The Power of Pen

 The pen, they say, is mightier than the sword. In other words, poetry is more effective than militancy of any sort. Countless examples can be provided to establish the validity of this truism.

Sarojini Nidu's poetry might not be that powerful. Yet it is undeniable that in the pre-Independence era, her poems gave a face and a name to the emerging indianness in the Western imaginary.

All of us know how her brilliant poems initially had a clear British Romantic feel to them. She was highly accomplished indeed, and a polymath, she could easily write poems in the Wordsworthian-Keatsian mode. It was W.B.Yeats who made her aware of her Indian roots, and the need to write in the 'native' (to her) mode. Thereafter her poems always had that Indian feel.

Teaching her poems in the graduate and the post-graduate classes has always been an interesting experience. My Commerce Students loved my explanation of her "The Bangle Sellers". Her use of colours, sounds, symbols was highly exciting for them.

After explaining all such unique beauties in "The Palanquin Bearers", i asked my 'Psycho' and 'Eco' Major students if they could sense the pain and the hard work of the lowly palanquin bearers despite its beautification. Boy, had I opened a Pandora's box! A proper can of worms indeed it was!  The online mode could not contain my students' bounding enthusiasm in thus exploring the poem. So many critiques opened up. Finally, I used the occasion to explain to them how literature can mean in multiple ways.

As for her "Radha, the Milkmaid", my English Honours students loved the way the Indianness can be explored in an English poem. Thus the IWE (Indian Writing in English) became for them an exploration of the Bhakti tradition in the Indian ethos.

As for her much anthologised "The Lotus", symbolism transcending mere realistic description was the theme I analysed. A few students who had initially found the poem a little too simplistic, even childish, finally agreed that the poem could mean gorgeously if we think of the Lotus as a new mode of being, of leading which is  different from the typical, traditional ways, signified by the Rose or the Lily in the poem.

In other words, her consciously 'literary' poems from the pre-Independence era became a stepping stone to literary initiation for my IWE students. In fact, they started liking "the nightingale of the IWE" so much that initially they found the 'bare-all-dare-all' boldness of  Kamala Das' feminist poetry a bit too much to stomach. In fact, I remember a student asking me in irritation the very purpose of such poetry. May be, I had made them infatuated with Sarojini Naidu's mellifluous lyricism!

Her home (now the Central Univ city office), her bold choice of a marriage, all such details are quite mythical in Hyderabad. Hence I introduced my students to her naughty wit and sharp tongue which could mock even Gandhiji. She thus became for them a symbol of a woman's role in the public space. 

In other words, Sarojini Naidu's poetry proved to my students the might of words, the power of poetry, as colourful, as delicate and as symbolic as the bangles Sarojini Naidu immortalised.

Pratima@ Poetry is, in brief, philosophy, psychology, sociology, the arts and criticism rolled in to one singular text of just a few lines, but with infinite meanings.