The Broken Wing

How great artists and thinkers responded to the First World War in individual works of art and scholarship 9.Santanu Das on the Indian poet, Sarojini Naidu's 1917 collection, The Broken Wing: Songs of Love, Death and the Spring. Saraojini Naidu was born in Hyderabad in 1879 and became known as "the Nightingale of India" for her work as a poet and also as an Indian independence activist. Of her 1917 collection, Rabindranath Tagore declared: "Your poems in The Broken Wing seem to be made of tears and fire, like the clouds of a July evening, glowing with the muffled power of sunset." The distinguished scholar of the First World War, Santanu Das, a reader in English at King's College, London, reflects on the importance of Naidu's work and on the impact of the First World War on the Indian fight for independence. Producer : Beaty Rubens.