Marriage Quote by Sarojini Naidu

The line lands like a drawing-room aside, but it’s really a political grenade rolled under a door. Naidu frames war not as heroic destiny but as bureaucratic scheduling: a husband “exceedingly busy,” a deployment rumor that goes “slack,” then suddenly there’s “a move” to ship him “to the front.” That choice of diction drains the romance from military service. War arrives not with drums, but with office talk and renewed administrative momentum, as if a human life is just a file being reactivated.

The subtext is sharper because the speaker is a wife. In a culture where women were often expected to sanctify sacrifice, Naidu lets domestic intimacy expose the machinery behind patriotic narratives. “Get him sent” quietly flips agency: the husband isn’t charging toward glory; other people are arranging his exposure to danger. The exclamation point at the end reads as a flash of alarm disguised as social reportage, the kind of tone you’d use at a tea table when the news is too grim to say plainly.

Context matters: Naidu was a leading Indian nationalist and public figure moving through the late-colonial world where war, empire, and propaganda leaned heavily on respectable households. Whether the “front” is literal or a pointed metaphor, the sentence captures how imperial conflict colonizes private life, turning spouses into unwilling stakeholders in decisions made elsewhere. It works because it refuses the expected register of reverence and replaces it with the cold language of procedure.