Don’t make Vande Mataram a religious quarrel

9:19 PM ETDeveloping

Health Desk

A rare painting of our national song, Vande Mataram, published in 1923 — Photo: Unknown author Unknown author / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)

It took until India’s 80th Independence Day for ‘ Vande Mataram ’ to be rendered, for the first time, as part of the celebrations at the Red Fort. Doesn’t its origin in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, with its difficult depiction of Muslim rule, make it exclusionary?

The war cry that had escaped a novel, entered the streets, unnerved an empire and accompanied bravehearts to prisons and gallows has taken nearly eight decades to reach independent India’s most symbolic ramparts. Across this vastness, languages, customs, deities and philosophies differed, yet beneath them ran the same insistent question: What is the ultimate reality, and how may the human being know it?

Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore and many others, like the Congress in 1937, propose restricting its national use to the first two stanzas. Long before passport, parliament or political boundary stood Bharatavarsha: a cultural and spiritual geography.

The Vishnu Purana describes Bharata as the land north of the ocean and south of the Himalayas. But even this sacred inheritance is not without its share of objectionable arguments.

How can a Muslim bow to Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati invoked in its later verses? India was certainly not a modern nation-state for most of her history.

But sometimes answers lie in recovering meanings we have lost. Was India even a nation when Bankim imagined her as Mother?

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It took until India’s 80th Independence Day for ‘ Vande Mataram ’ to be rendered, for the first time, as part of the celebrations at the Red Fort.
The war cry that had escaped a novel, entered the streets, unnerved an empire and accompanied bravehearts to prisons and gallows has taken nearly eight decades to reach independent India’s most symbolic ramparts.
But even this sacred inheritance is not without its share of objectionable arguments.
Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore and many others, like the Congress in 1937, propose restricting its national use to the first two stanzas.
How can a Muslim bow to Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati invoked in its later verses?
Doesn’t its origin in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, with its difficult depiction of Muslim rule, make it exclusionary?
Was India even a nation when Bankim imagined her as Mother?
But sometimes answers lie in recovering meanings we have lost.

Sources

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