Sarojini Naidu Queen’s rival
There is a strong impact
of Islam and Persian poetry on Sarojini Naidu’s poetry. The richness of her
poetry is Romantic and Persian and
Islamic culture appealed to her.
The Queen’s Rival has a
wispy plot drawn from Persian legend, told in the narrative vein of the folk-ballad. It deals with a
single situation,revealed dramatically,
with the utmost simplicity and economy of expression. Yet, in its wistful sense
of aspiration, melancholy and pathos, in the midst of super abundant opulence,
splendour and glory, the poem is alyric with balladlike overtones. Readers are
plunged into the action. The conclusion avoids a supernatural intervention, but
propels the natural towards a magical return to origins, which outclasses life
from the ordinary with joy and fulfilment.
Queen
Gulnaar is tired of her beauty, the empty splendour and shadowless
bliss of her sheltered royalty. Her peerless beauty has made her a lonely,
tantalized figure. She must have a rival, discover an objective correlative in
experience other than her own body, measuring against which she can achieve
self-definition and estimate her own real worth. She is like Nilambuja of the
poet’s prose fantasy, standing in the desert of her own lonely temperament,
seeking a foothold in the eternal
beauty of the universe,
but unable to overcome the pattern of interrupted acts her life had assumed.
“But still she gazed in
her mirror and sighed
“O king, my heart is
unsatisfied”.
The Queen is tired of
her beauty, tired of the empty splendour around her, tired of the shadow less
bliss. There is nobody to envy her, to contradict her, to press her own
claims against her. She wants someone to feel jealous of her charms, of her
magnificence, of the unbounded love, which King Feroz bestows upon her.
What she wants is a rival to compete with her, clash with her, because
competition and complicit add to the zest and saves the life. Therefore, the
queen, Gulnaar sighs like a murmuring rose, and asks the King to give her a rival.
But King Feroz, in his
passionate infatuation for his Queen, does not understand what the Queen, out
of her oriental modesty, is hinting at.He sends for his chief advisor and
orders him to search for seven beautiful brides for him.
King Feroz acquires
seven handmaids for his Queen. Gazing in the aphrodisiac mirror, she still
finds in it only her narcissistic image, evanescent, partial and
incomplete and aliented.
The Queen is sternly
unsatisfied. The real
cannot match the ideal. It has no continuity. It stands on its own pedestal of
accumulations and lacks succession, relation and meaning.
“I tire of my beauty, I tire of this Empty
splendour and shadowless bliss
Prior to the concluding
part of the poem, the poetess highlights a delicate psychological point that
any power, prosperity or beauty if vested in one person becomes the cause of
dissatisfaction at long. Rivalry in any field or aspect of life is the most essential
factor for mental happiness and satisfaction. Monopoly, at long last, becomes
like boredom. Human mind always longs for competition. It is the human nature
that wishes that the efficiency, richness, strength, capability or beauty
should be challenged by somebody. One should have opportunity of being tested
one’s own worthiness of merits. Here, the Queen Gulnaar is unhappy in absence
of any rival in case of her beauty. She was not satisfied with the rivalry of
seven queens. When the poem seems advancing to its end, a turning point arises
all of a sudden. Gulnaar is then lucky enough to have a powerful competitor.
Her competitor is nobody else but her two years old daughter herself.
One day, Queen Gulnaar’s
two year old daughter was adorned with precious dress. The child, like a fairy
in a forest, rushed to the Queen and snatched the mirror away from her hand..
Then the child quickly wore her mother’s hair-band. Suddenly, with a child-like
move, she planted happily a kiss on the mirror. Queen Gulnaar laughed like a
quivering rose, saying, “O King Feroz, look, here is my rival”.
Summing up, Gulnaar
realized that her daughter was the real rival of hers. Then the poem
dramatically ends with the reality of life that the parents are always happy
when they see their young ones playing and doing various innocent actions and
tricks around them. The poetess has successfully presented the psychological
point of mothering and motherhood through these sonnet-like three parts of the
poem.
It’s
no secret that the bond between a mother and daughter can be stronger than
either might like; and this relationship is where a daughter first feels safe
enough to really test her skills at self-assertion. Children come into this
world fully dependent on others to meet their basic needs; however, the drive
for independence asserts itself early and most of us spend the rest of our
lives learning to balance our innate drives for dependence and independence.
These two polarizing needs may give rise to a new mother-daughter battle across
the life span at virtually each new life stage.
‘The Queen’s Rival’,as
Sarojini Naidu confessed to Amarnath Jha, was the only poem which did not
‘come’ to her The conclusion
was added as a delayed response to a friend’s narration of the Persian poetry. It
is tender composition, full of insight into the
feminine psychology of growth and differentiation. The folk-conclusion of the
poem presents a typical resolution of adult conflict. It offers the
play-instinct as a palliative to individual aggression and the consequent
feeling of isolation and anxiety. The individual, who, by chance or choice,
loses his sense of connection with life, is restored to reality.
The ballad structure,
with the iterative situations, repeated words, images and symbols, the incremental
refrains, the free flow of the verse and above all, the unsophisticated
narrative and the folk-flavour of the story-line, lends a natural grace to the
lyrical vision of adolescent experience and childhood innocence. The mother’s
understandable
shock of recognition of her own daughter’s budding
individuality has the quality of folk-drama, usually associated with the
puberty-rites observed in the Indian villages.
These rites celebrate
growth and change. Shock and crisis are
overcome by nurturing a sense of social connection and continuity in the
emerging personality of the individual.
Along with her daughter,
the mother too grows up, stepping gracefully out of the cocoon of her own
self-created world into the flux and process of life
The roles assigned to
the woman in folk-culture are strategic compensations. Through these she
fulfils her ego-ideal and her symbolic status, as the embodiment of
disinterested love. In the poem, the action moves progressively from
narcissistic desire towards hieratic power, from self to breed.
This poem is of romantic
superfluity, colourful fancy and pleasing conceit. It has the dazzle of a
multicoloured jewel, the tremulous pattern of a seven-petalled rose and the
colour symphony of a painted natural scene. Queen Gulnaar’s state of mind
touches on the abnormal. It passes from the consciousness of the possession
of beauty to the conceit
about the possession of beauty. The conceit destroys her happiness and all the
resources of a kingdom do not restore it to her. The poem suggests the deeper
meaning that ultimately satisfaction for a frustrated soul comes from within
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