Sarojini Naidu: Beyond the Golden Threshold

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Frontispiece of Naidu's 1912 poetry collection, The Bird of Time.

Poet and activist, scholar and politician, Sarojini Naidu inhabited many roles. The daughter of privilege, she enjoyed an elite education... defied societal norms in marrying for love. Before women students could receive degrees, she studied at universities in both India and England, including at Girton College, Cambridge. A gifted poet, she was known as the "Nightingale of India," and wrote about topics including her own experience of chronic illness. She was involved in activism and politics, supporting women's suffrage in England, and working internationally for the cause of Indian independence from the 1920s onwards. This podcast examines both her extraordinary life and her distinctive literary voice.

Host: Lucy

Further Reading

Meena Alexander, “Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance,” Ariel 17:4 (1986): 49-61

Anupama Arora, “The Nightingale’s Wanderings: Sarojini Naidu in North America,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44:3 (2009), 87-105.

British Movietone News, reproduction of interview, 1930, via YouTube.

Nandini Chatterjee, “English Law, Brahmo Marriage, and the Problem of Religious Difference: Civil Marriage Laws in Britain and India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52:3 (2010): 524–52. 

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, “Review: Sarojini Naidu: A Fascinating Personality (K.A. Abbas),” India Quarterly 37:3 (1981): 482-83

Edward Marx, “Sarojini Naidu: The Nightingale as Nationalist,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 31:1 (1996): 45-62

National Film Library of India, footage of Sarojini Naidu, via YouTube.

Sarojini Naidu, 1928 ambassadorial message, via YouTube.

——. 1946 Constituent Assembly speech, via YouTube.

——. The Golden Threshold.

Rachel Norris and Suvi Dogra on “The Bird of Time."

B. Rambabu and P.S.R.CH.L.V. Prasad, "Life History of Sarojini Naidu, the Nightingale of India,” Language In India 11 (2011).

E.S. Reddy and Mrinalini Sarabhai, eds., The Mahatma and the Poetess: Letters Between Gandhi and Naidu. Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, (1998).

Sheshalatha Reddy, “The Cosmopolitan Nationalism of Sarojini Naidu, Nightingale of India,” Victorian Literature and Culture 38:2 (2010), 571-89.

Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography, Asia Publishing House, (1966).

Anna Snaith, “Sarojini Naidu: Feminist Nationalism and Cross-Cultural Poetics,” in: Modernist Voyages : Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890–1945, Cambridge University Press, (2014) 67-89.
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​Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)