SOURCE: "Sarojini Naidu: Romanticism and Resistance," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, October, 1986, pp. 49-61.

In the following essay, Alexander examines feminism in Naidu's life and works, noting in particular the conflict between the turn-of-the-century English poetry and lifestyle she absorbed while studying in London and the tumultuous social and political atmosphere of India prior to the country's independence.

I

What follows is a brief inquiry into the complex feminism of a woman who lived at the interface of two cultures, that of the Hyderabad she was born into and the colonial culture of British India. She passed through the diction and manners of the latter into a poetry and politics forged, at least in her later years, within the very tumult of Nationalist politics. Yet there are questions to be asked of her life and letters. There seems to be a radical cleft...