet as well. By her own account, she had been writing poetry for several years; at least some of it, according to her, was pastiche, being modeled faithfully upon the work of Scott, Barrett Browning, and other nineteenth-century poets. But the first public revelation of her persona as an English-language poet seems to have occurred during her English sojourn. The tale of her transformation into an Indian poet under the guidance of Edmund Gosse is well known. The critic who had earlier been responsible for introducing that other precocious Bengali poetess, Toru Dutt,^[13] to the west was (at least retrospectively) taken with Sarojini’s peculiarly “eastern” maturity and learning: “She was a child of sixteen years, but as unlike the usual English maiden of that age as a lotus or a cactus is unlike a lily of the valley. She was already marvellous in mental maturity, amazingly well-read, and far beyond a Western child in all her acquaintance with the world.” ^[14] But he was disappointed at the lack of fit between the enchanting eastern life and the English poetry that she gave him to read, finding in the latter a counterfeit westernness so uninspired as to be indistinguishable from caricature:

The verses which Sarojini had entrusted to me were skilful in form, correct in grammar and blameless in sentiment, but they had the disadvantage of being totally without individuality. They were Western in feeling and in imagery, they were founded in reminiscences of Tennyson and Shelley; I am not sure that they did not even breathe an atmosphere of Christian resignation. I laid them down in despair; this was but the note of the mocking bird with a vengeance.^[15]

Gosse advised her against this masquerade of a banal Englishness, at which she had shown herself to be so disturbingly proficient, and sought to bring the work into conformity with a life that he saw as unequivocally and magnificently “authentic.” The phenomenon of the mimic woman was not edifying; or was it the fact of her being a mimic woman rather than a mimic man? In any event, he counseled her instead to embrace another identification, that of the (Indian) national poet writing in English, articulating quite explicitly what he (as the representative figure of the English critic and reader) expected of an Indian poetess: “What we wished to receive was, not a rechauffé of Anglo-Saxon sentiment in an Anglo-Saxon setting, but some revelation of the heart of India, some sincere penetrating analysis of native passion of the principles of antique religion and of such mysterious intimations as stirred the soul of the East long before the West had begun to dream that it had a soul.” ^[16] As in the instance of the first turn to English, Sarojini submitted to her male pedagogue with “the docility and rapid appreciation of genius,” becoming Indian with as much facility as she had become English. This moment of interpellation was decisive. Thereafter she made herself into the quintessential (female) Indian poet and was admiringly received as such by the Rhymers’ Club and a host of notable literary figures, including Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons.

Sarojini was to publish, after her return to India, three volumes of poetry, The Golden Threshold (1905), The Bird of Time (1912), and The Broken Wing (1917), which were critically well received in addition to being bestsellers in England. The first contained a lengthy introduction by Symons and the second, one by Gosse, each detailing the impact of her personality on the English literary scene in London and describing the process by which she came to be hailed as an Indian poetess. Gosse insisted that she was “the most brilliant, the most original, as well as the most correct, of all the natives of Hindustan who have written in English”;^[17] he was entirely persuaded—even as he remembered proudly his own mentorship of her—that she was “in all things and to the fullest extent autochthonous. She springs from the very soil of India; her spirit, although it employs the English language as its vehicle, has no other tie with the West.” ^[18] For several years after her return to India, Sarojini corresponded with Gosse as with a mentor, but with the greater confidence of the native informant describing her milieu.^[19] Once again, she had proved an apt pupil.

It is on the one hand an all too familiar and racially marked tale of the making of a gendered Indianness through the patronizing election of the masculinist Orientalist guru. Yet we might also do well to recognize and remember the instrumentality for Sarojini of mentors like Gosse and Symons, whose mentoring of her—as the “Indian poet,” one who was especially authoritative because she had been “English” first—made possible her considerable fame and influence. Her skillful negotiation of an Indianness-for-England was to translate into considerable cultural capital with not only an English audience but also an Indian nationalist one. And since this identity as Indian poet was to prove her passport into the arena of Indian nationalism (which is not to say that she could not have entered it otherwise), we might also wish to ponder the paradox of identity as the gift of, and for, the Other. We would do well to remember the way in which Spivak, for instance, metaphorizes English in India (an instance for her of the enabling violation) as the “child of rape,” a thing that cannot be demonized or refused and that has, moreover—through whatever forms of coercion—become (uneasily) one’s own.^[20]

During her lifetime, any serious consideration (whether laudatory or critical) of Sarojini’s poetic accomplishment was, for the most part, disallowed by her status as the Nightingale, the premier female poet of the new India.^[21] In more recent times, the response to her poetry by Indian poets and critics, feminist and otherwise, has been markedly irresolute and contradictory; most of them have oscillated uneasily between echoing the fulsome and patronizing adulation of Gosse and Symons and dismissing the work as lightweight and maudlin. The poetry has been described by as antimodernist and retrogressive in both form and content and invested in the representation of a Kiplingesque India;^[22] Nissim Ezekiel’s dismissal of an embarrassing poetic foremother is only the best known of these counterblasts to the early admiration of her work: “It was Sarojini’s ill-luck that she wrote at a time when English poetry had touched the rock bottom of sentimentality and technical poverty. By the time it recovered its health she had entered politics, abandoning the possibility of poetic development and maturity.” ^[23]

The work has also been remarked by feminist readers for its celebration of an ethos very contrary to Sarojini’s self-staging as public figure. It is a critique remarkably similar in some ways to that of the Gosse, who perceived a significant hiatus between “life” and “work”; while Gosse was disappointed at the poet’s too-facile mimicry of a colonial model of expressiveness, feminists are dissatisfied about the same thing, though they differ from Gosse in their sense of what constitutes the colonial model. Interestingly, the same questions (why do the life and the work not echo each other? why does one fail to be the other’s mirror?) are posed by the Orientalist as well as by the (anticolonial) feminist, though the resolution is strikingly different for each. Both critiques are about the failure of a certain experiential model to “take,” or to reproduce itself in the poetry. Meena Alexander, in a superb essay on Sarojini the poet, proves to be the exception. She seeks to explain what commonly appears as a “radical cleft between the intense, if imprisoning passions of her poetry and the political life she espoused,” ^[24] cannily reading the poetry as staging the gendered constraints of Indian culture as a prelude to attacking the constraints of colonialism.

What has commonly been described as the (irreconcilable) tension between the “life” and the “work” can be seen to mirror the constitutive contradictions of gendered citizenship in the nation, in its nationalist and its postcolonial formations. Partha Chatterjee usefully reminds us that “[the] new subjectivity that was constructed here [by nationalism] was premised not on a conception of universal humanity, but rather on particularity and difference: the identity of the ‘national’ community against other communities.” ^[25] It is precisely this different idea or deployment of national identity and national modernity that possibly bridges what appear to be the contradictions between Sarojini’s poetic and political personae. Thus, writes Chatterjee, while the nationalists divided the domain of culture into ghar and bahir, the first associated with femininity and the latter with masculinity, they were also ingenious enough to accommodate a metaphoric understanding of these seemingly opposed spaces:

It is this latter criterion [femininity], now invested with a characteristically nationalist content, that made possible the displacement of the boundaries of the home from the physical confines earlier defined by the rules of purdah to a more flexible, but nonetheless culturally determinate, domain set by the differences between socially approved male and female conduct. Once the essential femininity of women was fixed in terms of certain culturally visible qualities, they could go to schools, travel in public conveyances, watch public entertainment programs, and in time even take up employment outside the home. But the “spiritual” signs of her femininity were clearly marked—in her dress, her eating habits, her social demeanor, her religiosity.^[26]

This, furthermore, must not be construed to mean that women were admitted into the public sphere only in lowly or marginal positions, though a benevolent tokenism remained an integral part of this new patriarchy’s practice; what this doctrine of “essential femininity” ensured was that women could engage in many of the same professions and activities as men without posing a threat to “essential masculinity.” Chatterjee’s explanation goes a long way toward explaining the seemingly anomalous position of a figure like Sarojini, as well as of other (elite) Indian women who were solicited to join the nationalist movement. Nonetheless, what merits additional consideration—and this is what I am primarily concerned with—is the deeply troubled and ambivalent responses to women in powerful or visible positions. Sarojini’s public life, and the responses it evoked, are an instructive instance of such ambivalence, as we shall see.

Viewed in the light of Chatterjee’s argument, can Sarojini’s poetry (and some of her nationalist rhetoric) be seen to function as a hostage given over to a nationalist patriarchy as the price of political admission? (The fact of one volume having been published before her entry into political life is beside the point; what matters, for the purposes of this chapter, is its status as symbolic tender in the enterprise of bourgeois nationalism.) Her poetry is, as most of her critics, including some of her contemporaries and most of our own, have recognized, distinguished by a striking and consistent archaism, not just in its choice of form—a form that was already outmoded by the time she published her third volume of poetry, The Broken Wing—but also in its celebration of an India always hyperbolically traditional. It was for this of course that Gosse praised her as “completely autochthonous” and which many Indian readers of her time (including Tagore) found compelling and attractive; nationalism as part of the project of modernity requires, as its condition of possibility, the trace of the archaic. One must not discount either the (equivocal) attractiveness of an archaism quite visibly stamped as “Made in England” in its idioms and in its language of expression, particularly as manifested in the corpus of a female poet whose own political (and personal) life seemed arranged according to an entirely different script.

It is precisely this fraught nexus of the poetic and the political that I wish to revisit, though not in order to establish one as more or less “real” than the other. An examination of Sarojini’s public status as poet poses a number of interesting questions for the gendering of bourgeois nationalism in the twentieth century. What forms of violence and what intimacies link the poet writing in English with the female nationalist? Why is the poet’s career one that must be both renounced and remembered in that moment which is defined as the political? I am interested in the way in which the poetry serves as collateral in the sphere denominated the political and defines her place in it; I am interested as well as in the deeply equivocal pattern of responses to her as the figure of the nationalist and national poet (which seems proleptic of the decidedly equivocal responses of latter-day literary critics). What I argue in this chapter is that the seeming breach between the poetic persona and the public one should not lead us—as Alexander reminds us—to overlook the profound articulations between the two spheres. I also argue that it is precisely the celebratory archaism of Sarojini’s poetry, including its parade of submissive and sacrificial women, as well as its stance against modernity (a modernity of telos as well as of poetic form), rather than the implicit critique of such an India, that permits Sarojini a point of entry into the nationalist movement. The sacrificial women of the poetry are, I believe, most productively read as emblems of a monumentalized and longed-for yet only partially emulable past. It is precisely the dialectic between the heroic submission of these mythical women and the (Indian) modernity of the contemporary woman that nationalism seeks to maintain rather than repress. The former must claim the latter as her own (progeny); neither can be abandoned. At the same time the poetry functions, I believe, as a kind of an alibi, embodying an idealized Indian femininity that partially exonerates the poet’s imperfect emulation of those gendered models.

In reading the Nightingale thus as a figure of convergence and tension between seemingly discrete impulses, I have found Anne McClintock’s recent essay on gender and nationalism particularly helpful. McClintock, remarking on the “Janus-faced” quality of the nation first noted by Tom Nairn, describes the nation’s simultaneous and paradoxical adherence to a primeval past and its turn to the future. This “temporal anomaly within nationalism” brings together in a mutually uncomfortable but necessary alliance the elements of nostalgia and social and cultural atavism with the notions of modernity and “progress.” The incommensurability of these two sets of terms is resolved “by figuring the contradiction as a ‘natural’ division of gender.” Women are “the atavistic and authentic ‘body’ of national traditions”; they signify nationalism’s link to a deep past, its conservative principle. Men on the other hand stand in for the modernity of nationalism, which is dynamic, aggressive, and revolutionary.^[27] We know, besides, that peasants, tribals, and other subalterns are also figured in this way, in their “failure” to be modern. Women, along these other traditionally marginalized groups, function as “the living archive of the national archaic.” ^[28]

For the most part Sarojini’s verse, especially in the early part of her career, eschewed “public” and “modern” events and comprised lyrics about what had come to be coded quite decisively as the timeless and the private (which in the imaginary of Indian nationalism was also the zone of tradition and of inviolable Indianness). Not surprisingly, in light of the carefully chosen archaism that characterized her corpus, many of the best-known lyrics were quite explicitly derived from “folk” sources (“Palanquin-Bearers,” “Indian Weavers,” “Suttee,” “In the Bazaars of Hyderabad,” and “Bangle-Sellers,” among others) and from classical Persian and Urdu ones (“The Song of Princess Zeb-un-nissa,” “Humayun to Zobeida,” and “The Queen’s Rival,” all in The Golden Threshold). Alexander directs our attention to the Tennysonian and late Romantic heritage of this poetry in its romanticization of the folk and its fascination with women in conditions of deathly passivity: “The young Sarojini would seem to have learnt her lesson all too well, embracing for herself the world-weary sensations, the stasis, the unmistakable agony of women who have nowhere in the world to go. The irony is of course that she should learn from Symons or Dowson, carrying back their diction to India, making up in her poetry images of exhausted women, hermetically sealed, a double colonisation that the interchange of cultures drew her to.” ^[29]

The echoes that Alexander describes are unmistakable, but it is possible that part of the Indian poet’s inspiration may have derived as well from indigenous sources—for instance from the highly self-conscious and conspicuously gendered invention of tradition, particularly in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal.^[30] Thus the sequestered woman in “The Purdah Nashin” (and we cannot forget that the campaign to bring women out of purdah was a very important plank of the reform movements of the nineteenth century) is celebrated, though not entirely unequivocally, as “guarded and secure / Behind her carven lattices, / Like jewels in a turbaned crest, / Like secrets in a lover’s breast.” ^[31] Likewise, sati is represented (in “Suttee”) not in the familiar reformist registers of women’s oppression or of social melioration but in that of feminine secondariness, which is also coded as love: “Life of my life, Death’s bitter sword / Hath severed us like a broken word, / Rent us in twain who are but one… / Shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone?” ^[32] It is not so much that sati is chosen by the grieving widow; life itself is inconceivable, indeed preposterous, for her in the absence of a husband. In her avatar as political figure, Sarojini’s approach to the reproducibility of a history celebrated as glorious was considerably more guarded and canny; sati as a practice in the current time was unwarranted because contemporary Indian men did not “deserve” sati.^[33] The burden of memory—and of memorialization—had to be borne while leading a life that was the opposite of what was remembered and celebrated.

For a figure so prominently associated with the nationalist movement, Sarojini wrote relatively few poems that could be construed as overtly public or modern (both terms being locatable within a single associative continuum). In the volumes following The Golden Threshold her poetry expanded in scope from love songs and songs commemorating a folk everyday to include poems with a more specifically “national” and historic orientation, as witnessed by “The Broken Wing,” “The Imam Bara,” “Imperial Delhi,” “Gokhale,” “The Lotus” (addressed to Gandhi), “The Prayer of Islam,” “Kali the Mother,” and “Awake!” (addressed to her friend Jinnah)—all of which appeared in The Broken Wing. These either memorialized the glories of a bygone era (now marked more subtly as historic rather than timelessly Indian), celebrated Hindu-Muslim unity, or worked as exhortations to the soul of India, often invoking the (by now) familiar and evocative maternal model of Indian nationness.^[34]

In speaking of the incongruousness between poetry and biography, we have already noted the fact that for Sarojini poetry functions as the register in which a woman’s dues are paid. It is her most conspicuous offering or sacrifice to the nationalist cause; it is one of the emblematic ironies of the gendered colonial situation that the same tribute is equally acceptable to Orientalists and nationalists. The poetry serves for Sarojini as a token of her good faith as an Indian woman. It does not simply constitute an account of willing feminine sacrifice; the poet herself must enact the renunciation she describes, if not by reproducing the submission of her meek heroines, then by abjuring the poetry that has made her famous. The poetry is an offering to the cause of (a masculinist) nationalism; the renunciation of the poetry is no less so. As we shall see in the next section, however, the figure of the female poet/renouncer is attended by fascination as well as unease; her creative power must be harnessed or kept at bay even as it is deployed. When manifest in the prose of political rhetoric or in the arena of public life, the bardic gift establishes Sarojini as too hypnotically enthralling for comfort, even as a figure of seduction, even as she can be dismissed as a mere talker, whose bombast and the scandal of whose life alike point to a damning lack of substance. Both as poet and as politician, Sarojini serves as the vacant or even counterfeit figure of the mimic woman, always at a certain remove from the genuine article.

The Unbecoming Woman

Historical scholarship as well as popular opinion on bourgeois Indian (Congress) nationalism in the twentieth century have established that the movement created (as the Algerian revolution was to do later in the century)^[35] a new subject position for women—women as nationalists, activists, and public figures. Gandhi in particular among the (male) nationalists is believed to have played a crucial role in the “feminization” of nationalist activity. A nationalist for whom the purification and reform of Indianness rather than the transfer of political power from English to Indian hands constituted true Swaraj (independence),^[36] he is commonly understood to have feminized himself through satyagraha (literally, persisting in the truth—a one-word code for his nonviolent moral opposition to British rule in India). He is credited, too, with having made a significant departure from “the attitude of many of the leaders of the reform movements of the late nineteenth century, who tended to see women as passive recipients of more humane treatment through the initiative of enlightened male effort.” ^[37] It must, however, be remembered, as Radha Kumar points out, that women had already entered the public domain on a number of fronts, and Gandhi’s most important function was perhaps to legitimize this move as well as to expand existing definitions of “women’s work.” ^[38] Gandhi did this partially in the manner described by Chatterjee, not so much by making women’s rights a question of modernity and its ethical claims but by a deployment of the rhetoric of (Indian) female exceptionalism and purity. Thus he invoked traditional Hindu heroines like Sita and Draupadi as exemplars of moral courage and self-sacrifice. Women were, according to this scheme, peculiarly and intuitively suited for the exigencies of satyagraha and nonviolent struggle; the qualities of mind required for such enterprises had, on the other hand, to be learned by men. While this insistence on the autonomy and dignity of women—as well as the transformation of spinning on the charkha (spinning wheel) into a profoundly political act—undoubtedly had the effect of broadening women’s possibilities for action, they also, as Madhu Kishwar reminds us, “helped ensure the entry of women into public life without their having to assume a competitive posture vis-à-vis men.” ^[39]

Sarojini’s entry into the arena of the political as such cannot be construed outside this framework, and in a fundamental way it was not incongruous with the nature of her poetic corpus or indeed with the trajectory of her poetic career. In a vital sense, her entry into politics (or at least the role she came to play in the nationalist struggle) would have been far less easy without her first having been the kind of poet that she was. This we have seen. Female nationalists had to be feminized just as much as male nationalists did. In Sarojini’s case (as in that of Nivedita, to some degree, in an earlier period) it was possible be a public figure because the writing had provided a guarantee of her unimpeachable femininity. And in many important ways she showed herself to be the proper woman politician, who could be a true woman despite her great consequence and fearlessness in the public sphere and despite her considerable contributions to women’s issues as an orator and activist. Her life as a champion of women’s rights thus can exist in a productive (because generally subordinate) counterpoint to her life as a nationalist. In 1917 and 1918 she led the delegation to press for women’s suffrage before the Montagu commission and the Southborough Franchise Commission, and in the latter year she helped pass a resolution in support of women’s franchise at the Congress session. In 1919 she went to England as a member of the Home Rule League to press these claims before a Joint Parliamentary Committee. In 1931 she attended the second Round Table Conference in London as the representative of Indian women, though she, in common with the vast majority of bourgeois women nationalists, was to contend that women needed no special favors or separate representation.^[40] She was careful to insist on the complete congruity of these two aspects (the gendered and the nationalist) of her struggle; like many other Indian women, she insisted that the Indian women’s movement was distinct from those in the west in not being “feminist,” ^[41] the latter presumably marked with its attendant band of repugnant associations, being committed to sameness and equality rather than complementarity and difference, existing in an adversarial relationship with men rather than a supportive and amicable one, insisting on rights rather than duties, and operating outside a situation of colonial dominance. As Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi point out, the participants in the women’s movement “attributed their oppression not to men as a group, but to custom.…They argued that women’s issues could not be separated from the question of foreign domination, and this analysis had the effect of defusing male opposition and winning support for the women’s cause within India.” ^[42]

Despite this wariness about claiming the label of feminism (a wariness that has persisted over the decades^[43]), Sarojini was rarely content to be silent on women’s issues. She was willing, for instance, to castigate Indian men for not responding seriously to the criticisms of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), even as she challenged Mayo’s right to speak for Indian women.^[44] For her, women’s uplift could only strengthen male nationalist demands, rather than be counterposed against them. Thus one of Sarojini’s earliest public speeches (the one that brought her to the attention of the first of her nationalist gurus, Gokhale), which was in support of a resolution for women’s education at the Indian Social Conference in Calcutta in 1906, situated feminist issues firmly within the domain of nation building: “When the Indian races are seeking for the ultimate unity of a common national ideal, it is well for us to remember that the success of the whole movement lies centred in what is known as the woman question.” ^[45] Not only did the deprivation of women constitute a minus in the calculus of the national good, it might even have been the condition of possibility for colonial domination:

Does one man dare to deprive another of his birthright to God’s pure air which nourishes his body? How, then, shall a man dare to deprive a human soul of its immemorial inheritance of liberty and life? And yet, my friends, man has so dared in the case of Indian women. That is why you men of India are to-day what you are: because your fathers, in depriving your mothers of that immemorial birthright, have robbed you, their sons, of your just inheritance.^[46]

Freedom is a patrimony that is passed, curiously, through the female line; and if woman is to be the conduit (rather than the recipient or the giver) of such an inheritance, she cannot be allowed to be the weak link that prevents the sons from coming into their own.

This privileging of woman in her maternal aspect—and, moreover, as the mother of sons—was to be the keynote of Sarojini’s approach to the woman question. Thus, addressing the 1916 session of the Congress (under the presidency of Annie Besant that year), she made her appeal on the Arms Act not as a representative citizen of an imagined community but, once again, and somewhat paradoxically, in the accents of a mother demanding rights for a son intent upon winning or preserving his manhood: “It is suitable that I who represent the other sex, that is, the mothers of the men whom we wish to make men and not emasculated machines, should raise a voice on behalf of the future mothers of India to demand that the birthright of their sons should be given back to them.” ^[47] Sarojini certainly made the appeal in the conventional and self-effacing accents of the maternal, which had come to trope woman’s identity as nation(alist). Within this frame of reference, woman cannot expect to be citizen on her own account but only for something larger than herself; her citizenship is a moving away from the claims that constitute normal (that is, normatively male) citizenship. But there was at the same time a certain paradox in her arrogation of the authority to make the appeal, since only the disinterested petition by the decisively not-male on behalf of the once-male or the to-be-male (or the would-be-male) could guarantee the latter’s (slippery) manhood.

In a complex and fraught relationship with this attempted (but never fully successful) embodiment of a maternal Indian polity was Sarojini’s apparent willingness to take on the role of disciple to a succession of prominent men; first her father, then Gosse, then Gokhale, and then finally Gandhi was her guru.^[48] If Gosse was the first to discipline her efforts and to claim her for India, Gokhale was to do the same nearly two decades later, when she was already an established poet; her relationship with him rehearses some though not all of the difficulties of a nationalist patriarchy with the figure of the westernized nationalist woman as public persona. Having heard her move the resolution on women’s education in the Calcutta meeting of the All-India Social Conference in 1906, he wrote to express his admiration: “Your speech was more than an intellectual treat of the highest order.…We all felt for the moment to be lifted to a higher plane.” ^[49] The praise is extremely warm; but it should not escape notice, either, that what is also being invoked is, in the words of the feminist and nationalist Margaret Cousins, “Ruskin’s idea of woman being the inspirer and guide rather than the dominator or leader.” ^[50] The modality of this response was to repeat itself through Sarojini’s political career (though often inflected more disparagingly), as the effects of her oratory and poetry were written in the register of sensibility and sensation rather than the register of intellectual suasion. All her life she functioned as a figure (often an empty one) of inspiration, rather than as a thinker or even a doer.

From the moment of that initial solicitation she became, albeit informally, a disciple of the great nationalist. Despite his praise for her elocutionary power, Gokhale was apparently rather suspicious of her fame as a poet, nervous about the effect on her of immoderate adulation, and apprehensive about the affect she was capable of producing. And yet (in her telling of it), when he claimed her for the nation he could only do so—in the most florid arabesques, no less—by hailing her as a poet: “Stand here with me, with the stars and hills for witness and in their presence consecrate your life and your talent, your song and your speech, your thought and your dream to the motherland. O poet, see visions from the hill-tops and spread abroad the message of hope to the toilers in the valleys.” ^[51] Poetry had to be renounced as an indulgence (a feminine one, undoubtedly) in the face of the nation’s need, and it would be precisely this capacity for sacrifice and self-abnegation that would mark her as a woman-for-the-nation. Yet it was her status as a poet that made her worthy to be called to the nation’s service in the first place.

Discipleship to Gokhale was followed by a more lasting yet more complex and troubled tie with Gandhi. His disciple she undoubtedly was, both in her own telling of their relationship and in the accounts provided by other observers. But unlike the guru, she was anything but ascetic; in marked contrast to him, she loved English civilization even as she fought against British colonialism in India. Also unlike the vast majority of Gandhi’s female disciples, and some of the male ones, Sarojini had a profound distaste for the austerities of the satyagrahi (practitioner of satyagraha), including those of the guru, and her discipleship was characterized by a refusal to emulate the guru in his spartan, indeed self-flagellating, ways. No doubt she went to prison (as did her nationalist compatriots) several times, but she had little use for his regime of austerity and self-denial as an everyday and intimate practice,^[52] and she dismissed his diet as “grass and goat’s milk.” She appears more than anything else to have found his self-enforced poverty rather comical (if not a shade self-aggrandizing), remarking on one occasion that it required a millionaire to keep the great leader in poverty;^[53] the reference was to the wealthy industrialist G. D. Birla, with whom Gandhi often stayed. She also resolutely refused to spin or to regard the charkha with any piety, despite the fact that the spinning of khaddar (coarse handspun cloth) was central to Gandhian satyagraha and was considered a peculiarly feminine activity. Nor would she, despite her long association with the mahatma, be subject to the substantial rigors of Sabarmati Ashram. She did wear khaddar for two years, in the initial stages of the Non-Cooperation movement, upon Gandhi’s urging, but reverted to her silk saris and elaborate jewelry before very long. She was always regarded in some ways as an anomaly in the mahatma’s camp, a figure who was never completely invested with high seriousness. She was instead “the licensed jester of the Mahatma’s court,” ^[54] the one disciple privileged to speak of him openly as “Mickey Mouse” and to comment on his general ugliness and perversity.

Besides, Sarojini’s own life as a nationalist Indian woman was by no means exemplary. Despite her repeated paeans to the meek and self-sacrificing female figures from the Hindu epics, her repeated invocation of the sati as a model for the satyagrahi, and her showcasing of her own status as mother (all of which were coupled with her frequently disparaging remarks about her own femininity), she was in her personal life quite markedly different from the ideals she conjured up. Her relationships with some of her family members were notably strained. She distanced herself publicly from the activities in Europe of her revolutionary communist brother Virendranath, an act which estranged her from her father.^[55] We know little of her relationships with her mother or her other siblings; her youngest brother, the poet Harindranath, hardly mentions her in his autobiography, despite her substantial reputation as a poet.^[56] Moreover, much of her life after 1914 was spent away from her husband and children, who lived in Hyderabad. She did travel in India and abroad with her daughters Padmaja and Lilamoni, especially the former, but her husband remains a shadowy figure in her biographies and seems not to have appeared even at her funeral. In a recent biography, there is a brief mention of the resentment on the part of her own family at her absences and the criticism she faced about spending relatively little time with her husband.^[57] This was of course one of the central paradoxes of nationalism’s engagement with the woman question. Woman was hailed as (wife and) mother; these markers of femininity were internalized so that she could be woman even in the public sphere. But how could the figure who literalized the familial imaginary of the nation dedicate herself as Sarojini did to both nation (and its spiritual patriarch) and her own family without failing the latter? Gandhi tried to resolve this by politicizing the domestic, through the act of spinning, and it was by far his preferred model of nationalist struggle for women. Yet there were those who wished for a fuller involvement in the nationalist struggle; Gandhi’s response was to ask the unmarried ones among them to seek a vocation higher than wifehood, that of celibate singleness and service to the nation. This was the route followed by—among others—Mirabehn and Sushila Nayyar. But it obviously made the position of Sarojini and other married women like herself quite anomalous.

Nor was Sarojini’s love of magnificent clothing and fine furnishings easily recuperable into a nationalist schema of taste and consumption; in this she was distinct from her sister-in-law Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (or from the Pupul Jayakars of a later period), whose keen interest in handlooms and folk arts of various kinds was not seen to be marked in the same way by mere womanly vanity or weakness.^[58] In fact, all the accounts of Sarojini emphasize this important difference from the ideal practiced by Gandhi; they all point repeatedly to her love of comfort and good living, including good food and clothing and comfortable accommodations. She is described all too often in the register of the private and of “taste.” Her most prominent biographer, Padmini Sengupta, begins her work with a chapter entitled “Sapphire and Gold,” which is an extended description of her “intense love for colour,” most notably manifest in her love of rich and flamboyant clothing.^[59]

These were to be the terms in which Sarojini was most often invoked, by many observers, Indian and European, some sympathetic to Indian nationalism and some hostile. To many of them she seemed like a society grande dame of the best kind (which to many satyagrahis was the worst kind). Margaret Cousins, attentive to the details of Sarojini’s toilette and diction, was reminded, in Sarojini’s home, of the atmosphere of a French salon.^[60] To the liberal young English Member of Parliament Robert Bernays she was like the socialite Patricia Campbell, and moreover the only Indian woman who managed to make khaddar look attractive.^[61] Even the vitriolic Beverly Nichols, who found little to love in India, was bowled over by a figure he described, not unadmiringly, as “so very Mayfair”:

Among these figures [major Indian politicians] Mrs. Naidu stands out, and always stood out, in high relief. 64 years old, she has lived—to put it mildly—a full life. She was the first Indian woman to be elected President of Congress; wherever the fight has been thickest, she was to be found, fluttering a gaily-bordered saree, with feminine defiance, in the face of the British Raj. She had been swept into lathi [baton] charges, had held Gandhi’s hand at some of the most crucial moments of his career, and…while finding time to produce a considerable family, had written a great deal of enchanting poetry.…The fact remains that she still gives the impression of being a young woman. She has allure, and she knows it.^[62]

This allure (a highly complex affect, in Sarojini’s case) was, for other nationalists a source of some discomfort. It is important to remember this even as one recalls that she served as an eminent ally of Gandhi’s in many important missions. She was sent by the mahatma on a grand tour of the United States following the publication of Katherine Mayo’s searing (if undeniably racist) critique of the sexual pathologies of Indians and of the victimization of Hindu women by Hindu men (especially nationalists) who claimed to revere motherhood. Though she said almost nothing in public about Mother India, Sarojini’s lectures and her social appearances appear to have been clearly designed to serve as a rebuke to the allegations of that infamous book; and her “love letters” to Gandhi from the United States, detailing her triumphs, were regularly reproduced in the pages of his journal Young India. (For once, she carried off what was for a nationalist patriarchy a convincing imitation of a genuine and appropriately modern Indian femininity.) She served in other ambassadorial capacities: she was an emissary to conferences on the status of expatriate Indians in South Africa and East Africa, and she was to accompany Gandhi as a delegate to the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1932. She was also to be the first Indian woman president of the Congress, and one of only two or three until Indira Gandhi’s nomination in 1959.

But a more than casual reading of the details of her career makes it obvious how precarious her position in nationalist politics was, despite her high profile and her long association with the mahatma. She was famous for her oratory, moving persons as unlike each other as Gokhale, Lado Rani Zutshi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Margaret Cousins. It was her oratory as much as her poetry that kept alive in the public mind her status as poet, as the Nightingale of India. Yet there was also a profound suspicion of the affect produced by her speeches, of the very rhetorical brilliance that could lull the reason into a kind of stupefaction. Motilal Nehru is known to have commented caustically after Sarojini’s presidential address to the Congress in 1925—an address that is reputed to have moved most of the audience to tears—“But what did she say?” ^[63] The younger Nehru, too, no mean orator himself and a friend of Sarojini’s (and given, like her, to extempore speechmaking) wrote at a later date in his diary: “Sarojini’s poetical fervours made her say fine nothings.” ^[64] His praise in his autobiography of her eloquence is less conspicuously damning, though it is distinctly ambivalent about his one-time callow admiration of her fluency: “I remember being moved also, in those days after the Lucknow Congress, by a number of eloquent speeches delivered by Sarojini Naidu in Allahabad. It was all nationalism and patriotism and I was a pure nationalist, my vague socialist ideas of college days having sunk into the background.” ^[65] Her impact is written almost as a seduction against which vigilance must be vigorously exercised. Is it any surprise that Nehru was to have a long-standing romantic relationship with her daughter Padmaja (who was, like her mother, flamboyant and charismatic though politically far less visible)?^[66]

Even Gandhi seems to have regarded her with a certain wariness. In reply to G. D. Birla’s objections (what these were is not known) to Gandhi’s having nominated her for the presidency of the Congress session in 1925, the latter provided this rather equivocal support:

You are unnecessarily worried about Sarojini. She has served India well, and is still doing so. While I have done nothing in particular just now for her presidentship, I am convinced that if others who have so far accepted that position, were fit for it, she too is fit. Everybody is enamoured of her enthusiasm. I myself bear witness to her courage. I have noticed nothing wrong about her.

But from all this you need not infer that I approve of all that she or anybody else does.

God has inhabited this our world with objects

Living and inanimate, good, bad, indifferent;

The wise are concerned only with the good

Just as the swan sucks milk, leaving water alone.^[67]

Among the factors that seemed to make Sarojini central to Indian nationalism, while ensuring her distance from it, was the apparent linguistic anomaly of a being a national poet writing in English; the mimic (wo)man is despised as much as she is solicited. On the one hand the choice was logical: she was born to Bengali parents, brought up in the Urdu-speaking environment of princely Hyderabad, compelled to learn English at an early age, educated partially in England, and married to an Andhra man. The choice of English would seem logical, if not inevitable, in her case. It would also seem to be what allowed her to be hailed as the Nightingale of India, and to function as such. In what language could the poet of “unity in diversity” write and speak if not in English? As in the case of Vivekananda, what could account for her stature in India if not her reception in England? Yet this also ensured her partial alienation from a nationalist project, especially a Gandhian one that insisted on the un-Indianness of English and the centrality of Hindi to any conception of national culture.^[68] (When Sarojini did speak in an Indian language—which was not often—it was the Urdu of her native Hyderabad, and Urdu poetry that she deployed, rather than the Hindi preferred by a Congress now firmly dominated by North Indian Hindus.)

Despite her status as the laureate of nationalism and her presidency of the Indian National Congress, Sarojini was in many fundamental ways a marginal figure in the decision making of that nationalist body. This is not to deny that she may have been symbolically central. In this her role was not significantly different from that played by other women participants in the nationalism; “the participation of women in the freedom movement,” says Kishwar, “was limited, both quantitatively and qualitatively.” ^[69] No women, for instance, were invited by Gandhi to form part of his band of seventy-odd satyagrahis who were to march to the sea at Dandi to break the Salt Laws, in the single most dramatic instance of confrontation with the tyranny of colonial law. Several nationalist women protested and compelled Gandhi and the Congress Committee to withdraw their opposition to women’s participation in the salt satyagraha, though not in the march itself.^[70] Large numbers of women, acting individually and as members of women’s organizations, joined the salt satyagraha. Sarojini was at the beach at Dandi to hail Gandhi as the “Deliverer.” When he was arrested, and his successor Abbas Tyabji after him, she led the raid upon the Dharasana Salt Works in what was to be one of the most brutal episodes of the nationalist period, as the police systematically beat the nonviolent activists into “bloody pulp.” ^[71] She was the first woman to be arrested in this campaign.

Given the distinctly secondary and supportive role Sarojini (and other women) had been assigned in the civil disobedience movement, it is no surprise to find her not invited to run for election in 1936 (though a few women did contest seats).^[72] Nehru is known to have been very unwilling to have her serve on the Working Committee of the Congress party in 1936 (despite the convention of always having a woman in the Cabinet).^[73] We also have it on M. O. Mathai’s (admittedly dubious) authority that Gandhi persuaded Nehru to leave her out of the Working Committee in 1946 for fear of her “talk[ing] loosely and leak[ing] out secrets”; this was a decision that apparently enraged Sarojini.^[74] After independence in 1947, there seemed no obvious place for her, a fact that biographers have noted. She did become governor (or governess, as she caustically put it) of the United Provinces, the largest state in independent India, but only after Bidhan Chandra Ray, to whom Nehru had first offered the position, declined the offer. It was a largely ceremonial position, and supposedly well suited to Sarojini’s great powers as a bon vivant and hostess. It is perhaps quite consistent with the other details that while she was invited to many university convocations as governor, at Shantiniketan, at Lucknow University, at Benares Hindu University, and in that capacity conferred honorary doctorates upon many intellectuals and prominent nationalists including Nehru, Homi Bhabha, and Govind Vallabh Pant, she received no such honors herself.

Becoming Woman

In what ways could Sarojini be considered a representative figure of the elite Hindu woman in Indian nationalism? An extended comparison of Sarojini’s standing in the nationalist movement with that of other prominent women nationalists, such as Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay,^[75] is not possible here, but my contention is that the case of Sarojini may raise some productive questions of a generalizable nature,^[76] even though the specific details of her life or the trajectory of her career may not have corresponded with those of the other figures. (For instance, her status as a poet is a complicating factor of some magnitude.) Partha Chatterjee’s useful point about Indian nationalism’s capacity to absorb women in powerful positions needs to be fleshed out, and perhaps even troubled, at this point, by some of the questions that the case of Sarojini raises. Rather than comparing her case with that of other women nationalists of the Congress, it may in fact be more illuminating to compare Sarojini and Gandhi, certainly one of the most feminine actors in the nationalist movement. The parallels are fascinating and instructive.

In important respects the personae of Sarojini and her mentor Gandhi display a striking specularity. As Kishwar points out, Gandhi “more than any other leader tried to live his personal life as publicly as possible,…[and] many of his experiments which most people consider eccentricities and obsessions are inextricably linked to his vision of new types of relationships between men and women.” ^[77] Hence the emphasis, both in Gandhi’s own accounts of his life and practices and in the responses of people to him, on the staging of such everyday questions as clothing, diet, sexual activity, and personal hygiene.^[78] His autobiography is full of details regarded as mundane and also intimate, too intimate and unsublimated sometimes even for bourgeois autobiography (which after all is dedicated to the transcendentalization of the banal).^[79] Such a showcasing and politicization of the everyday was, as Kishwar also reminds us, vital to Gandhi’s reconfiguration of women’s domestic and routine activities (like cooking or spinning) as revolutionary.

Gandhi’s relentless propaganda in favor of charkha spinning and wearing of khadi [khaddar] was designed to bring the spirit of nationalism and freedom into every home, even in the remotest village. In this way, abstract political ideas, such as struggle against colonial rule, assumed concrete form for ordinary people. This was a very remarkable way of reaching out to women and bridging the gap between their private lives and the economic-political life of the country. The decision of what to wear or not to wear is one of the decisions likely to be more in the control of a woman, and Gandhi was able to imbue this seemingly mundane sphere of life with a new political and moral significance. The choice of spin [sic] and wear khadi was at once the simplest, least dramatic of choices, calling for no obvious heroism. At the same time, it symbolised each individual’s conscious choice of a philosophy, a way of life. To wear khadi came to mean many things—opposition to colonial rule, identification with the poor and the exploited, and an assertion of the spirit of self-reliance, of freedom.^[80]

In foregrounding these mundane, “womanly” activities, Gandhi did more than invite large numbers of (not always privileged) women into the domain of nationalist politics. The strategy transformed him in many respects into a “woman” himself. To cite one obvious instance of this feminization: to his grandniece Manu Gandhi he comported himself as a mother, hence the seeming incongruity in the title of her book on the mahatma: Bapu [Father, the name by which Gandhi was often known], My Mother.^[81] On another occasion, he said to one of his women disciples, “I trust you have not missed the woman in me”;^[82] he made such assertions on several occasions.

Oddly enough, Sarojini’s everyday life seems to have received almost as much attention as Gandhi’s. The accounts of her life focus on her clothing, her preferences in food, her shopping, her taste in decor, on everything routinely considered the domain of the everyday, the unremarkable, the feminine, the outside-the-political. While Gandhi’s life has been received as his message, so in a perverse way has Sarojini’s. It is remarkable that these figures, who are considered as unlike as two figures can be, are remembered in the same register of the everyday, which by the way is also that of exhibitionism and of theatricality. However—and this is the important distinction—Gandhi’s femininity was not seen (either in his lifetime or in historical remembrance) as analogous to Sarojini’s. She, too, was seen and represented in the register of quotidian habits of consumption and behavior; she was seen in a real sense as fundamentally feminine in the least elevated ways in her love of clothing and food and good living. Yet none of this was translatable, as Gandhi’s actions were, into another and higher register, into the story of her experiments with truth. These actions were, in other words, not signs pointing to something other than themselves. It should be noted that I speak here more of the effects produced respectively by Sarojini and Gandhi and less of their status as intending agents. Gandhi’s autobiography, as well as his copious writings in Harijan and Young India and the evidence of numerous interviews and other encounters in which public reflection about the politics of everyday practice is made manifest, may be said to facilitate such a reading. Besides, as Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph note, such details contributed to his aura of saintliness that in the popular Indian context translated into considerable political capital.^[83] In Sarojini’s case, on the other hand, there is a notable taciturnity in the letters about “private life,” despite the obvious delight in gossip about mutual acquaintances and talk about visits and daily routines. (One can only imagine, and I use this word in the most nonrestrictive sense, what her investment might have been in nationalism, in discipleship, in the women’s movement, and in the politics of daily practice.) She wrote no autobiography, unlike Gandhi; nor did she edit any journals. The question here is one of the reception of these two figures, given that there was in some respects such a striking overlap in the practices of the everyday and despite their both featuring as figures of the feminine. Gandhi is seen to have an existential substance that is not available in Sarojini. And this, paradoxically, is because she is too phenomenal a creature to have any philosophical core; she is seen as a creature entirely of surfaces, entirely of the moment, with no depth whatsoever. She is characterized entirely by ephemera, and as such is not available for abstraction. She is precisely that figure whose activities cannot be recorded or monumentalized. She cannot be a historical figure; she can only be a subject-effect, can only provide the impression of being an agent. What we have in her case is a series of actions that cannot be transcendentalized and that disclose no existential depth. Her femininity, then, is set against the femininity of a Gandhi, who is seen to embody far more fully and profoundly the lineaments of an essential Indian femininity, often represented as Mother India—self-sacrifice, nurturance, nonviolence, and a commitment to everyday heroism. Sarojini on the other hand is the figure not so much of this philosophically thick Mother India as of another femininity, talkative, sparkling, vain, the essence of which is that it has no essence. If anything, she corresponds analogically to the figure of the seductive woman whose lack of sobriety and austerity threatens to destabilize the endeavors of spirituality and politics. Of the two, Gandhi is the better woman. I would like to emphasize that I do not wish to describe Gandhi’s femininity as unreal or as a “theft” that robs Sarojini of her “real” femininity;^[84] I wish, rather, to draw attention to the kinds of femininity that are accommodable by bourgeois nationalism and to those that must be kept at arm’s length or rendered trifling even as their allure cannot be disavowed.

This may be why, in speaking of Sarojini the political figure, other political figures were rendered speechless (as Nehru was in his eulogy of her) and could only speak of her in terms of the ineffable. Many political figures as well as literary critics insisted that she was not quite a politician, that she was to be understood above all as a poet,^[85] which was the coded way of asserting that her essence was style (a word with a double valence, meaning both personal and poetic style) and that her achievements were unquantifiable. Language seems to fail to describe the figure seen as the quintessence of poetry.

Faced with the task of coming to terms with her political contributions, biographers and nationalists alike seem to have been hard put to point to something solid, quantifiable, or decisive. Thus one of her biographers (a sympathetic one) says, “There was…considerable material of historical interest available in the National Archives, but as I had anticipated, great gaps existed in this information because it was probably physically impossible to record the brilliant outpouring of both profound thought, human concern and the light-hearted banter that was the hallmark of Sarojini Naidu’s personality.” ^[86] This may, of course, be an unusually frank and thoughtful admission of the absolute Otherness of the biographical subject, but it also entirely consonant with the general difficulty for nationalists of defining Sarojini’s substance or contributions (though the biographer was in this case a woman). Thus Nehru, upon her death, was unable to define the essence of Sarojini (despite her many decades of highly visible nationalist activity and work in women’s organizations, quite apart from her career as a poet) except in terms of a lack, or in terms of an affect rather than something relatively more tangible: “So we think of her as a brightness, as a certain vitality and vividness, as poetry infused into life and activity, as something tremendously important and rich and yet something which in terms of the material world is rather insubstantial, difficult to grasp and difficult to describe, as something which you can only feel, as you can feel beauty, as you can feel the other higher things in life.” ^[87]

Nehru’s eulogy enacts some of the difficulties involved in “fixing” Sarojini, who functions—as we have seen—as all things to all people, and yet never as quite the right thing. She is on the one hand—especially in relation to the saintly mahatma—too corporeal and too trivially worldly to be allegorized as a figure of Mother India. Yet she is also, at the same time, a figure who carries a peculiarly numinous charge. She is unrepresentable and imponderable, and she can be praised but not particularized or understood; such a (lack of) definition is what usually distinguishes the sacred. Is this an apotheosis that is the characteristic modality of the nation’s memory of its great women? Or is it the stutter caused by a female figure whose (biographical) femininity exemplifies not sacrifice and self-effacement but their opposite? Is her aura a function of her status as a (female) poet, or as a (particular kind of) woman, or both? In any event, Sarojini functions as the name for a certain kind of (female) trouble for nationalism, a trouble that will not go away.

Notes

It becomes in Bankim, probably for the first time in Bengali literature, something emphatically other than simple neutral territory, a profane space, but sacred “ground” (with all the great complexity of this metaphor) of a community. Space is invested with sacrality in a literal sense making transfer of a moral language possible. It was not something which was fit to be geologically surveyed, but to be offered a political form of worship. From a neutral space, India becomes an evocative symbol, female, maternal, infinitely bounteous, invested with the complex and convex symbolism of the feminine in the Hindu tradition—a sign simultaneously of vulnerability and invincibility.