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The fifteenth of August 2007, sixty years after India's independence and the appointment of Sarojini Naidu as governor of Uttar Pradesh, may be as good a day to remember, recollect, and re-think the life and poetry of this remarkable woman. To truly assess this "wandering singer's" life and works, we must look at her entire life and all her writings, including innumerable letters and long speeches that can be read to construct a fascinating world of politics, poetry, and personalities. Such an endeavour would reveal the poetic voice of an extraordinary, albeit highly privileged woman and her tremendous life force that moved her to assert herself in spite of fragile health and turbulent times. This essay will look at Sarojini Naidu from a postcolonial, postmodern, and global feminist perspective and place her within a broader landscape of women's voices with their particularity, and within an Indie landscape.
Recently, when I was in Hyderabad, the city where Sarojini was bom and lived most of her life, I went around the bookstores quite sure of easily locating all her works, but I was astonished to find not a single work in any of the college bookstores. One of the more posh stores had only a small illustrated biography. But booksellers were eager to sell me books by or about many of the European poets taught at the colleges. I could not help but think of the "asymmetry of ignorance" that Dipesh Chakrabarty talks about in Provincializing Europe. He argues that:
... insofar as the academic discourse of history - that is, "history" as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university is concerned, "Europe" remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call "Indian", "Chinese", "Kenyan", and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called the history of "Europe".1
He points out how remaining ignorant of all other histories while speaking authoritatively of a universal history is a prerogative of European historians: "This is a gesture ... we cannot return. We cannot even afford an equality or asymmetry of ignorance at this level without taking the risk of appearing 'old-fashioned' or 'outdated' ...."2 Although Chakrabarty...