|
THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD
THE GOLDEN THRESHOLD SAROJINI NAIDU DEDICATED TO EDMUND GOSSE WHO FIRST SHOWED ME THE WAY TO THE
GOLDEN THRESHOLD
London 1896 Hyderabad 1905
CONTENTS
FOLK SONGS
Palanquin-Bearers
Wandering Singers
Indian Weavers
Coromandel Fishers
The Snake-Charmer
Corn-Grinders
Village-Song
In Praise of Henna
Harvest Hymn
Indian Love-Song
Cradle-Song
Suttee
SONGS FOR MUSIC
Song of a Dream
Humayun to Zobeida
Autumn Song Alabaster
Ecstasy
To my Fairy Fancies
POEMS
Ode to H. H. the Nizam of Hyderabad
In the Forest
Past and Future Life
The Poet's Love-Song
To the God of Pain
The Song of Princess Zeb-un-nissa
Indian Dancers
My Dead Dream
Damayante to Nala in the Hour of Exile
The Queen's Rival
The Poet to Death
The Indian Gipsy
To my Children
The Pardah Nashin
To Youth
Nightfall in the City of Hyderabad
Street Cries
To India
The Royal Tombs of Golconda
To a Buddha seated on a Lotus
INTRODUCTION
It is at my persuasion that these poems are now published. The
earliest of them were read to me in London in 1896 when the
writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India
in 1904 when she was twenty-five; and they belong I think
almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have
an individual beauty of their own I thought they ought to be
published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very
proud and very sad" she wrote. "Is it possible that I have
written verses that are 'filled with beauty' and is it possible
that you really think them worthy of being given to the world?
You know how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual
little poems seem to be less than beautiful--I mean with that
final enduring beauty that I desire." And in another letter
she writes: "I am not a poet really. I have the vision and the
desire but not the voice. If I could write just one poem full
of beauty and the spirit of greatness I should be exultantly
silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do and my songs
are as ephemeral." It is for this bird-like quality of song it
seems to me that they are to be valued. They hint in a sort of
delicately evasive way at a rare temperament the temperament of
a woman of the East finding expression through a Western
language and under partly Western influences. They do not
express the whole of that temperament; but they express I think
its essence; and there is an Eastern magic in them.
Sarojini Chattopadhyay was born at Hyderabad on February 13
1879. Her father Dr. Aghorenath Chattopadhyay is descended
from the ancient family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram who were
noted throughout Eastern Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning
and for their practice of Yoga. He took his degree of Doctor of
Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1877 and afterwards
studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to India he founded
the Nizam College at Hyderabad and has since laboured
incessantly and at great personal sacrifice in the cause of
education.
Sarojini was the eldest of a large family all of whom were
taught English at an early age. "I" she writes "was stubborn
and refused to speak it. So one day when I was nine years old my
father punished me--the only time I was ever punished--by
shutting me in a room alone for a whole day. I came out of it a
full-blown linguist. I have never spoken any other language to
him or to my mother who always speaks to me in Hindustani. I
don't think I had any special hankering to write poetry as a
little child though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy nature.
My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
character. He was determined that I should be a great
mathematician or a scientist but the poetic instinct which I
inherited from him and also from my mother (who wrote some lovely
Bengali lyrics in her youth) proved stronger. One day when I
was eleven I was sighing over a sum in algebra: it WOULDN'T come
right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it
down.
"From that day my 'poetic career' began. At thirteen I wrote a
long poem a la 'Lady of the Lake'--1300 lines in six days. At
thirteen I wrote a drama of 2000 lines a full-fledged passionate
thing that I began on the spur of the moment without forethought
just to spite my doctor who said I was very ill and must not
touch a book. My health broke down permanently about this time
and my regular studies being stopped I read voraciously. I
suppose the greater part of my reading was done between fourteen
and sixteen. I wrote a novel I wrote fat volumes of journals; I
took myself very seriously in those days."
Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
Govindurajulu Naidu now her husband is though of an old and
honourable family not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused
an equal opposition not only on the side of her family but of
his; and in 1895 she was sent to England against her will with
a special scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England
with an interval of travel in Italy till 1898 studying first at
King's College London then till her health again broke down
at Girton. She returned to Hyderabad in September 1898 and in
the December of that year to the scandal of all India broke
through the bonds of caste and married Dr. Naidu. "Do you know
I have some very beautiful poems floating in the air" she wrote
to me in 1904; "and if the gods are kind I shall cast my soul
like a net and capture them this year. If the gods are
kind--and grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need
to make my life perfect for the very 'Spirit of Delight' that
Shelley wrote of dwells in my little home; it is full of the
music of birds in the garden and children in the long arched
verandah." There are songs about the children in this book; they
are called the Lord of Battles the Sun of Victory the
Lotus-born and the Jewel of Delight.
"My ancestors for thousands of years" I find written in one of
her letters "have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves
great dreamers great scholars great ascetics. My father is a
dreamer himself a great dreamer a great man whose life has been
a magnificent failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are
few men whose learning is greater than his and I don't think
there are many men more beloved. He has a great white beard and
the profile of Homer and a laugh that brings the roof down. He
has wasted all his money on two great objects: to help others
and on alchemy. He holds huge courts every day in his garden of
all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs and beggars and
saints and downright villains all delightfully mixed up and all
treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear night and day
the experiments are going on and every man who brings a new
prescription is 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 is the genius of
curiosity--the very essence of all scientific genius--in me is
the desire for beauty. Do you remember Pater's phrase about
Leonardo da Vinci 'curiosity and the desire of beauty'?"
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her "nerves of
delight" were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To
those who knew her in England all the life of the tiny figure
seemed to concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards
beauty as the sunflower turns towards the sun opening wider and
wider until one saw nothing but the eyes.
She was dressed always in clinging dresses of Eastern silk and
as she was so small and her long black hair hung straight down
her back you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little and in a low voice like gentle music; and she seemed
wherever she was to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East.
And first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known
any one who seemed to exist on such "large draughts of
intellectual day" as this child of seventeen to whom one could
tell all one's personal troubles and agitations as to a wise old
woman. In the East maturity comes early; and this child had
already lived through all a woman's life. But there was
something else something hardly personal something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian which I
realised wondered at and admired in her passionate
tranquillity of mind before which everything mean and trivial
and temporary caught fire and burnt away in smoke. Her body was
never without suffering or her heart without conflict; but
neither the body's weakness nor the heart's violence could
disturb that fixed contemplation as of Buddha on his
lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom as of age or of the age of a race
there was what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation.
Pain or pleasure transported her and the whole of pain or
pleasure might be held in a flower's cup or the imagined frown of
a friend. It was never found in those things which to others
seemed things of importance. At the age of twelve she passed the
Matriculation of the Madras University and awoke to find herself
famous throughout India. "Honestly" she said to me "I was not
pleased; such things did not appeal to me." But here in a
letter from Hyderabad bidding one "share a March morning" with
her there is at the mere contact of the sun this outburst:
"Come and share my exquisite March morning with me: this
sumptuous blaze of gold and sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies
that adorn the sunshine; the voluptuous scents of neem and
champak and serisha that beat upon the languid air with their
implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold and blue and
silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of life in
nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate ardent and
unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and
love. And do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by
petal from my heart's blood these little quivering birds are my
soul made incarnate music these heavy perfumes are my emotions
dissolved into aerial essence this flaming blue and gold sky is
the 'very me' that part of me that incessantly and in- solently
yes and a little deliberately triumphs over that other part--a
thing of nerves and tissues that suffers and cries out and that
must die to-morrow perhaps or twenty years hence."
Then there was her humour which was part of her strange wisdom
and was always awake and on the watch. In all her letters
written in exquisite English prose but with an ardent imagery
and a vehement sincerity of emotion which make them like the
...
|
