Vande Mataram revisited: Modi’s pitch and the forgotten context

The renewed emphasis on Vande Mataram, overlooking its complex and contested history, risks reviving old ideological and religious divides

Can the restoration of ‘wounded pride’ or the resurrection of ‘usurped tradition’ fill empty stomachs, deliver salary slips or ensure timely access to healthcare?

Similar questions — often rooted in historical narratives that bear little relevance to the everyday struggles of the people — arise in the context of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech in New Delhi on November 7. Delivered at the year-long commemoration marking 150 years of the national song Vande Mataram, the speech was aimed at boosting the morale of his electoral and political constituency.

True to his style of grand symbolism over token gestures, Modi staged yet another full-scale spectacle. This occasion, too, was marked by his familiar promise to restore past glory and reject the humiliation allegedly inflicted through the appeasement of the ‘other’. Ahead of his speech, a website was launched, and a commemorative stamp and coin were released marking the occasion.

On this richly designed website, one can listen to various versions of the national song, sequentially starting with Rabindranath Tagore in 1896 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress, followed by Pandit Omkarnath Thakur’s rendering on All India Radio at 6.30 am on August 15, 1947.

More importantly, the website allows citizens to upload their rendition of Vande Mataram and record participation in events hosted by various agencies.

This initiative — designed to immerse Indians in a new mythology of the national song as narrated by Modi, rich with both factual and interpretative history — has struck a chord. The website has recorded at least 1.29 crore renditions of the national song.

Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, historian and author of Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, begins his vivid account by recalling an oft-repeated observation: that some texts – prose and poetry – remain confined to the pages of a book, while others “come out of the pages and enter our life.” Vande Mataram is one such text.

The only difference now, especially after Modi’s latest instigative pitch, is whether the song will continue to live among the people in its current abridged form — unanimously adopted by the framers of the Constitution — or in its entirety, which Modi now seeks to revive, despite the potential to generate more strife. Modi quoted Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi eulogising the song in specific contexts.

However, the prime minister omitted the broader political backdrop in which these statements were made and failed to acknowledge the later remarks by both Tagore and Gandhi — remarks that were notably divergent from their earlier views. Modi cherry-picked only those statements that fostered his politics.

The prime minister also quoted excerpts from those sections of the poem that were unanimously excluded from the official version of the national song by the Constituent Assembly — much like several verses of Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana are not part of the national anthem. But more insidiously, Modi alleged that unfortunately in 1937, “crucial verses of Vande Mataram, a part of its soul, were severed. Vande Mataram was broken, it was torn into pieces. This division of Vande Mataram also sowed the seeds of division of the country.”

Given this, one must revisit events from when Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote Vande Mataram, in the early 1870s, as a standalone poem, preceding his acclaimed novel Anandamath. When the poem was included in the novel in the early 1880s, it came, in the words of historian Tanika Sarkar, as “something of an annunciation, not only of a momentous literary event, but even the idea of a Hindu nation and a new Hindu goddess”, later named Bharat Mata.

When this Bengali novel was published and circulated in many languages, the concept of a nation as motherland — let alone as a Hindu goddess — was not widely seen. However, in a few decades, the imagination of the nation as a mother became universal, personified as ‘Bharat Mata’. This vision gained a visual form through the work of artist Abanindranath Tagore, who titled the iconic depiction Banga Mata (Mother Bengal).

Rabindranath Tagore first sang Vande Mataram at the 1896 Calcutta Session of the Indian National Congress. It soon emerged as the powerful symbol of protest and a political slogan, particularly during the Swadeshi agitation and the movement against the 1905 Bengal Partition. Vande Mataram was also co-opted by the nationalists.

However, the idolatry in Vande Mataram was problematic for a large section of nationalists, largely because of the novel’s imagery and rhetoric. From 1908 onwards, the Muslim League, particularly Mohammed Ali Jinnah, objected to Vande Mataram being used as the movement’s battle cry. The Hindu Mahasabha was against those who opposed the song, and formally promoted Vande Mataram and its use in nationalist programmes, although it chose to stay away from anti-colonial agitations and protests. In October 1937, the Hindu Mahasabha organised a Vande Mataram Day in Pune and Bombay (and later in other cities) to celebrate the song. 

Interestingly, the controversy raged even as many Indians, including senior nationalist leaders, failed to grasp Vande Mataram’s true meaning and contended themselves with just the gist of the complex linguistic construction: ‘Vande Mataram! Sujalam, suphalam, malayaja shitalam, Shasyashyamalam, Mataram...’ Only Jawaharlal Nehru candidly admitted that he could ‘not understand it without the help of a dictionary.’

More than the meaning of individual words, Nehru was troubled by the overall thrust of the song and the questions over its continued use in Congress programmes. Sitting on the horns of this dilemma, he turned to Rabindranath Tagore, who first introduced Vande Mataram to the people four decades earlier. In a letter to Rabindranath Tagore, Nehru wrote that ‘it does seem that the background is likely to irritate the Muslims.’

Eventually, all but the first two stanzas were dropped from the version sung at Congress sessions and wherever Vande Mataram was evoked. Importantly, this decision was taken by a Congress committee acting on Tagore’s advice.

Over time, even Gandhi recognised Vande Mataram’s capacity to trigger communal discord. In the July 1939 issue of Harijan, he wrote: “No matter what its source was, and how and when it was composed, had become a most powerful battle cry among Hindus and Musalmans of Bengal during the Partition days. It was an anti-imperialist cry...and when I first heard it sung it had enthralled me. I associated the purest national spirit with it... never occurred that it was a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus. Unfortunately, now we have fallen on evil days…”

Gandhi was more explicit in 1947 when he wrote, “that was no religious cry…It was a pure political cry. It should never be a chant to insult the Muslims.” 

From 1937 onwards, Congress leaders broadly agreed that Vande Mataram, in isolation, was a religio-patriotic chant. But, when placed within Anandamath, the background was certainly offensive towards Muslims.

This explains why the Constituent Assembly decided to continue with the Congress’ decision to retain only the first two stanzas of the song. Importantly, it was left to Rajendra Prasad to declare on the floor of the House that only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram would be recognised as the national song and Jana Gana Mana would be the national anthem.

With his speech on November 7, Modi launched a campaign to reverse this agreement and re-introduce Vande Mataram in its entirety. This move is likely to provoke discomfort among sections of the Muslims and may be used to portray those who oppose this move as anti-national. Unable to bring about fundamental and lasting change, and betterment in the lives of ordinary people, this is a tried and tested tactic to ensure people remain distracted and keep contesting among themselves over issues of identity and symbols.

(The writer is a Delhi-NCR-based journalist and author. His latest book is The Demolition, The Verdict and The Temple: The Definitive Book on the Ram Mandir)