An Indian Nationalist Condemns the British Government

Despite British concerns, the First World War provoked strong support for Britain among the Indian population. Indians rallied around the British war effort, offering soldiers, food, and other essential resources. After the war, however, Indian nationalism grew rapidly, due in large part to disillusionment with Britain’s continuing imperialist policies toward its colonies. In 1919, British troops were ordered to use live ammunition to disperse a peaceful crowd of men, women, and children celebrating a Sikh festival in the city of Amritsar. Hundreds were killed and more than a thousand wounded. Indian feminist and nationalist leader Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) used this incident and other examples of British hypocrisy to justify Indian independence and self-rule.

I speak to you today as standing arraigned because of the blood-guiltiness of those who have committed murder in my country. I need not go into the details. But I am going to speak to you as a woman about the wrongs committed against my sisters. Englishmen, you who pride yourselves upon your chivalry, you who hold more precious than your imperial treasures the honor and chastity of your women, will you sit still and leave unavenged the dishonor, and the insult and agony inflicted upon the veiled women of the Punjab?

The minions of Lord Chelmsford, the Viceroy, and his martial authorities rent the veil from the faces of the women of the Punjab. Not only were men mown down as if they were grass that is born to wither; but they tore asunder the cherished Purdah,8 that innermost privacy of the chaste womanhood of India. My sisters were stripped naked, they were flogged, they were outraged. These policies left your British democracy betrayed, dishonored, for no dishonor clings to the martyrs who suffered, but to the tyrants who inflicted the tyranny and pain. Should they hold their Empire by dishonoring the women of another nation or lose it out of chivalry for their honor and chastity? The Bible asked, “What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” You deserve no Empire. You have lost your soul; you have the stain of blood-guiltiness upon you; no nation that rules by tyranny is free; it is the slave of its own despotism.

Sarojini Naidu, “The Agony and Shame of the Punjab” [speech], in Padmini Sengupta, Sarojini Naidu: A Biography (London: Asia Publishing House, 1966), 161–162.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS