'You were predestined to
a splendid martyrdom'

Lucknow
29 September 1929

My beloved Jawahar:

I wonder if in the whole of India there was yesterday a producer heart than your father's or a heavier heart than yours. Mine was the peculiar position of sharing in almost equal measure both his pride and your pain. I lay awake until late into the night thinking of the significance of the words I had used so often in reference to you, that you were predestined to a splendid martyrdom. As I watched your face while you were being given the rousing ovation on your election, I felt I was envisaging both the Coronation and the Crucifixion - indeed the two are inseparable and almost synonymous in some circumstances and some situations: they are synonymous today especially for you, because you are so sensitive and so fastidious in your spiritual response and reaction and you will suffer a hundred-fold more poignantly than men and women of less fine fibre and less vivid perception and apprehension, in dealing with the ugliness of weakness, falsehood, backsliding, betrayal... all the inevitable attributes of weakness that seeks to hide its poverty by aggressive and bombastic sound... However I have an abiding faith in your incorruptible sincerity and passion for liberty and though you said to me that you felt you had neither the personal strength nor a sufficient backing to put your own ideas and ideals into effect under the turmoilsof so burdensome an office. I feel that you have been given a challenge as well as offered a tribute: and it is the challenge that will transmute and transfigure all your noblest qualities into dynamic force, courage and vision and wisdom. I have no fear in my faith.

In whatever fashion it is possible for me to help you or serve you in your tremendous and almost terrible task, you know you have but to ask...if I can give no more concrete help, I can at least give you full measure of understanding and affection...and though, as Khalil Gibran says, "The vision of one man lends not its wings to another man", yet I believe that the invincible faith of one's spirit kindles the flame of another in radiance that illumines the world...

Your loving friend and sister,

Sarojini Naidu

'Remember Liberty is the ultimate crown of all your sacrifice'

The Mahatma's Camp
Calcutta
13 November 1937

My very dear Jawahar:

I am writing from the modern version of the Tower of Babel. The Little Man is sitting unconcernedly eating spinach and boiled marrow while the world ebbs and flows about him breaking into waves of Bengali, Gujarati, English and Hindi. Bidhan and his colleagues are in despair over his stubborn indocility as regards his health. He is really ill... not only in his brittle bones and thinning blood but in the core of his soul...the most lonely and tragic figure of his time... India's man of destiny on the edge of his own doom...

To you, the other man of destiny, I am sending a birthday greeting... It will not reach you in time because of intervening eyes that must scan your correspondence. I have been watching you these two years with a most poignant sense of your suffering and loneliness, knowing that it cannot be otherwise.

What shall I wish you for the coming year? Happiness? Peace? Triumph? All these things that men hold supremely dear are but secondary things to you...almost incidental... I wish you, my dear... unflinching faith and unfaltering courage in your via cruces that all must tread who seek freedom and hold it more precious than life... not personal freedom but the deliverance of a nation from bondage. Walk steadfastly and along that steep and perilous path... if sorrow and pain and loneliness be your portion. Remember Liberty is the ultimate crown of all your sacrifice... but you will not walk alone.

Your loving,

Sarojini

A letter to Tagore