Reading list: Eight articles on the history of ‘Vande Mataram’ and what it represents

Bharatiya Janata Party President Amit Shah on Wednesday alleged that the Congress’ policy of appeasing Muslims had resulted in Partition.

Shah, who spoke at an event in Kolkata commemorating 19th-century Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, referred to the party’s decision during the freedom movement to retain only two stanzas of India’s national song Vande Mataram, written by Chatterjee, following complaints by many Muslims. The event was organised by the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, a Delhi-based think tank associated with the BJP.

“Had the Congress not made the mistake of censoring the national song Vande Mataram to just two stanzas instead of the whole song, we could have stopped India from getting divided,” IANS quoted Shah as saying.

“Historians blame the Khilafat movement or the Muslim League’s two-nation theory for India’s partition,” Shah said. “But I am sure that the appeasement politics that Congress introduced by censoring Vande Mataram as a national anthem led to the country’s partition in the long run.” The Khilafat movement was launched by Indian Muslims to urge the British government to preserve the authority of the Turkish Sultan as Caliph of Islam with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Shah, who is on a two-day tour of West Bengal, added that the song was not related to any religion. “There is no attempt to show anyone in bad light.”

The song was originally written and printed in 1875 as a filler for a blank page in Chatterjee’s journal Bangadarshan (Vision/Philosophy of Bengal). It was added to his novel Anandamath in 1882, and set to music and sung publicly for the first time by Rabindranath Tagore at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896.

The song became a rallying cry for Indian nationalists during the freedom struggle and helped shape the idea of “Mother India”. Aurobindo Ghose even credited Bankim Chandra Chatterjee for having “caught the first modern glimpse of this grand spectacle”, as Sugata Bose explains in his book The Nation as Mother: And Other Visions of Nationhood.

Here are eight articles on the national song:

1. A short recorded history of the contentious national song ‘Vande Mataram’: In its long and tortuous history, this poem, a paean to Mother India by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, was set to numerous ragas and sung in a variety of styles.
2. ‘Bande Mataram’ was written as a song about Bengal – not India: As ‘Vande Mataram’ causes a controversy between BJP members of the Meerut municipality and Muslim councilors, a note about the origins of Bankim Chandra’s poem.
3. How nationalists devised the idea of equating India with a mother: The motherland was not meant to be metaphorical but a real, feminised figure.
4. Vande Mataram in Gorakhpur – there’s a chasm between dreams of Indian nation, reality of Indian state: Nationalistic pride fills in for systemic shortcomings and inequities.  
5. How ‘Vande Mataram’ came to be chosen as India’s National Song: As freedom became a real possibility, many versions of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s poem were presented to the parliamentary committee in charge of choosing India’s National Anthem.  
6. Record discs that helped defeat the British empire – Tagore sings ‘Bande Mataram’: During the freedom struggle, recordings of patriotic speeches and songs helped rally support.  
7. Three Freedom Movement-era versions of ‘Vande Mataram’ in march time: Plus, three singalong versions that were popular at political rallies and marches.  
8. How ‘Bharat Mata’ became the code word for a theocratic Hindu state: Not only does it embody a Hindutva imagination of India, it categorises Muslims as a group who are unable to partake of this form of patriotism.