SOURCE: "Sarojini Naidu," in The Golden Breath: Studies in Five Poets of the New India, John Murray, 1933, pp. 102-21.

In the following essay, Anand surveys Naidu's life and works.

Sarojini Naidu is affectionately called by her countrymen "the nightingale of India." A higher compliment than this, implied in the poetess's comparison with the celebrated bird that pervades the whole of Hindustani poetry, could not have been paid, and an apter nickname could hardly be imagined. For Sarojini sings of life as the bulbul of the rose, glorying in all its loveliness, longing to realise its many-coloured forms, and weaving melancholy strains about it when the cold, bare, stark brutality of death has robbed it of its warming glow. And although she has adopted a Western language and a Western technique to express herself, she seems to me to be in the main Hindustani tradition of Ghalib, Zok, Mir...