'Bande Mataram' Fits the BJP's Agenda, But its History is Complicated

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently announced a year-long celebration of the 150th anniversary of the national song – 'Bande* Mataram' ('I salute the Mother'). Composed first as a free-standing song by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, it was later inserted into his novel Anandamath  in 1882. 

In a longer essay on this theme, I argued that even though most nationalists, then and now, read the song as an independent composition in its own rights,  the novel and the song are  actually mutually complementary: without the fictional frame, the real purpose and meaning of the song remain hidden. 

'Bande Mataram' is a hymn to the Goddess of the Motherland, a deity Bankim had freshly minted himself. She instantly leapt to a central position in the Hindu pantheon. In the 1920s, when Jawaharlal Nehru tried to convince Uttar Pradesh peasants that they themselves constitute the real country, they scoffed at the idea: the country is a goddess, they insisted. “It is your image we worship in all temples," the hymn had sung, and the words came true in no time.  

The novel-time belongs to the late 18th century when a catastrophic famine had devastated Bengal, then ruled by a puppet Nawab, backed by a rapacious East India Company. Even according to its own officials, the Company had so relentlessly extracted peasant surplus for itself, despite repeated crop failures, that the famine was unavoidable. Bankim, however, held the Muslim Nawab entirely culpable: his supposed guilt, moreover, was immediately broadened into a grisly picture of innate Muslim evildoing. There had been fierce battles between Nawabi and Company forces on one hand and armed Hindu ascetics and Muslim fakirs on the other. Bankim excised the fakir rebellions from his narrative.  

An imagined band of 'upper' caste ascetics instigate Hindu villagers to kill Muslims, to ransack their huts and demolish their mosques, to capture their women and to stamp upon their dead faces. They suspend caste hierarchies as long as the war goes on: but promise to restore them after their  victory. The British are relatively minor players and the last edition concluded with their triumph: an ethereal voice consoles the rebel leader that the time is not yet come to eliminate them, Hindus must first learn their skills. The bloodbath against Muslims, on the other hand, is their highest holy duty, ordained by the goddess. 

Also read: Historical Records Debunk PM Modi’s ‘Vande Mataram’ Charge Against Congress

The Goddess of the Motherland is an amalgam of three deities – Jagaddhatri, Kali and Durga, who correspond to her past splendor, present shame and future glory once her sons have crushed the enemy. The song begins gently and tenderly, invoking the bounteous, serene land in the first two stanzas, using lush, soft Sanskrit words. Soon, however, it transmutes into the clanging of swords, into thunderous voices raised to spell doom to the enemy. The land changes into the demon-slaying goddess, lethal weapons in all ten hands. Sound-effects are now harsh, hard and jangling as befits the war cry. Both poetry and prose being rendered in Bankim’s unparalleled mastery over words, they captivate  readers with their  compressed energy and passionate rhetoric.  

The song has had several political habitations. The Congress used it as a slogan at anti-colonial demonstrations whereas Hindu nationalists chanted it during communal violence. Even during Bankim’s lifetime, Muslim critics found the novel and the song deeply distressing. Their grievances were twofold. First, they virtually excluded non-Hindus, especially Muslims, from the nationalist arena. Islam strictly forbids the personification of divinity in a human image, so they are destined to remain outside the patriotic community, they cannot belong to the country. The goddess, moreover, commands war. This made the entire composition – novel and song – deeply threatening for Muslims who also felt debased by the slur the novel threw at them. 

Muslim disquiet steadily mounted as the Congress record in their provincial ministries was not always problem free – it made singing the 'Bande Mataram' mandatory, even for Muslim students, in its government schools in the Central Provinces. The Muslim League began to express strong reservations in the 1930s and the renowned Bengali poet Jasimuddin expressed his deep anguish to Tagore. Tagore had sung it at a Congress session in 1894 where it became the de-facto national anthem. At the same time, he also underlined its communal potential in his novel Ghare Baire (1915). He added that the country was actually embodied in the land and the people. Its reification in a divine form amounted to a mystifying abstraction. The song had inspired Gandhi in 1915, but he retracted his praise  in 1947 after the communal carnage of 1946-47. Nehru started reading the novel in 1937 and, increasingly disturbed, he asked Tagore about its desirable status. Tagore advised that since the first two stanzas merely praised the beautiful land, they could be sung at Congress sessions, but the rest should not be used. In 1951, the Constituent Assembly retained the two stanzas as the national song while Tagore’s 'Jana Gana Mana' was elevated as the national anthem, well after Tagore’s death. 

Clearly, changed circumstances had revised the perspectives of Gandhi and Nehru. As they read the novel alongside the song, they were alerted to its disturbing communal potential. In a recent article, BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader Ram Madhav, however, sees the Muslim hand behind the revisions, and suspects that Congress leaders opportunistically changed their stance, to seek Muslim votes in the 1937 elections. He brands the Congress response as communal while he is silent about the visceral communal passages in the novel, wherein the song is embedded.    

The recent BJP decision to celebrate the song with gala events is but natural. Fusing religious and communal passions, and defining the product as authentic patriotism, the song quite precisely prefigures the Sangh Parivar’s agenda. Moreover, the song and the novel overturn the conventional deity-devotee relationship where sacred activism conventionally passes from the former to the latter. The sons of the Goddess, on the other hand, go to war to restore her glory – they are the saviour of the divine, not the other way round. That resonates strongly with Hindutva thinking wherein Ram’s devotees have to return his birthplace to him.  

Bankim’s however, was a highly complex mind and Anandamath was not his final word on communal history. His last novel Sitaram imagines a Hindu realm, founded by a heroic and idealistic king who defeats his Muslim adversaries. He however comes to embody, and even exceed, all the evil commonly  attributed to Muslims. His Hindu associates abandon him and the last to leave is a pure- hearted fakir who sadly concludes that it is no longer possible to live in a Hindu Rajya.

*I use Bande instead of the more common Vande because that is how it is pronounced in Bengali and the song is a Bangla one.    

Tanika Sarkar is a historian who retired as professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

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