'Icon and Mother': An Inquiry into India's National Song

Abstract

The Republic of India, which is constitutionally a ‘secular’ state, has a National Song and a National Anthem. Each has its official and other uses. The verses that became the National Song have been dogged by religious and political controversy, sometimes turning to violence, from pre-Independence days. These verses first appeared as part of a larger hymn in Anandamath, a Bengali religio-political novel by the famous novelist, Bankim Chatterji, first published serially in 1881-2, and then as a book from 1882. The hymn is entitled ‘Vande Mataram’, viz. ‘I revere the Mother’, and glorifies the ‘motherland’ of a band of ascetic warriors, called ‘santans’ or ‘Children’, who live in the heart of a dense forest somewhere in Bengal and emerge periodically to make war against foreign (Muslim and British) rule. As the hymn clearly indicates, the santans are children not only of the motherland but also of the Goddess, who is identified with the motherland. However, the National Song, which comprises only the first two verses of the hymn, makes no mention of the Goddess. This has not prevented various Indian voices through the decades from objecting strenuously to the religious, ‘idolatrous’, and ‘xenophobic’ resonances of a National Song that allegedly belies the secular status of the state. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that the title of the hymn/National Song, viz. Vande Mataram, played a significant role, as watchword and rallying-cry, in India’s largely (Hindu) freedom movement, as also in communal strife between Hindus and Muslims from the first decades of the twentieth century. Using a recent resurgence of the controversy as a starting point, this article discusses the content of the hymn in its original setting, reviews the history of and reasons for the ongoing controversy about the National Song, and offers a suggestion as to how fundamental religio-political objections to it may be resolved.