Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu published lyric poetry in London before she was twenty, led the salt march after Gandhi's arrest, and became the first woman to govern an Indian state. She was a scientist's daughter from Hyderabad who passed the matriculation at twelve, was sent to England at sixteen, and was told by Edmund Gosse to stop imitating English poets and write about India, which she did; The Golden Threshold and The Bird of Time made her the Nightingale of India, a label that has partly obscured the rest. She married outside her caste in 1898. From 1904 she worked for women's suffrage and for Hindu-Muslim unity, became the first Indian woman president of the Congress in 1925, and was arrested repeatedly. At Dharasana in 1930, after Gandhi was jailed, she led volunteers who walked in ranks into police lathis without raising a hand, and the reporting of it did serious damage to British authority abroad. She was governor of the United Provinces from 1947 until her death. She was one of the delegates at the Round Table Conference in London in 1931 and was jailed for twenty-one months after the Quit India resolution of 1942, in the Aga Khan Palace with Gandhi and Kasturba. She helped found the Women s Indian Association in 1917 and led the deputation to Montagu asking for the vote. Her daughter Padmaja was also jailed and later became a governor herself. She stopped publishing poetry after 1917 and said politics had taken the time. Her birthday, 13 February, is observed in India as Women s Day.

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