An Anthem of Divisive Intent
Sukumar Muralidharan
EVERY nation has an anthem, but India is unique in having a song that competes for prestige. The two decisions -- on adopting Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana as national anthem and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram as national song – were made the same day in the Constituent Assembly. There was no discussion, nor any thought given to the role either would play in public life.
Rules were written in later years, stipulating how and when the national anthem would be played, and the public deference that was its due. No equivalent rules exist for the “national song”. In that time, Vande Mataram has become a weapon of aggressive communal mobilisation. A slogan often heard during the late-1980s, when the Ayodhya mobilisation was at its peak was: “Hindustan mein rehna hai to Vande Mataram kehna hoga”.
On November 6, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a year-long commemoration of Vande Mataram, to mark 150 years since its first publication. The precise date is mystifying, since the song (Bande Mataram in the original Sanskritised Bangla) was unknown to the public till 1881.
Concocted Anniversary
Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya notes in a 2003 “biography” of the song, that Bankim composed Vande Mataram between 1872 and 1875, though it lay in obscurity till a young editorial assistant working with his literary journal Bangadarshan, proposed its use as a space filler, as an issue was prepared for press. Bankim dissuaded him in words that a nephew recorded: “You cannot possibly guess now if this is good or bad. Time will tell – I shall be dead by then.”
Bhattacharya tells us that the poem finally saw the light of day in Bankim’s novel Anandamath, published serially between 1881 and 1882. There is general agreement that the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram were distinguished from the rest, indicating their earlier origin. Four of the six stanzas, it is believed, were written specifically for the novel.
Critical response to the novel was mixed. Bankim’s younger contemporary, the Sanskrit scholar Haraprasad Sastri, thought Vande Mataram, as a poem “discordant and ungrammatical”, with an inter-mixture of Sanskrit and Bangla and some flagrant breaches of grammatical conventions. Bankim never responded to this and various other critiques, leaving it to future generations to guess his intent.
It is abundantly clear though, that the 150-year anniversary of the song, is a concoction of the Modi government, with an immediate focus on the West Bengal state assembly election, due in less than six months. A larger intent is the Hindutva vision of a theocratic India in which religious minorities have no place.
Origins of the Song
Anandamath is a novel that is inaccurate in its historical references and suffused with the theme of violence against Muslims. In the early years of nationalist awakening, the song detached itself from the context of the novel, and established a distinct identity. Two years after Bankim’s death, Vande Mataram was sung, in a tune composed by Rabindranath Tagore, at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, presided over by Rahimtullah Sayani.
As a political slogan Vande Mataram gained a particular resonance when protests erupted against Viceroy Curzon’s decision in 1905 to divide Bengal. When the Congress organised a demonstration in Barisal, a coastal town in eastern Bengal, both Hindus and Muslims marched in protest, chanting the slogan.
There were forces working to counteract the spirit of unity. Census enumerations had revealed that Hindus were a minority in Bengal, in turn engendering multiple anxieties. In 1909, one U.N. Mukherji published a series of articles, later assembled between the pages of a book, presaging an existential struggle for survival. Hindus, a Dying Race, was the title and this was followed with another pamphlet, Hindus and the Coming Census, was nothing less than a call to arms, to exploit the decennial census for communal advantage.
As a slogan, Vande Mataram had acquired a different resonance by now. Protests over the 1905 partition of Bengal exposed communal faultlines, and year 1907 witnessed a series of riots between Hindus and Muslims in eastern Bengal.
In Ghare Baire, his novel published after a period of reflection following his severance of all links to the Swadeshi movement, Tagore has his main protagonist, Nikhil, deprecating those “running amuck crying Bande Mataram”. Those who “needs must shout and deify their country in order to keep up their excitement”, Nikhil reflects, “love excitement more than their country”.
The Spirit of Anandamath
Unlike the novels of Tagore though, Anandamath has only had in all the years since it was written, a rather modest number of translations. Three translations will be considered here, of which the latest was published in 2004, with elaborate critical notes by Julius Lipner, a scholar with many years spent in West Bengal, including as a school student. Other notable translations include Aurobindo Ghose’s, which was begun in 1909, but left it incomplete till his brother took it up and had it published in the 1940s. Then there was one, with the title translated as Dawn Over India, by Basant Koomar Roy, first published in 1941.
Bankim’s factual reference point for Anandamath was the widespread unrest in Bengal in the aftermath of a lethal famine. The East India Company (EIC) had just established its rights as a revenue agent and begun sucking the land dry – its peasants and weavers and all craftspersons – in a ruthless drive for profit. A cataclysmic famine broke out in 1770, leaving uncounted numbers dead. This has earned a permanent place in Bangla folk memory as the “chiyattarer mannantara”, or famine of ’76, after the year 1176 in the Bangla calendar.
An account of those years of turmoil was published by the EIC employee W.W. Hunter in 1860. He described how the British encountered an adversary more formidable than the wild forests they tried to subdue, in “bands of cashiered soldiers, the dregs of the Mussulman armies … and the miserable peasantry, stripped of their hoard for the winter .. (who) .. were forced to become plunderers in turn”.
Bankim takes this factual background and transforms it into an epic battle of the Santans, a Hindu cult, against oppressive Muslim rule. He is at best ambiguous about the British through the novel, but ends with a full-throated paean of praise for the material benefits that colonial rule could bring.
The errors in historical recall are evident from the very beginning, when Bankim sets the scene. It is the year 1770, when famine stalked the land, and “Bengal had not yet fallen under British sway”. The British did nothing more than “collect the revenue”. They took no responsibility for “overseeing the lives and property of Bengalis”. That charge indeed, belonged to the “evil Mir Jafar, a vile, treacherous blot on the human race”, who dosed himself on opium and slept, while “the British took in the money and issued receipts, and the Bengali wept and went to ruin” (From the Lipner translation).
Bankim’s recollection of that dark period of history is rife with errors. Mir Jafar assumed the reign of Bengal following the Battle of Plassey, but was ousted by the British in 1761 and reinstated in 1763. By 1765 he was dead. To have held the dissolute Mir Jafar solely responsible for all the suffering of Bengal, while absolving the British, who were effectively in charge, was more than an act of poetic licence. It was a deliberate choice.
After one of the main protagonists of the novel is initiated into the Santan fold, the group sets out on a major mission. One of the warriors summons the faithful to the mission in these words: “For a long time we’ve been wanting to smash the nest of these weaver-birds, to raze the city of these Muslim foreigners, and throw it into the river – to burn the enclosure of these swine and purify Mother Earth again! Brothers, that day has come! … Come let’s raze that city of the foreigners to the dust! Let’s purify that pigsty by fire and throw it into the river!” Their mission accomplished, the Santans “set fire to as many Muslim homes as they could find”.
These words from the Lipner translation are substantially the same as in Aurobindo Ghosh’s, and there are many more similar passages right through Anandamath, in which violence against Muslims is celebrated as an existential necessity. Curiously, they go completely missing in the Roy translation published in 1941, part of a systematic pattern of excising every passage which may hint at communal antagonisms.
Bankim did in later years, disavow a notion of history as a narrative of “Bad Muslims and Good Hindus”. But the point is that he had to make the effort. And when the Congress decided in 1937, that it would only take the first two stanzas of the song into official observances, it was acknowledging the point that both the text and context of Vande Mataram mattered. Coming as it did during a complicated communal deadlock, that proved insufficient in preventing a parting of ways. But for the Hindutva government to begin a year-long commemoration at this stage, with sharp attacks against the Congress, clearly speaks of its divisive intent and eagerness to reopen old wounds.
