Mahatma Gandhi on Sarojini Naidu

“But it is woven into her nature - to laud to the skies the person she admires. But apart from these defects, where would you find a woman like her who has given up her life and soul for India?”

“God presses not pride but humility in His service. Man knows how to destroy, it is woman`s prerogative to construct. May Sarojini be the instrument in God`s hands for constructing real unity between Hindus and Mussalmans.”

“That woman is living solely for the cause of India. She is using all her extraordinary power of speech and pen in India's service. There is, of course, in her behaviour with men, a freedom which may appear to the strictly orthodox - Malaviyaji for instance - as going beyond the limits of modesty. She revels in fun and frolic - even mischievous pranks. But to me it seems she is just the sort of person whom all that befits. I know her husband well enough. He, too, is a brave soul. He has the largeness of heart to give her the fullest freedom. They simply hug and dote upon each other. I think she never hides from the public gaze her conduct with anybody. The fact itself is a proof of the purity of her soul.”

“She intimately knows more Mussalmans than I do. She has access to their hearts, which I cannot pretend to. Add to these qualifications her sex, which is her strongest qualification in which no man can approach her. For peace-making is woman's special prerogative. Sarojini Devi has deliberately cultivated that special quality of her sex. She showed it to perfection at the time of the disgraceful rioting in Bombay in 1921. Her personal bravery and her tireless energy had become infectious. Wherever she went, the rioters laid down their arms. She has been a veritable angel of peace in East Africa and South Africa. The best welcome India can extend to her is to pray that God may give her the strength to continue her mission of peace and that she may become an indissoluble cement between the two communities. May the so-called weaker sex succeed where we, the so-called stronger sex, have failed.”

“I am no believer in foreign propaganda as it is commonly understood, i.e., in the sense of establishing an agency or even sending peripatetic deputations. But the foreign propaganda that Sarojini Devi would carry on during her tour in the West would be the propaganda that would tell more than anything that could be done by an established agency whose very existence would be unknown to the indifferent and would be ignored by those whose opinion would matter to us. Not so India's Nightingale. She is known to the West. She would compel a hearing wherever she goes. She adds to her great eloquence and greater poetry a delicate sense of the true diplomacy that knows what to say and when to say it and that knows how to say the truth without hurting. We have every reason to expect much from her mission to the West. With the instinct of a gentlewoman she has gone with the resolution not to enter upon a direct refutation of Miss Mayo's insolent libel. Her presence and her exposition of what India is and means to her would be a complete answer to all the untruth that has been dinned into the ready ears of the American public by agencies whose aim is to belittle India and all that is Indian.”