When Sarojini Chattopadhyaya (later Naidu) departed Bombay on a steamship bound for Europe in September 1895, she was doing something that was both remarkable and commonplace. At sixteen years of age, she was travelling to Britain on a scholarship to study at King's College London and Girton College, Cambridge. Even in progressive circles, this was a highly unusual step for a young woman to take. Yet the movement of people along colonial shipping lanes was an established practice that had already re-distributed large numbers of Europeans, Africans and Asians across the globe. Mobility – both elite and subaltern – was a feature of the age, and the passage between India and Britain was a well-trodden path taken by colonial migrants of all classes.

By the time Naidu arrived in Britain, a small number of privileged Indian students – future doctors, lawyers, engineers and civil servants – were attending British universities. While a Western education opened up opportunities within the imperial system, the ‘England returned’ frequently became critics of the imperial regime and later formed the leadership of the nationalist opposition. Whatever its role in inscribing existing power structures, colonial mobility shaped the anti-colonial imagination, enabled transnational networks and encouraged a globally assertive nationalist movement. These factors framed Naidu's career as she rose to national and international prominence as a poet and a political figure in the early decades of the twentieth century.

As the first Indian woman President of the Indian National Congress (1925), Naidu was, in many ways, an extraordinary and unrepresentative figure. Furthermore, in comparison to the younger generation of women that came to prominence in the 1930s, she cut a fairly conservative figure as far as her approach to women's rights was concerned. Yet an examination of her career illuminates the intellectual and political factors that framed the way a generation of anti-colonial women engaged with the global public sphere in the decades leading up to and after independence. Her life straddled the turn of the century.