The Mahatma and The Poetess

APPENDIX-II:

4. Foreign Propaganda and Sarojini Devi

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.