Symbolism, Empire, and the Dance: On Sarojini Naidu’s ‘Eastern Dancers’ and Arthur Symons’s ‘Javanese Dancers’

Abstract

Born and raised in Hyderabad, Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) is largely known for her role in the Indian independence movement and her tenure as the President of the Indian National Congress in 1925. Yet, in her lifetime, she also developed a rich literary career and published multiple Anglophone poetry collections. She began writing in her childhood, composing ‘1300-line poems when she had barely entered her teens’. It was when her father arranged for her to study abroad at Cambridge and London in 1896, however, that Naidu encountered Arthur Symons and the British decadent community for the first time through Edmund Gosse, one of her teachers at Cambridge.