Saquib Salim

“One morning, a little despondent and sick at heart about national affairs in general, (Gopal Krishna) Gokhale suddenly asked me, “What is your outlook for India?

 ‘One of hope’, I replied.

 ‘What is your vision of the immediate future?’

‘Hindu-Muslim unity in less than five years,’ I told him with joyous conviction.

‘Child’, he said, with a note of yearning sadness in his voice, ‘You are a poet, but you hope too much. It will not come in your lifetime or mine. But keep your faith and wish if you can.”

This is an excerpt of the conversation between Sarojini Naidu and Gopal Krishna Gokhale as she told the Bombay Chronicle in 1915. Like Gokhale's other famous disciple, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sarojini remained committed to the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity until the very end.

Padmini Sengupta, her biographer, noted, “Hindu-Moslem unity was a part of her very life and Sarojini was deeply troubled at the many evidences of disunity which occurred periodically in India.”

During the agitations against the Partition of Bengal in 1905, Sarojini started addressing public meetings to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims. Over the next few years, she wrote, spoke, and worked to achieve this goal. She was one of those few prominent Hindu leaders who attended or addressed the sessions of Muslim organizations, including the All India Muslim League.

In 1911, at Lucknow, Sarojini attended the Annual Session of the Muslim League where a major change in the constitution of the League was brought into force. She later wrote, “It was my unique privilege to attend and address the new historic sessions of the Muslim League which met in Lucknow on the 22nd March to adopt a new Constitution which sounded the keynote of loyal cooperation with the sister community in all matters of national welfare and progress. The unanimous acclamation with which it was carried by both the older and younger schools of Mussalman politicians marked a new era and inaugurated a new standard in the history of modern Indian affairs.”

Before leaving for England in 1913, Sarojini wrote to G. A. Natesan, the editor and proprietor of The Indian Review, “I feel we have come to a very critical time in our history and that a great responsibility lies with those who are in the position of our leaders. You have realised that the Mussalmans have definitely held out their hand to the Hindus. Be gracious, be wise, be brave, and make the Hindus hold out their hand to the Mussalmans at the next Congress.

"Do not analyse motives too closely, but take the proffered hand and hold it fast, and so represent truly the Indian world as far as your influence reaches — and, I believe, it reaches far, I am going away a very sick person — as I believe my illness is serious, and I may be away in Europe for a year — but this is the request I am making to all my friends who lead public opinion.”

This was not a one-sided love affair. Muslim leaders also adored her. At the 1916 session of the Muslim League, Sarojini was asked by the President of the League to address the delegates.

She spoke, “I do not know what claim I have to stand before you today except that I have been for many years a faithful comrade of the young generation of the Mussalmans and champion of the Women of the Muslim community and fought with their men-folk for the privilege that Islam gave long ago but which you denied to your women-folk.”

Sarojini said, “The Post-War Reforms would not have been possible but for the fact that we millions in India speak with one voice because we are one, undivided and indivisible whole. I am not a politician. I spoke to you as a lover of my country and I charge you, Mussulmans of India, to remember the high responsibilities of your desires. No one can give to you what you do not have the capacity to take.”

In one of her speeches at Patna, Sarojini, told the University Students, “After all what is this antagonism between creed and creed? Antagonism is merely the asset of the ignorant. They are not the weapons of the wise, who realise that after all, it is only the misunderstanding of the essential truth wherein lies the difficulty in launching across that golden bridge of sympathy that brings together the two great communities whose fundamental teaching is the love of God and the service of men. And then in this great country, the Moslems came to make their home not to carry spoils and to go back to their own home but to build permanently here their home and create a new generation for the enrichment of the Motherland.

"How can they live separate from the people of the soil? Does history say that in the past they have so lived separately? Or rather it says that once having chosen to take up their abode in this land they became the children of the soil, the very flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. Gentlemen, history has said that the foreign emperors sought not to divide and rule, but to unite the people and so build an imperishable guarantee of their power and administration.”

Sarojini believed that India needed mutual cooperation between Hindus and Muslims. In her view both the religious faiths complemented each other. In her view, democracy was the way ahead for the country.

She said, “Now it is this principle of Democracy that implies certain mental qualities that are inseparable from Democracy. It implies a certain inviolable sense of justice that gives every man his equal chance in the evolution of national life and these we want imported into our national life, assimilated into our national, life which the Hindu community cannot with its system of exclusion that have been the misinterpreted characteristic of a system that made it merely a true division of responsibility. I say the Hindu community by itself cannot evolve because, Hindu as I am, I stand here to confess the limitations of my community. We have not mastered that fundamental equality that is the privilege of Islam.”

In the India of her dreams, Muslims and Hindus played distinct roles to help India reach greatness. She compared the Indian example with that of Italy saying, “It used to be said concerning Italian Liberty, that Mazzini by himself was merely a dreamer and that Garibaldi was by himself merely a soldier and either of them separately could not have built what is the great Liberated Italy of today. But it was the genius of Mazzini the dreamer, Mazzini that became the deed of Garibaldi that made Italy free. And so in the evolution of our national history, the Hindus are the Mazzini and the Mussalmans the Garibaldi. A combination of the visionary, the dreamer with the statesman, the soldier, the mystic genius with the virility of manhood — that is what we want today in this great India of ours.”

Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb (the civilization of Ganges and Yamuna) as the Hindu Muslim syncretic culture has evolved over the centuries and used to be one of her important examples to teach people about secularism. In the words of Sarojini, “when this great river (Ganges) arrives where it meets another river, in sacred Prayag, there is the Union with mystic music, soul to soul and heart to heart, of the two great rivers, the Ganga and the Jumna — a Sangum (confluence) of two rivers each without losing its own characteristics and qualities. And yet it is a perfect union. And that should be the symbol of the Hindu and Muslim Unity, each keeping its own culture, its own individual characteristics, its own purity, its own special colour of its own waters, the music of its own deed even at that point of Union.That is the meaning of the Sangum of the national life. That is, gentlemen, the true meaning of the Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

Sarojini did not attend the First Round Table Conference in 1930 because the British Government would not include Mukhtar Ahmad Ansari, a Muslim leader, in the delegation. The reason given was, ““Besides being a Congressman, he represented a great Party in India; the Nationalist Mussalman Party. The Mussalmans were not all reactionary. There was a distinct group which was nationalist in mind and plumbed for Purna Swaraj — Mukammil Azzadi. But it is an open secret that Lord Irwin had made a distinct Promise at the instance of Gandhi to nominate three individuals, namely Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, and Doctor Ansari. While the former two were appointed, Doctor Ansari was cut out. It suited Britain’s interests to make it appear at the R.T.C. that Mussalman India was against Swaraj.”

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Her mission was the unity of Indians. In 1947, at Varanasi, she asked a gathering of writers, “Have we been true to our mission in India? Trying to become leaders, have we not been too busy discussing academics or trying to find out why people are so busy hating one another? Had we been true to our mission, would the difference between Hindu and Muslim be so acute?”