Oscar Wilde swathed her in orchidaceous epigrams. The learned Sir Edmund Gosse called her "the most accomplished living poet of India." Even Queen Victoria was impressed by Sarojini Chattopadhyav, the brilliant daughter of a fabulously rich Hindu of the highest Brahmin caste — but all that was years & years ago.
Last week Poetess Mrs. Sarojini Chattopadhyav Naidu became Acting President of the Indian National Congress, the sixth Acting President appointed since St. Gandhi was clapped into jail in January (TIME, Jan. 11). Poetess Naidu is still rich, still a potent poetess, but the slender, bashful Victorian maiden has become a matron with grown children who now devotes her large person and her vast wealth to the cause of Indian Independence. Fully expecting that His Majesty's Government would soon jail her, Mrs. Naidu keynoted while she could last week these facts:
¶ St. Gandhi and 26 of the most prominent Gandhites have been jailed without trial or opportunity to defend themselves.
¶ Forty-two other Gandhite leaders are exiles from India.
¶ Among the 27,000 political prisoners in jail last week was Tycoon Purushotanbas Thakureas, reputed Bombay's richest cotton broker, and Mr. J. M. Sen Gupta who was Mayor of the great city of Calcutta when taken into custody.
As President of the Congress which is "fighting passively" for freedom. Poetess Naidu had, of course, no active policy last week. An active poet is Chinese General Tsai, whose 19th Route Army astounded the world by its resistance to Japan. But Mrs. Naidu is a passive poet.
"What do we think of England?" she said in answer to a correspondent's question. "What would any country think of another which held it in subjugation? It is vain to expect justice from a race so blind and drunk with the arrogance of power,* the bitter prejudice of race and creed and color, drunk moreover with abysmal ignorance."
If an Englishman or Englishwoman wants to have a pleasant chat with Poetess Naidu, he or she should coax her to reminisce about her old father and the Court where she was brought up, the Court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, famed "Richest Man in the World."
"I don't suppose," Poetess Naidu will say fondly of her father, "that in the whole of India there were more than a few men of greater learning or more greatly beloved. He had a great white beard and the profile of Homer and a laugh that brought the roof down. He wasted all his money on two objects: to help others and alchemy. He held huge courts every day in his garden and entertained all the learned men of all religions, rajas and beggars, saints and downright villains, all delightfully mixed up and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh. dear, night and day the experiments went on and every man who brought a new prescription was welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know, only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for beauty, the eternal beauty. The makers of gold and the makers of verse, they are the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery, and what in my father was the genius of curiosity—the very essence of all scientific genius—in me is the desire for beauty."