Preview

Sarojini Naidu

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1131 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Sarojini Naidu
The Indian English poetry that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely an imitation of the English Romantic poetry both in its form and matter. No attempt was made to project the essence and nuances of the rich culture and tradition of India. The Westerners inturn wished for a glmpse of Indian life and customs through the literature of the time. As Edmund Gosse says in his introduction to Sarojini Naidu’s The Bird of Time (1912) :
What we wished to receive was not a rechauffe 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. ( “Introduction” The Bird of Time )
Such a revelation of the heart of India began with the poems of Toru Dutt. Greatly influenced by the puranas and the religious culture of ancient India, she interpreted Indian life before the Western world by recapturing the legendary past of India in her verses. Following Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu wrote poems rooted in Indian folklore, myths and legends thus showing the West the soul of India.
Sarojini Naidu’s poetry can be regarded as a mirror of India. She portrays the customs, traditions, festivals, myths and legends, men and women, flaura and fauna, landscape and skyscape of India through her poems. According to A.A Ansari, the most characteristic quality of Sarojini Naidu’s poetry besides its lyrical wealth is its purely Indian character. Her poems “Summer Woods” and “Village Song” are rich in Indian situations and sentiments.
The poem “Village Song” included in The Golden Threshold has a purely Indian atmosphere with the girl hurrying off to the forest: “Where upon the champa boughs the champa buds are blowing; / To the koil- haunted river-isles where lotus lilies glisten,” (“Village Song” The



Bibliography: Bhatnagar, Manmohan k, ed. Indian Writings in English. Vol.1. New Delhi: Atlantic , 1998. Naidu, Sarojini. The Bird of Time. 4 february 2012 < http: // www. archive. org /.../ birdoftime3073imbp/ > ---. The Broken Wing:Songs of Love,Death and Destiny,1915-1916. 4 february 2012<http://www.archive.org/stream/.../brokenwingsorgs00naidrich_djvu. txt > ---. The Golden Threshold. 4 february 2012 < http: // www. fullbooks.com/ The-Golden-Threshold. html > Naik, M K. Indian English Poetry: from the beginnings upto 2000. Delhi: Pencraft International, 2009.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Better Essays

    3 Nakate, Shashank. "Romantic Poetry Characteristics." Buzzle. N.p., 17 Sept. 2011. Web. 16 May 2013. .…

    • 1612 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Stations of the Cross

    • 742 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Contents: Syllabus for Courses: A.ENG.3.01 – The Elements of Poetry A.ENG.3.02 – Indian Writing in English 1850-1980 A.ENG.3.MS -- Media Studies (Applied Component)…

    • 742 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Revision Essay

    • 1525 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Wordsworth, W.(2002). The Complain of a forsaken Indian woman. In Richey, W., & Robinson, D. (Eds). Lyrical ballads and related writings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.…

    • 1525 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Satya

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Sarojini Naidu | | Born | Sarojini Chattopadhyaya(সরোজিনী চট্টোপাধ্যায়) 13 February 1879Hyderabad, Hyderabad State, India | Died | 2 March 1949 (aged 70) Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India | Occupation | Poet, writer, social activist | | | Alma mater | King's College London Girton College, Cambridge | Spouse(s) | Dr. Muthyala Govindarajulu | Children | Jayasurya, Padmaja, Randheer, Nilawar and Leelamani | Veerapandiya Kattabomma | portrait of Kattabomman |…

    • 313 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This paper focuses on the linguistic perspective and existential anxiety in Arun Kolatkar’s poems. Arun Kolatkar is not a familiar name for many of us, in fact until he was included in the undergraduate syllabus of English Honours by West Bengal State University two years ago he was not known to us. Arun Balkrishna Kolatkar (1932 –2004) was a poet from Maharashtra, wrote in both Marathi and English. Radically experimental in nature, his poems are oblique, whimsical, mysterious, baffling and at the same time dark, sinister, and sarcastic and funny. His poetry represents the quintessence of modernism and left profound influence modern Marathi poets. Despite his inspiring and profound creativity it is ironical that his greatness has not been adequately acknowledged or recognized even after 7 years of his death. I would like to begin by quoting from one of Kolatkar’s Marathi poems.…

    • 2114 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In his essay “Tagore’s Poetic Greatness”, William Radice states, “Tagore always attached great value to craftsmanship.” We can see this in the careful construction of his poems where he skillfully blends metre (six foot/four foot alternating pattern with six stress and four stresses respectively as seen in Maran-Milan when reading in Bengali), rhyme and verse structure with such control that, to us as readers, the experience of the poem’s respective theme is deeply experienced.…

    • 1129 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    Cited: * Breiner, Laurence. An Introduction to West Indian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.…

    • 2808 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    sarojini naidu

    • 6045 Words
    • 24 Pages

    Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949), the 'Nightingale of India,' is remem­bered as a leading woman nationalist leader of India's political struggle for independence. Born in 1879 as Sarojini Chattopadhyay and one of the brightest students in school, she blossomed into a writer of passionate verses on a variety of themes. Her works on poetry are The Golden Threshold, published in 1905; The Feather of the Dawn; The Bird of Time, published in 1912, and The Broken Wing, published in 1917.…

    • 6045 Words
    • 24 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Profile of Nissum Ezekiel

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The expression Indian poetry in English has a strange colonial hangover. When it comes to Indian poetry in English it has a long past perhaps longer than fiction written in English today. Indian poetry in English took roots much before independence say around the twenties and thirties with writers like Henry Vivian Derozio, Sarojini Naidu, etc. They wrote under a neo romantic strain and were sharply influenced by English Victorian and Romantic poetry. Moreover, they were swept by a feeling of idealism with the Nationalist Movement just around the corner. This briefly was the context in which they wrote and shaped their thought processes. Their poetry was a poetry of apotheosis in which the country was deified and everything around them look beautiful. There were no concerns with social or political realities.…

    • 320 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Sarojini Naidu

    • 304 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Sarojini Naidu, also known by the sobriquet The Nightingale of India, was a child prodigy, Indian independence activist and poet. Naidu was one of the framers of the Indian Constitution. Naidu was the first Indian woman to become the President of the Indian National Congress and the first woman to become the Governor of Uttar Pradesh state. Her birthday is celebrated as Women's Day all over India.…

    • 304 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    M.A.English Literature

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages

    INDIAN LITERATURE IN ENGLISH (1820S ONWARDS) LINGUISTICS AND STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF TEXTS LITERATURE OF ENGLISH RENAISSANCE AND RESTORATION NINTEEN AND TWENTIETH AMERICAN CENTURY LITERATURE…

    • 642 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The usage of humor makes the poem entertaining.and many references of the Indian society and even the mention of the Indian newspaper times of india. The poet lacks in speaking good English and…

    • 359 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Adiga is a complex poet, and his narrators suffer from existential crisis, having the potential to create splinters but cannot explode. While K.S.Na's protagonist is an optimistic common man whose acceptance of life's absurdities cosmically connects him to his surroundings.K.S.Na’spoem Ramanavami taken from KaimaradaNelalalli(Under the Shade of the Hand Post) written two years before his death in 2001, typically speaks about the poet’s innate optimism, by beginning with,I am not the one who brings a fingerbefore the eyes,intendingto look at the world fromthere. /If seen thus, the sight is incomplete. (Song of Life: 60)The poet asks us to look at the trickling rivulet, the standing hill, the stubbornboulder,the flying bird and the hearth. He further brings us closer to reality by diverting our attention towards children who are returning home from school and their laughter which continues even as they sit to eat, making the author feel that some fortunelost long ago, has been regained. And then the day is remembered as Rama's birthday, the rituals of a jasmine garland on Rama's portrait, sweetmeats,salad, melon-juice, fan, children in gold-laced dhoti bustlingaround and singing hymns, thefestival springing as an oasis amidst the desert of life. While the elders bless that 'Let lifebe a festivallike this every day,' their…

    • 1793 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    A passage to india

    • 5648 Words
    • 23 Pages

    The discussion on A Passage to India as a political fiction has for long been dominated by the followers of a mimetic theory of literature, whose quest for empiricism tied to didacticism is achieved when they find the narrative content to be an authentic portrayal of India and a humanist critique of British-Indian relations during the last decades of the Empire. Since the accession of critical methods concerned with representation as an ideological construct, and not a truthful, morally inspired account of reality, however, the politics of the novel have demanded another mode of analysis, where the articulations of the fiction are related to the system of textual practices by which the metropolitan culture exercised its domination over the subordinate periphery; within this theoretical context, A Passage to India can be seen as at once inheriting and interrogating the discourses of the Raj. In common with other writings in the genre, this novel enunciates a strange meeting from a position of political privilege, and it is not difficult to find rhetorical instances where the other is designated within a set of essential and fixed characteristics: `Like most Orientals, Aziz overrated hospitality, mistaking it for intimacy'; `Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour'; and so on. It is equally possible to demonstrate that while the idiom of Anglo-India is cruelly parodied, the overt criticism of colonialism is phrased in the feeblest of terms: `One touch of regretnot the canny substitute but the true regret from the heartwould have made him a different man, and the British Empire a different institution.'…

    • 5648 Words
    • 23 Pages
    Good Essays