Aug 16, 2026
(Published: Social Scientist, Volume 53, No: 11-12, Nov-Dec 2025, pp 25-40)
Every nation has an anthem which it accords a unique place in all observances deemed to be of “national” significance. India is unique in having enshrined a song that competes for place and prestige with its national anthem.
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On November 6, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a year-long commemoration of the Vande Mataram song, to mark 150 years since it was published. The precise date of publication he identified, November 7, 1875, is mystifying, since the song (Bande Mataram in the original Sanskritised Bangla) was unknown to the public till 1881.
Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya notes in a 2003 “biography” of the song (Bhattacharya, 2003: 70) that Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay composed Vande Mataram between 1872 and 1875, though it lay in obscurity till a young editorial assistant working with his literary journal Bangadarshan, proposed that it could be a space filler in an issue ready for the press. Bankim dissuaded his colleague in words that his nephew recorded: “You cannot possibly guess now if this is good or bad. Time will tell – I shall be dead by then. It is possible you may live to see that day” (Ibid: 68-9).
Bhattacharya records that the poem finally saw the light of day in Bankim’s novel Anandamath, published serially in Bangadarshan between 1881 and 1882. There is general agreement that the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram were distinguished from the rest, when first published, indicating their earlier origin. Of the six, four stanzas it is believed, were written specifically for the novel (Ibid: 70-1).
Critical response to the novel was mixed. Bankim’s younger contemporary, the Sanskrit scholar Haraprasad Sastri, thought the poem “discordant and ungrammatical”, with an inter-mixture of Sanskrit and Bangla and some flagrant breaches of grammatical conventions. Bankim never responded to this and various other critiques, leaving future generations to guess his intent (Ibid: 73).
What is abundantly clear though, is that the 150-year anniversary dated precisely to November 2025, is an invention of the Modi government. The immediate purpose of this concoction is the West Bengal state assembly election, due in the second quarter of 2026. The larger intent was obviously to impose the Hindutva vision of a theocratic India in which religious minorities have no place.
In an inaugural address to the year-long commemoration of Vande Mataram, Modi accused the Congress party of having bowdlerised the song in 1937, cutting out four paragraphs as a measure of Muslim appeasement. Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, in an op-ed commentary for a leading English daily, scaled heights of lyricism (well-concealed till then). “This song carries neither the lure of power nor the bias of caste, creed, or region,” he wrote: “It embodies the collective consciousness of India, an awareness forged through millennia of civilisation, culture, and spiritual traditions. It reminds us that a nation is not merely a geographical territory, but a living, nurturing mother”.[1]
These locutions betray both the politician’s impatience and his eagerness to twist facts into a communal agenda. Indeed, since the 1980s, when the Ayodhya issue emerged afresh as a focus of mobilisation and neo-nationalist striving, the Vande Mataram song has been instrumentalised as a weapon of communal aggression.[2] This tendency has a long history, and none of it salutary. Few can recite or commit to memory the complex Sanskritised verses of the song, but the five syllables venerating the motherland are sufficient for communal mobilisation. Among the slogans that acquired currency during the Ayodhya mobilisation was one that demanded the chanting of the slogan as a threshold condition for enjoying the rights of Indian citizenship.[3] This recent history of the song is told rather simply, though the story of its contentious role through the freedom struggle would take deeper inquiry.
India’s Constituent Assembly spent as little time as possible on the symbols of nationhood, such as the flag and the anthem. In one of the rare interventions on the matter, Seth Govind Das, a member from the Central Provinces and Berar, in November 1948, strongly urged that Vande Mataram be adopted as the national anthem, because of its long associations with the struggle for India’s freedom. The other contender, Jana Gana Mana, was tainted by its association with the visit of George V to India in 1911, and with no disrespect to its composer, was disqualified for that reason (Constituent Assembly, 1948: 222-3). The latter supposition is of course baseless, since Tagore’s song, with its five stanzas, of which only two are now honoured as the national anthem, was composed before the King Emperor’s India sojourn and rendered for the first time at the Indian National Congress session of 1911 (Bhattacharya, 2011: 206).[4]
The question was raised on the final day of the Constituent Assembly on November 26, 1949. B. Das, representing a General Constituency from Orissa, asked Constituent Assembly president Rajendra Prasad, if he would make a “pronouncement” on the status of Vande Mataram as “national song”. Alongside, Das asked: would Rajendra Prasad make a decision on the national anthem?. Rajendra Prasad demurred: he would not make an announcement just yet, but would clarify his thinking after due consideration (Constituent Assembly, 1949: 983).
In what was supposed to be a ceremonial sitting of the Constituent Assembly on January 24, 1950 — two days before the Constitution went into force, Rajendra Prasad announced his decision, ex cathedra. There had been some thinking, said Rajendra Prasad, about debating the matter of the national anthem in the Constituent Assembly and inscribing it into the Constitution. Likewise, he had also been advised that the matter was not really one to be settled through debate and formal resolution, but through a statement from his side. Accordingly, he placed before the house, to collective applause, the proposition that the “composition consisting of the words and music known as ‘Jana Gana Mana’” would be the National Anthem of India. Vande Mataram, in recognition of its “historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom”, would be “honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana and (would) have equal status with it” (Constituent Assembly, 1950: 1).
When the session wrapped up after all members had signed off on the official Hindi translation of the Indian Constitution, a member requested that the house may sing the national anthem. Once that was concluded, the House collectively sang Vande Mataram before adjourning. In the years that followed, the formal practices and observances surrounding the National Anthem came to be defined with a high degree of detail.[5] No such rules on the public observances attached to Vande Mataram were framed, permitting its capture by a party committed to theocratic politics.
In 1992, just a few months ahead of the demolition of the mosque in Ayodhya, the journalist Arun Shourie, already a major dignitary on the side of Hindu nationalism, later to become a member of the Union Cabinet under the first prime minister of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), suggested a small thought experiment to figure out how far the Indian people were in tune with their heritage. Take the poem Vande Mataram, he suggested, and read it in translation to any member of India’s English-speaking elite. How would he respond. Take a good translation urged Shourie, preferably by Aurobindo Ghose, himself a great nationalist. Why, he asked, would the English educated person – a true representative of the Indian elite – manifest a deep sense of awkwardness, even embarrassment, at the rendition of a hymn glorifying the nation as the mother and the provider?[6] (Shourie, 1992).
The challenge is worth accepting and the Aurobindo Ghose translation is ready at hand, along with a later translation with accompanying critical apparatus by Julius Lipner. Created as an independent composition, Vande Mataram was incorporated into Bankimchandra’s novel Anandamath, a significant landmark in Bengali literature. The song then acquired its own identity, independent of the novel. It does seem curious though, that in all the century-and-a-half since its publication, there have been only a rather modest number of translations of a novel that was regarded as transformative for its time.
The first translation was by Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta, which went into its fifth edition in 1906, but is today rarely seen or referred to. Aurobindo Ghose began his translation in 1909, but left it incomplete till his brother took it up and had it published in the 1940s (Ghose, n.d.). Finally, there was one, with the title translated as Dawn Over India, by Basant Koomar Roy, first published in 1941 (Roy, 1941). Lipner (2005: 1695) demonstrates how the particular conjuncture in which India was in the 1940s, with the sensitivity of the communal question, influenced the Roy translation. Though the novel itself is strewn with references to the Muslims of Bengal and their baneful influence as rulers, Roy managed in a seeming concession to the nationalist imperatives of the time, to “translate them out of the novel entirely”.[7]
As a novel, Anandamath stands on infirm foundations in its nationalist credentials. It is inaccurate in its historical references, and suffused with the celebration of violence against Muslims. This does not mean that the song composed separately and introduced into the novel should be discounted as an expression of the nationalist spirit. In the early years of nationalist awakening, the song did manage to detach itself from the novel, and establish a distinct identity. Two years after Bankim’s death, Vande Mataram was sung, in a tune composed by Rabindranath Tagore, at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, with a Muslim from Bombay, Rahimtullah Sayani presiding (Bhattacharya, 2003: 19).
Vande Mataram gained resonance as a political slogan when protests erupted against Viceroy Curzon’s partition of Bengal in 1905. A communal fault-line was then incipient, acquiring shape and form as arguments sharpened over political representation. In a vision of India as a patchwork of religious faiths, the British Raj could only conceive of political representation in confessional terms under the limited reforms introduced in the 1890s.
Lipner records, in the elaborate critical notes accompanying his translation of the novel (which is the most recent) that at a demonstration organised in 1906 by the Congress, both Hindus and Muslims marched in protest chanting the slogan at Barisal, a coastal town in the eastern part of Bengal. Aurobindo Ghose that same year launched his revolutionary paper, titled Bande Mataram, to reflect the fiery agitational temper of the times. The paper braved a sedition charge and “kept up a relentless attack against the British colonial presence” till it was shuttered in 1908 (Lipner, 2005: 1079).
Bhattacharya (2003: 22) speaks of the new technology of audio mass reproduction as a powerful accessory in the propagation of the song. The gramophone company Pathephone’s 1906 catalogue “not only claimed a technical improvement upon the earlier Edison-type records, but also boasted of their record of Vande Mataram”. The Pathephone distributor in Calcutta had his establishment searched by the police, which destroyed every available recording of Vande Mataram.
There was no reason intrinsic to the tone or imagery of the song, for Bengalis of the Muslim faith to oppose it. Images of the nation as a mother nourishing all her children, were used frequently in the poetry of Kazi Nazrul Islam. One among his strongest evocations of the theme, involved an exhortation to the leader of all Bengal, to imagine himself as the “captain of a ship in peril … (and) … say unambiguously that those who were drowning were all the Mother’s children”. Likewise, Tagore’s Amar Sonar Bangla (My Golden Bengal) which is suffused with similar imagery, continued to be sung and deeply revered among Muslim Bengalis, before finally being adopted as national anthem by newly independent Bangladesh in 1971 (Bose, 2017: 15).
Perhaps Vande Mataram was successful in its early days, in securing a place in the public imagination, independent of its novelistic context. But as it became entrenched ever deeper within communal rivalries and burgeoning disputes over political representation, references to its context became inevitable. Beginning in the early years of the 20th century, anxieties about the status of each class of colonial subject within the system of political representation began to cast a shadow over inter-communal relations. Census enumerations had revealed that Hindus were a minority in Bengal, though they were by far the more prosperous and advanced in the adoption of western values. In 1909, one U.N. Mukherji published a series of articles, later assembled between the pages of a book, presaging an existential struggle for survival. Hindus, a Dying Race, was the title and this was quickly followed up with another pamphlet, Hindus and the Coming Census, which was nothing less than a call to arms, to exploit the decennial census for strategic advantage (Datta, 1993: 1305).
As latent tensions surged to the surface after the early protests against the partition, Vande Mataram began acquiring a different resonance. The year 1907 witnessed a series of riots between Hindus and Muslims in eastern Bengal, with Vande Mataram used explicitly as a slogan of communal aggression.
In Ghare Baire, a novel published after a long period of reflection following his abrupt and irrevocable parting of ways with the Swadeshi movement, Tagore has his main protagonist, Nikhil, deprecating those “running amuck crying Bande Mataram” (Tagore, 1914: 22). Those who “needs must shout and deify their country in order to keep up their excitement”, Nikhil reflects, “love excitement more than their country”. He holds firm to this opinion, despite knowing that his wife Bimala, thinks very differently and imagines that the “skies would be rent and scattered into a thousand fragments” by the force of the slogan (Ibid: 12).
In April 1907, as cited by Lipner (2004: 1109) from a contemporary account that year, “serious disturbances erupted in Jamalpur”. Swadeshi agitators, predominantly of the Hindu faith, began “destroying foreign-made goods at a fair” when they were set upon by “Muslim rowdies:”. Following this, they (i.e., the Muslim “rowdies”), “attacked landlords’ houses, destroyed debt bonds, and smashed an image of Durga”. This act of desecration outraged Hindus in every part of the country. Bande Mataram (the paper) fanned the flames… sub-editor Hemendra Prasad Ghose spoke for hundreds when he wrote: ‘it makes one’s blood boil to think of it … Revenge is the word that escapes one’s lips’”.
Normally glossed over, this source of tension within the early nationalist upsurge, is probed deeply and from every moral angle, in Tagore’s Ghare Baire. At one stage in the narrative, Nikhil, the patrician with a sense of responsibility towards the underprivileged, faces a poor trader Panchu, who is just getting by trading cloth that he buys with money borrowed from a local zamindar. At the height of the Swadeshi fervour, the zamindar imposes a penalty of a hundred rupees on Panchu for his persistence in trading foreign cloth. Panchu pleads to be allowed to sell the stock he has in hand, but the zamindar proves unrelenting. In sheer frustration at one point, Panchu blurts out: “I can’t afford it! You are rich; why not buy it up and burn it?”. His entire stock of cloth is burnt and for good measure, he is administered a thrashing for his insolence. Deeply anxious now at the prospect of crippling lifelong debt, Panchu seeks out Nikhil, who is appalled. Intent on the poor man getting fair treatment, Nikhil asks his friend Sandip, who is heady with the fervour of the movement and was at the scene of the arson, to bear witness to Panchu’s loss so that adequate recompense could be made.
Sandip says he would gladly bear witness, except not for the poor trader, but for the other side. Nikhil is aghast: “Will you not bear witness to the truth?”, he asks. “The truth we must build up”, retorts Sandip, “will require a great deal of untruth in the process” (Tagore, 2014: 75-7)
Like Sandip’s wilful abridgment of reality to serve a larger cause, Anandamath is a novel that alters and reconstructs history for the ideal of national resurgence and consolidation. Bankim’s historical context was the widespread unrest in Bengal after a lethal famine. The East India Company (EIC) had just established its rights as a revenue agent and begun sucking the land dry in a ruthless drive for profit. A cataclysmic famine strikes in 1770, leaving uncounted numbers dead and earning a place in Bengal’s folk memory as the “chiyattarer mannantara” (or famine of ’76 after the year 1176 in the Bengali calendar).
An account of those years of turmoil was published by the EIC employee W.W. Hunter in 1860. He described how the British encountered an adversary more formidable than the wild forests they tried to subdue, in “bands of cashiered soldiers, the dregs of the Mussulman armies … and the miserable peasantry, stripped of their hoard for the winter … (who) … were forced to become plunderers in turn” (Lipner, 2004: 395).
Bankim takes this factual background and transforms it into an epic battle of the Santans, a Hindu cult, against oppressive Muslim rule. He is ambiguous about the British through the novel, but ends with a full-throated paean in praise of the material benefits that colonial rule could bring.
Bankim’s novel begins in the year of the famine, when “Bengal had not yet fallen under British sway”. The British did nothing more than “collect the revenue”. They took no responsibility for “overseeing the lives and property of Bengalis”. That charge indeed, belonged to the “evil Mir Jafar, a vile, treacherous blot on the human race”. He was a man unable to look after himself, leave along “look after Bengal”. He dosed himself on opium and slept, while “the British took in the money and issued receipts, and the Bengali wept and went to ruin” (Lipner, 2004: loc 1914).
These lines are substantially the same in the Aurobindo Ghosh translation and in fact, the two translations concur in the manner they interpret the paragraphs that may touch the deepest religious sensibilities. In the 1941 translation by Basanta Koomar Roy, published under the title Dawn Over India, the same lines are rendered thus: “The British had long been expert in collecting revenue. At different centers they had their collectors who seized taxes and revenues to be shipped to the treasury of the East India Company in Calcutta. Thousands of men, women and children might die of starvation; yet there must be no cessation in the collection of taxes. This year’s collection, however, fell short of expectations. If mother earth refused to yield wealth, humans could not create it. All that could be collected, however, was being shipped at once to the British treasuries in Calcutta” (Roy, 1941: 41).
Roy excises the Muslim nobility of Bengal out of the story, and this is a pattern that recurs through his translation. This is omission by intent, a serious abridgment of sections most charged with communal antagonism. Yet, there may be little to choose between this artistic liberty taken by the translator, and those taken in the unique twist the author imparts to actual historic events. The Muslim nobility that bear the blame for Bengal’s miseries in Bankim’s narration, had begun to fade away by the historical juncture that is the setting of Anandamath. Mir Jafar had briefly assumed the reign of Bengal following the Battle of Plassey, been ousted by the British in 1761, then reinstated in 1763. By 1765 he was dead. Bankim as Lipner (2004: 841) points out, could not have been unaware of these basic facts of history. To have held Mir Jafar responsible for all the suffering of Bengal, while absolving the British, was more than an act of poetic licence. It was a deliberate choice.
The novel tracks a substantial land-owner Mahendra Thakur and his family, who flee a village ravaged by famine, and are then cruelly torn apart by circumstances. Set upon by bandits crazed by hunger who intend to make a meal of them, his wife and infant daughter barely manage to escape. Wandering about desperately through a dense forest, they find shelter in an abbey. Satyananda, the head of the abbey guesses her antecedents from the idiom of her speech, with its distinct caste inflections, and tasks a loyal follower, Bhabananda to ensure that Mahendra is traced and reunited with his family.
Mahendra himself is taken captive on suspicion of being a bandit, by a convoy of company sepoys on the road to Calcutta. Bhabananda chances upon the same convoy and in a tactical ploy, submits to their accusations of banditry and enters the company of Mahendra as a captive. He has a strategy to escape and at a certain point in the forest, when the convoy comes under attack by “two hundred armed men … shouting the name of Hari”, they break their bonds and escape (Ibid: 1952).
The sepoys incur heavy casualties and flee in disarray. Though prepared to participate in combat, Mahendra holds back rather than partake of the plunder of the convoy. Bhabananda suffers no such qualms and as he returns from the battle, beckons Mahendra to follow him if he wanted to reunite with his family. Hesitantly, Mahendra complies.
While trudging along in a mood of scepticism about the company he was in, Mahendra hears Bhabananda sing the first lines of a poem. He is seized with wonderment: who could be this “mother” that Bhabananda sang about, that was “rich in waters, rich in fruit, cooled by the southern airs, verdant with the harvest fair”? (Ibid: 1978).
A flash of recognition comes when Bhabananda sings the next few lines, though Mahendra is still confused: “But that’s our land, not a mother”, he says. “We recognise no other mother”, Bhabananda responds: “One’s mother and birthland are greater than heaven itself”. The remaining verses of the song follow and even as Mahendra submits to its rapture, he is unable to suppress his curiosity. Who possibly could have adopted this invocation to a divine mother as their call to action, he wonders.
Bhabananda then lets him into the story of the Santans, or children of a Mother. “We don’t rob and plunder”, says Bhabananda. What Mahendra had just thought was unlawful loot, was in fact, the assertion of a rightful claim to the wealth of the kingdom, since the king himself had no right to “the money he takes”. There was everywhere, a pact between king and subject for the protection of the latter, says Bhabananda, “but does our Muslim king protect us? … We’ve lost our religious way of life, our caste status, our self-respect, our family connections – and now we’re about to lose our lives! If we don’t get rid of these bearded degenerates will anything be left of our Hindu identity?” (Ibid: loc 2000).
Mahendra is ushered into the monastery, where he meets Satyananda (a mystic of senior status) and is shown around a gallery representing various stages in the history of the Hindu faith. The very first image he encounters is of surpassing beauty, where the goddess is depicted “as Bearer of the earth, perfectly formed and decorated with every ornament”. That Satyananda tells him, is the Mother, “as she was”. A little further, he finds another image, in a state of dishevelled rage, “blackened and shrouded in darkness”. Satyananda tells him that this was the Mother as she was at the time, “robbed of everything” and “garlanded with skulls”, because the whole land “is a burning ground”. And then there was another image, “in a large marble shrine glistening and smiling in the early morning rays”. The ten arms of this latter manifestation of the Mother, reached out in as many directions, “adorned with various powers in the form of the different weapons she holds”. This was, said Satyananda, the Mother as she should be, and the mission of the Santans was to effect that transformation from her dishevelled and demeaned state (Ibid: loc 2045-56).
A sequence of mishaps follows, and Satyananda and Mahendra are taken captive by a sepoy patrol, transported to the city and confined in a dark and gloomy prison. Their incarceration is not received well by the Santans. Jnanananda, a senior warrior within the fold, vows to secure their freedom, summoning the faithful to battle in striking words: “For a long time we have been wanting to smash the nest of these weaver-birds, to raze the city of these Muslim foreigners, and throw it into the river – to burn the enclosure of these swine and purify Mother Earth again! Brothers, that day has come! … Come let us raze that city of the foreigners to the dust! Let us purify that pigsty by fire and throw it into the river!” (Ibid: loc 2341).[8]
The Santan army plunges into the city from all directions, throwing it “into terror”. As the “inhabitants fled in all directions”, the Santans went straight to the royal prison, killed all its guards and set Mahendra and Satyananda free. Once that mission was accomplished, the Santans “set fire to as many Muslim homes as they could find”. Retribution was quick to come from the Company, which dispatches a contingent of sepoys to quell the uprising. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Santans were defeated “and they began to run away” (Ibid: loc 2348).
Mahendra’s induction into the Santan fold is not free of its own moments of puzzlement. All that he has witnessed first-hand about the Santans, he found irreconcilable with his own deep Vaishnava faith. Satyananda explains: the Vaishnava code revealed by the 16th century guru Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, only saw Vishnu as “love incarnate”, but failed to grasp him as a manifestation of power. The two needed to complement each other for the full picture of the faith to emerge. Mahendra begins to grasp the point: does that mean, he asks, that Santans are not the sole faith, but “simply an order of religious devotees”? Yes, says Satyananda, the Santans do not “aspire to temporal power”. They only wished “to uproot the Muslims completely since they are enemies of our Lord” (Ibid: 2507).[9]
The deep agonies of “chiyattarer mannantara” grind on, claiming over a third of Bengal’s population. The year that follows is kinder. Rains are plentiful, crops abundant, and all who survived could eat their fill. Many found the plenitude difficult to cope with, after the year of deprivation. Crops grew with nobody to consume them. The Santans though, were not concerned with mundane issues such as hunger, since they had begun arming themselves. No more was their focus on gems or gold; their singular object was through fair means or foul, to procure fire-arms in every functional state. Agents fanned out across the countryside, recruiting people to the cause of Vishnu. And as soon as a reasonable number of volunteers stepped up, “they would enter a Muslim village and set it on fire”. There was just cause for anger against the Muslims in “the anarchy and lawlessness of their reign”. Anxious that their “rule of life had disappeared … many Hindus were keen to establish a sense of Hindu identity” (Ibid: loc 2626).
The company meanwhile, was not sitting still. The Governor-General in Calcutta, Warren Hastings, has forged an iron chain to entrap all of Bengal. Soldiers and commanding officers of exceptional ability were recruited, to counter the Santans who were preparing a final assault on the bastions of power.
An engaging female warrior Shanti is introduced meanwhile, who enters the Santan camp in male disguise and qualifies as a warrior through all the exacting tests. As the final battle looms, Shanti encounters a British officer, Captain Thomas, who is captivated by her beauty and invites her home in the role of a concubine. Shanti brushes him off with the insulting counter-offer: that she will gladly take him home as a pet monkey. But then she also poses Captain Thomas a question: “Why do you people interfere in a fight between Hindu and Muslim? Go back to your own home” (Ibid: loc 2674).[10]
The early course of the battle is adverse, but Bhabananda creates, through a great act of valour, a pathway for the Santan troops to cut losses and regroup. Captain Thomas throws his army into blocking this escape, in a manoeuvre that leaves part of his force undefended. Another force enters at this time on the side of the Santans, and as their troops are mowed down, the British officers surrender. Captain Thomas is captured and trussed, but chooses death by a British bullet rather than submission. Bhabananda, driven by the quest of martyrdom, meanwhile makes one final charge in which he falls, while destroying every remnant of the British force. The Santans mourn and provide their dead the last rites with appropriate reverence, and then give in to the ecstasy of victory.
The two fallen heroes on either side had earlier had a phase of close combat, after which Bhabananda had seized Captain Thomas by the hair – a mark of total subjugation – but then conveyed words of reassurance: “Captain Sir, I shall not kill you, the English are not our enemies. But why are you here to help the Muslims? Here, I spare your life, for the time being, you are my prisoner. Victory to the English? We wish you well!” (Ibid: 2909).[11]
In all the annals of world literature, this must count as a most curious depiction of a battlefield encounter: a Santan military commander, cheering his enemy on to victory, at the very moment they are engaged in mortal combat. Following the victory, the top army commanders of the Santans confer to decide on next steps. One suggests an effort to capture the “capital”. Another wonders how that military campaign could be undertaken when the army had vanished. Dhirananda explains where the army has gone missing: “… everyone is out looting. The villages are now unprotected. They will plunder the Muslim villages and the silk factories and go home” (Ibid: 2969).
Governor General Warren Hastings was meanwhile, planning one more assault to establish absolute supremacy over Bengal, and this time he came with an abundance of preparations, and a new, more capable military commander. With a mix of wile and raw courage, the Santans turn adversity to advantage and again emerge victorious. As they mount a final assault, “there was great confusion among the English army” and the sepoys, “caring for the fight no more, fled from the right and the left”. The Santans meanwhile, are pressing on with triumphant cries, except that they seem yet again, to have mixed up the identity of their enemy: “Crush the Muslims and kill them! There are a hundred thousand Santans on the hillside” (Ibid: 3160).
The theme of violence against the Muslims is as pronounced an aspect of the novel, as is a deep ambivalence toward the British. It is curious in the extreme that most modern commentators have chosen to tiptoe around these aspects of Bankim’s novel (Lipner, 2004: 860). There has been a proposition advanced that Bankim — as a government official concerned with security of employment – was doing no more than using the Muslims as a whipping boy for the British. This may be crediting him with greater subtlety than he intended
Anandamath ends with the Santan rebellion successfully consummated, but Satyananda is distraught. Returning to the monastery, he meets his spiritual mentor, the mysterious Healer who appears at key moments to work physical miracles and resolve spiritual dilemmas. He pours out his heart: “Muslim rule has been destroyed, but Hindu rule has not been established. Even now the English remain powerful”. Turning to the image of Mother India, Satyananda pours out his grief: “Oh Mother, I have not been able to set you free. Once more you will fall into the hands of unworthy foreigners. Do not be offended with your Child. Alas, Mother! Why did I not die on the battlefield today?” (Ibid: loc 3214).
The Healer offers words of comfort. There are two branches of knowledge, he explains, and being adept at one, the English had invaluable lessons to offer. “Unless the English rule, it will not be possible for the Eternal Code (Sanatana Dharma) to be reinstated”. The Eternal Code was rich with the knowledge of interior words, but the English would serve a purpose in its restoration since they were both “very knowledgeable in the outward knowledge”, as also “very good at instructing people”. By making them king, the people could become “well instructed about external things”, preparing them “to understand the inner”. All obstacles to the propagation of the Sanatana Dharma would then be removed, and it would “shine forth by itself again”. Till that magical dawn when the Hindu gains wisdom and virtue, “English rule will remain intact”. There will be little to fret over, since “subjects will be happy under the English, and they will be free to follow their religion” (Ibid: 3232).
Colonial rule becomes in this narrative, an interlude, enabling the rediscovery of the true path, after the tragic loss of Hindu sovereignty. Interestingly, this entire chapter goes missing when Basanta Koomar Roy’s translation of Anandamath was published. Indian nationalist aspirations were reaching a high watermark and statements of fealty to the Raj would obviously not serve the cause. Both the Aurobindo and Lipner translations consist of eight chapters in the fourth and final part of the novel. Roy’s has only seven..
Bankim’s Anandamath is not by his own lights, a historical novel. Lipner assembles a number of instances when Bankim explicitly disavows any intent to root the work in history as actually lived. The intention then is different, as Lipner reads it. It is to open up the possibility of a “new programme of collective history in the Indian context” (Lipner, 2004: 602). Or as Sudipto Kaviraj (1995: 108-9) has argued, it was a part of the colonial intellectuals’ discovery of the “truth” about history. This was not a world of truths in “that bland, straightforward, positive sense”. Rather, it was “a realm of truth established by belief”. History was “the myth of a people, its construction of its self”. For the colonised subject, history gave “an explanation of the experience of subjection, and also a rational ground for hope”.
Kaviraj (Ibid: 137) contests the view of “ahistorical secularists”, who see Bankim’s fame (even his infamy) mainly in how he dreamt up an “icon of the nation – feminine, maternal, territorial, natural, but offensively Hindu”. Bankim’s utilisation of these motifs he argues, were “highly unorthodox”, and in the final analysis, his focus was on the ethics of social praxis rather than adherence to ritual. Indeed, there is ample evidence that Bankim himself was often careful to disavow any sense of animus based on religion: “no reader should think that this book aims to point to disparity between Hindus and Muslims. One is not good just because one is a Hindu or bad just because one is a Muslim, and vice versa. There is good and bad among both equally. In fact, one must admit that when Muslims ruled India for so many centuries, they were certainly better than contemporary Hindus where kingly qualities (rajakiya gun) were concerned” (quoted in Lipner 2005: loc 969).
Bankim may stand blameless in the judgment of history. Perhaps the political appropriation of his poem diverged from his narrative intent. Written as an ode to Mother Bengal, Vande Mataram resonated through the country. But it did nothing to mend the sharp divisions that emerging over political representation in a British colony defined by the colonists as one of religious disunity and incoherence. In the definition of the colonial rulers, this also meant the absence of a popular will that could be discovered through an election conducted under normal rules.
Vande Mataram invited all individuals to submit to the worship of the mother. It was only in the restoration of the glory of the mother goddess and her unique form of Shakti that the nation would regain its sovereignty. Mundane matters of political representation and the extension of the franchise, were debated in the halls of government. On the streets, a vision of the nation as mother goddess fought pitched battles with a rival theology.
Vande Mataram had already been transformed into an anthem of division by 1937, when the Congress, in a pretence of ignorance of the burdens it carried, proposed that the song be raised to official status. Provincial governments with administrative powers had just taken office under the Raj’s experiment with dyarchy. Relations were already embittered by the Congress, despite its yawning deficits in Muslim representation, refusing outright to allow the Muslim League into the portals of governance as a coalition partner. Vande Mataram as an anthem of the provincial governments muddied the waters further. Jawaharlal Nehru, by now established himself as the Congress’s most influential leader after Gandhi, as also its most popular campaigner, admitted that certain elements in the novel Anandamath, which he had just read, would understandably be “irritating” to the Muslim community. Subhas Bose, at the time still an influential and charismatic figure within the Congress, threw his authority behind the song, perhaps in deference to its author’s cult like status (Bhattacharya, 2003: 37-8).
When dissent from the Muslim side gained an irresistible force, Tagore wrote privately to Bose saying that for all his deep love for the song, it did not recommend itself for a national body where people of diverse religious faiths met. “Bengali Hindus have become restless at this debate”, he wrote, “but the matter is not confined to the Hindus. Where there are strong feelings on both sides, what is needed is impartial judgment. In our national quest, we need peace, unity, good sense – we don’t need endless rivalry because of one side’s obstinate refusal to yield” (Bose, 2017: 19). That said, he saw little difficulty in separating two stanzas of the song from the rest of it, as also from the context of the novel in which it was first published.
The last word came from the Congress Working Committee which responded with a resolution seeking to “explain the significance of the song”. Certain parts of the song, the Congress conceded, could attract objections, but the evolution of the poem “as part of national life (was) of infinitely greater importance than its setting in a historical novel before the national movement had taken shape”. The first two stanzas of the song had spread “gradually” to all parts of the country, and a “certain national significance (had come) to attach to them”. In this context, the Working Committee concluded that the “long record of suffering for the cause, as well as popular usage, (had) made the first two stanzas of this song a living and inescapable part of our national movement and as such must command our affection and respect”. While recognising the “validity of the objection raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song”, it also underlined that there was “nothing in the (first two) stanzas to which anyone can take exception (Aziz,1978: 120-2).
The Congress decision did not go well with the Hindu camp. Bose and Tagore “were showered with abuse by a sizeable section of Bengali Hindu literary and political circles”, though neither seemed particularly fazed. Bose ended his presidential speech at the Haripura Congress in 1938 with “Bande Mataram”, but “refused to entertain any controversy … raised by some Hindu politicians over the decision to abridge the song” (Bose, 2017: 19-20).
The folly of using exclusively Hindu imagery to capture awakening aspirations for nationhood in the people was evident even to Aurobindo, an early partisan who ran a fiery newspaper by that title: “..if we hope to have a vision of the mother by invoking the Hindus’ mother or establishing Hindu nationalism, having made a cardinal error we would be deprived of the full expression of our nationhood” (Bose, 2017: 22).
Among all the issues then driving a wedge between Hindu and Muslim political aspirations, Vande Mataram, was perhaps of only symbolic importance. There were sharp differences over substantive issues, one side seeing a unitary polity as essential without quite saying it, the other standing for a federated arrangement with only residual powers vested with the centre. And as things transpired, the haste with which the British scuttled and quit after the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan, driven by the vainglory and impetuosity of the last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, afforded little opportunity to work through these matters of detail.
Soon after independence and partition, Mahatma Gandhi addressed a prayer meeting at Calcutta on August 23, with sharp words of deprecation for Vande Mataram. “That was no religious cry”, he said: “It was a purely political cry. … It should never be a chant to insult or offend the Muslims”.[12]
For the president of the Constituent Assembly to have issued an ex cathedra decision to raise the song to “national status”, even after a cataclysmic partition which drew arbitrary borders and irrevocably separated people who had lived together for generations, speaks of moral righteousness, rather than reconciliation. Perhaps it was also an expression in some measure, of the retributive spirit, which assigned the blame for partition exclusively on one side, and effectively, dismissed those perceptions as irrelevant to the life of the nation going forward. That spirit was never far from the surface through the history of independent India. It now expresses itself with renewed and unparalleled vigour in the Modi regime. The divisive intent is palpable and is all the more dangerous now. The portents for India’s democracy are grim.
References
Aziz, K.A. (1978): Muslims Under Congress Rule, 1937-1939, A Documentary Record, Volume 1, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, USA.
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (2003), Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song, Penguin, New Delhi.
Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (2011), Rabindranath Tagore, An Interpretation, Penguin, New Delhi.
Bose, Sugata (2017): The Nation as Mother and other Visions of Nationhood, Viking India, Delhi.
Constituent Assembly (1948): Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report, Volume VII, (Sixth Reprint), Lok Sabha Secretariat, Delhi, 2014.
Constituent Assembly (1949): Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report, Volume XI (Sixth Reprint), Lok Sabha Secretariat, Delhi, 2014.
Constituent Assembly (1950): Constituent Assembly Debates, Official Report, Volume XII (Sixth Reprint), Lok Sabha Secretariat, Delhi, 2014
Datta, Pradip Kumar (1993): “Dying Hindus-Production of Hindu Communal Common Sense in Early 20th Century Bengal”, Economic and Political Weekly, 28:25, June 19, pp 1305-19.
Ghose, Aurobindo (n.d.): Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandamath, Basumati Sahitya Mandir, Calcutta.
Kaviraj, Sudipto (1995): The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
Lipner, Julius (2005): Bankimcandra Chatterji’s Anandamath,Or the Sacred Brotherhood, Oxford University Press, Delhi (all citations are from the Kindle edition).
Mitra, Anirban (2020): “How — and Why — ‘Jana Gana Mana’ Became India’s National Anthem”, The Wire, August 15; extracted December 2025 at: https://thewire.in/society/independence-day-national-anthem-jana-gana-mana-subhash-chandra-bose-netaji.
Nussbaum, Martha (2013): Political Emotion, Why Love Matters for Justice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA.
Roy, Basant Koomar (1941): Dawn over India by Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Devin-Adair, New York.
Shourie, Arun (1992): “Our Heritage, Our Lives”, The Observer of Business and Politics, Delhi, July 24, 1992.
Tagore, Rabindranath (1914): The Home and the World, (translation by Surendranath Tagore of Ghare Baire), Dover, New York, 2018; all citations from the Kindle edition.
[1] See the “PM targets Congress over Vande Mataram: Key Stanzas Dropped, Still Face Divisive Mindset”, Indian Express (New Delhi edition), November 8, 2025, p 1; and Yogi Adityanath, “150 years on, Vande Mataram is still nation’s soul, evokes unity”, Indian Express, November 7, 2025, p 11.
[2] Vande Mataram will be used here, since that is more common. Its enunciation in Bengali, Bande Mataram would also be used in accordance with the context of the source cited.
[3] The slogan in Hindi is as follows: “Hindustan mein rehna ho, to Vande Mataram kehna ho”, which translates as, “if you seek to live in Hindustan, you will have to chant Vande Mataram”.
[4] Bhattacharya also excavates a letter that Tagore wrote in 1937, where he explains the intent behind the song as neither the celebration “of any fifth or sixth”, nor “any George”. Rather, his purpose was to call for submission to the “Dispenser of India’s destiny who guides, through all rise and
fall, the wayfarers, He who shows the people the way”. Martha Nussbaum (2013: 102) sees the song “expressing the idea that the only true leader is the moral ideal, and that India is rightly led towards freedom by that ideal”. The nation is not conceived in a figurative sense, but rather in terms of the rich culture and geography. Subsequent work has revealed how Jana Gana Mana came to be adopted as national anthem by Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army during its formative years. Subsequently, when Bose took operational control of the army in South-East Asia, a translation into Hindustani titled “Sab Sukh Chain ki Barkha”, came to be adopted because of the easier accessibility of the language (Mitra, 2020).
[5] The full directive by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs can be viewed here: https://www.mha.gov.in/sites/default/files/NationalAnthem%28E%29_2.pdf.
[6] Arun Shourie, “Our Heritage, Our Lives”, The Observer of Business and Politics, Delhi, July 24, 1992.
[7] Aurobindo Ghose’s translation was published by the
[8] In the Aurobindo Ghose translation, these lines are rendered as follows: “We have long contemplated breaking this nest of pernicious birds, totally destroying this Mussalman city and throwing it into the river. We must burn the pig-sty with fire and once more purify the earth. Brethren, that day has dawned … Come, let us go and reduce to dust that city of the Mussalmans. Let us purify with fire that den of swine and cast it into the river. Let us break that nest of pernicious birds and scatter its twigs and straws to the four winds” (Ghose, n.d.: 77).
The Aurobindo Ghosh translation tends to be much closer to Lipner and thus to the original. In comparison, the Roy (1941: 101-2) translation does a thorough bowdlerisation: “For a long time we have been thinking of destroying, root and branch, British rule in India, and then of drowning it in the depths of the seas, and thus of purifying Mother India from the pollution of this alien domination. Brothers, that day is here today! … Let us now get together to crush British rule in India under our feet. Let us burn their sceptre into ashes, and then scatter the ashes to the winds”.
[9] In the Aurobindo translation, these lines are rendered thus: “We do not want kingly power. Only because the Mussalmans are the enemies of God we want to destroy them totally” (Ghose, n.d.: 98). Curiously, or perhaps not so, these lines have entirely been erased from the Roy translation.
[10] In the Aurobindo Ghose (n.d.: 118-9), these lines read as: “(when) the Hindus and Muslims are fighting, why do you intervene? Return home”. In the Roy translation (1941: 148), as follows: “We are the children of this soil. You have no more moral or legal right to rule over this country than we have to rule over your England. Why don’t you Englishmen, like true Christians, return peacefully to your own homeland?”
[11] In the Roy (1941: 180) translation, these lines read as follows: “Captain Thomas, I won’t kill you. You are too despicable to kill. But you are my captive”. The Aurobindo version does not differ very much from Lipner’s.
[12] A report on the speech can be found in Volume 89 of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (as published online), page 80: https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/cwmg_volume_thumbview/ODk=#page/1/mode/2up.
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