Sarojini Naidu Published Three Books of Verse Between 1905 and 1917, Presided Over the Congress at Kanpur in 1925, and Led the Dharasana Salt Raid in 1930 After Gandhi Was Jailed

Sarojini Naidu was arrested at the Dharasana salt works on 21 May 1930 while directing a raid by about 2,500 volunteers. She was 51, she had published three books of English verse, and in 1925 she had presided over the Indian National Congress.

Her public life left three kinds of record that can be checked against each other: the introductions to her books, the proceedings of the 1931 Round Table Conference, and the debates of the Constituent Assembly. This account follows those, and gives each Dharasana casualty figure with the name of whoever stated it.

Gosse told her to throw out the English verses

Arthur Symons, in his introduction to her first book, records that Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born in Hyderabad on 13 February 1879. A scholarship from the Nizam of Hyderabad took her to England in 1895, where she studied at King’s College, London, and then at Girton College, Cambridge.

Edmund Gosse met her through his own household and told the story in his introduction to The Bird of Time (1912). When she reached London she was “a child of sixteen years.” He asked to see her poems and was disappointed, finding them “skilful in form, correct in grammar and blameless in sentiment” but “totally without individuality.” His advice was to put the lot in the waste-paper basket, to “write no more about robins and skylarks,” and to be “a genuine Indian poet of the Deccan,” the plateau of central and southern India.

The Golden Threshold followed in 1905, with an introduction by Symons and a dedication to Gosse, “who first showed me the way to the golden threshold.” Symons wrote that he had persuaded her to publish, over her doubts. “I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the desire, but not the voice,” she told him in a letter. What he valued in the poems was their “bird-like quality of song.” Among its folk songs are “Palanquin-Bearers,” “Indian Weavers” and “Coromandel Fishers.”

The Bird of Time came out in 1912 from Heinemann in London, with John Lane listed for New York. Gosse wrote that he was “not disinclined to believe” she was “the most brilliant, the most original, as well as the most correct” of the Indians who had written in English, and he heard “a graver music” than in the earlier books. The Broken Wing (1917) carries the years 1915 to 1916 on its title page. Its poem “The Gift of India,” dated August 1915, has India speaking as a mother whose sons lie in Persia, Egypt, Flanders and France. It ends: “Remember the blood of thy martyred sons!”

Later readers divide. Zaynub Zaman, writing in the Journal of Victorian Culture’s online blog in 2020, says Symons and Gosse shared a fashion for treating the East as exotic, and that criticism has often held that Naidu’s verse suffered from a vision of the East imposed by her male mentors. Zaman argues that poems such as “The Snake-Charmer” and “Dirge” do more than supply that vision, and adds that Naidu is now remembered mainly as a national figure rather than a poet. The origin of her title “Nightingale of India” is also reported two ways. In Zaman’s telling Gandhi gave it to her, whereas Ramakrishnan, in his preface to her letters with Gandhi, says a grateful people called her Bulbul-e-Hind (nightingale of Hindustan) from her early youth.

Gokhale’s appeal in 1913 and a medal sent back in 1920

Ramakrishnan dates her first appearance on a Congress platform to 1905, when the partition of Bengal set off the Swadeshi (buy-Indian) boycott. He reports that on 2 August 1913, after the veteran Congress leader Gopal Krishna Gokhale spoke at Caxton Hall in London, Gokhale told her to “consecrate your life and your talent, your song and your speech, your thought and your dream to the Motherland.”

Her own account, quoted in the same preface, puts her first meeting with Gandhi in London on the eve of the 1914 war, in a Kensington lodging where she burst into laughter at the sight of him seated on the floor with his meal. Gandhi’s first letter to her is dated 23 February 1915. A Congress tribute by Capt. Praveen Davar gives a different place and year, saying she met Gandhi and Nehru at the Lucknow session of 1916. It also says that at Lucknow she helped bring the Congress and the Muslim League to cooperate, under Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s guidance.

The Constitution of India archive says that in 1917 she headed an all-India women’s deputation and helped Annie Besant found the Women’s India Association. Davar says she went to England in July 1919 with the Home Rule League deputation and pleaded for votes for women.

By September 1920 she was writing to Gandhi from London’s Forum Club. Her letter to the Secretary of State had protested the ill-treatment of women under martial law in the Punjab, and a member of the Khilafat delegation, heading home, was carrying a letter from her to the Viceroy together with her Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal, bestowed on her “long ago” in King Edward’s time.

Kanpur in December 1925 and Gandhi’s joke about it

Belgaum in 1924 had been Gandhi’s own Congress. In a letter of 20 December 1925 he told her their next meeting would be at Cawnpore (Kanpur), “where a mere woman displaces a mere man,” and hoped her words would be “balm to the Hindu-Muslim wound.”

The Constitution of India archive calls Kanpur the Congress’s 40th session. Annie Besant, who was Irish-born, had presided in 1917, so Davar describes Naidu as the second woman president and the first of Indian origin. Davar quotes her address: “in the battle for liberty, fear is the one unforgivable treachery and despair the one unforgivable sin.”

In late 1928 she toured the United States. On 19 November she wrote to Gandhi from Cincinnati, three weeks into the trip.

Dharasana, from the first attempt on 15 May to her arrest on 21 May 1930

Gandhi drafted a letter to the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, on the eve of his arrest. It said he meant to “set out for Dharasana” with his companions and “demand possession of the Salt Works.” According to the Gandhi Heritage Portal chronology, he was arrested at 12:45 a.m. on 5 May at Karadi. Abbas Tyabji and several of the original Salt March volunteers followed on 12 May, arrested on the road to Dharasana, and on 15 May volunteers under Naidu marched on the works.

The Bombay Government’s summary, printed in Hansard on 26 May 1930, gives its own account of 15 and 16 May. Police stopped Naidu and 50 volunteers at the entrance, and they sat on the road for more than 24 hours, joined by three other bands. On 16 May she and 200 volunteers were arrested and taken back to their camp, where the summary says they were released with “Mrs. Naidu and her party giving an undertaking not to return.”

The United Press correspondent Webb Miller reached the camp on 21 May, and his accounts say she opened the raid with prayers and a speech. The beatings are described in the scene at the salt works and the tax behind the raid in the tax on salt, so they are not retold here. Miller’s wire report has her saying: “Although Gandhi’s body is in prison, his soul goes with you.” His memoir words it differently: “Gandhi’s body is in jail but his soul is with you.” Later that morning, the memoir says, a British official told her she was under arrest. She answered: “I’ll come, but don’t touch me.” The Bombay summary lists Naidu and Gandhi’s son Manilal among the leaders arrested.

Four counts of the injured

The Bombay Government’s report, quoted in Hansard, puts the volunteers at 2,600 and says: “From Congress sources it is estimated that 170 were wounded, more or less, only three or four seriously.” It adds that police “sustained few contusions and scratches” and that no weapon except the lathi, which Miller describes as a five-foot club tipped with steel, was used.

Miller’s wire report of 21 May says 260 volunteers were hurt, and that a Doctor Shah had treated about 200, “mostly for minor injuries.” It mentions no deaths. His longer dispatch datelined 22 May says that at noon he “counted more than 200 injured lying in rows on the ground.” The memoir he wrote later gives 320 injured and says two had died.

None of these documents reconciles the figures. Only the 170 is attributed to the Congress side, and the government relays it. Miller made the 260 and the 200 within a day of the raid, while the 320 and the two deaths appear only in his memoir.

The Round Table plenary of 30 November 1931

The second Round Table Conference in London lists Naidu among its British Indian representatives, and the Minorities Committee’s composition list includes her. Gandhi came as the Congress’s sole representative. With Begum Shah Nawaz, Naidu presented a memorandum from three women’s organisations, dated November 1931. It asked for adult franchise, rejected reserved seats, nomination or co-option for women, and said: “no sex discrimination either against or in favour of women.”

In the plenary session on 30 November, she said her work had not lain in the Federal Structure Committee “except as a spectator” and that she would speak only as an Indian. The Lord Chancellor had offered the Taj Mahal as a model of patient construction, and she replied that it was built with slave labour. A phrase like “Dominion Status” meant nothing to her, she said, and she added: “I do claim the liberty of India, with the fullest implications of what liberty must mean to every country in the world.” Gandhi, she reminded the table, was the Congress’s sole representative, but “I too have been a President.”

B. R. Ambedkar, who argued at the Conference for separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, drew a reply too. Hindu leaders should be pledged to remove untouchability, she said, and anyone who tried to “isolate them away behind electoral barriers” would do the community a disservice. The Poona Pact of September 1932 settled the question another way. When Gandhi announced his fast that month, she wrote asking him to reconsider. His reply of 17 September, addressed “Dear Mother, Singer and Guardian of My Soul,” said the decision had been taken after prayer.

Jail in 1942 and the dates that do not agree

Counts of her imprisonments differ. The Constitution of India archive says she was arrested five times, while Davar calls Quit India her third imprisonment. For 1942 the Gandhi Research Foundation lists her among those held at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune with Gandhi, Kasturba Gandhi and Mahadev Desai, and says she was released on 21 March 1943 because of ill health. It gives Gandhi’s own term there as 9 August 1942 to 6 May 1944 but no start date for hers, and no source opened for this article gives the day she was arrested. The movement itself is covered in Quit India, 1942.

A flag speech in July 1947 and a condolence in May 1949

On 22 July 1947 Nehru moved the resolution adopting the tricolour with the Ashoka wheel, and the Constituent Assembly’s President called Naidu to make the final speech. She began by saying she had “refused over and over again this morning to speak.” She recalled four occasions abroad when India had no flag: Paris after Versailles, a New York peace celebration where 44 nations’ flags hung and India’s did not, a women’s conference in Berlin where Indian delegates tore strips from their saris to sew a tricolour, and the Asian conference in Delhi a few months earlier, which excluded the Congress tricolour. “I as a poet and as a woman, I am speaking prose to you,” she said. Members adopted the motion standing. The wider work of that body is in the Constituent Assembly at work.

Her governorship of the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh, began on 15 August 1947, according to the Constitution of India archive, and the Congress’s AICC page calls her the first woman appointed a governor. She died in Lucknow on 2 March 1949, aged 70, and the Assembly met next on 16 May 1949. President Rajendra Prasad told members that “She had been one of the makers of the India of today,” and they stood in silence in her memory.