The national song and a history lesson

When Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote Vande Mataram in 1875, it was composed as a hymn longer than the two verses we know as the national song. An even longer version of the hymn later appeared in his novel Anandamath (1882), set against the Great Bengal Famine of the early 1770s.

On 7 November, while inaugurating a year-long commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram’s first appearance, Prime Minister Narendra Modi replayed an old RSS tune — that in dropping the later stanzas of the song, the Congress in 1937 had sown the seeds of Partition.

As if on cue from the master, Sangh ideologue Ram Madhav echoed the same claim in a column that appeared in the Indian Express the next day. The central thrust of the criticism is that by adopting only the first two stanza — the ones that do not contain explicit Hindu religious imagery — the Congress ‘mutilated’ the song to appease Muslims — and this decision, the specious argument goes, paved the way to Partition. This argument is, in fact, a wilful misreading of how and why the CWC took the decision to abridge the national song.

The most significant rebuttal of the Sangh retelling of this story comes from the documented exchange between Rabindranath Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, leading up to the CWC resolution.

Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya details this pivotal consultation in his authoritative work Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song. ‘Three days before the [CWC] meeting, on October 26, 1937, Tagore wrote to Nehru on this issue. It was Gurudev [as Tagore was widely known] himself, with his own special relationship to Vande Mataram, who suggested that the first two stanzas of the song be adopted... His letter, in fact, profoundly influenced the resolution in its entirety.’

Tagore, who had himself set the tune for Vande Mataram and first sang it at the 1896 Congress session, made a distinction between the song’s political power and its religious source. In his view, the first two stanzas, which invoked the motherland in terms of its natural beauty, bounty and secular power (‘rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with thy orchard gleams’ etc.) were a truly national expression.

The Great Bengal Famine referenced in Anandamath was one of the deadliest in recorded history, killing millions. It devastated the Bengal Presidency (modern-day West Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and parts of Bangladesh), killing about a third of the population, according to some estimates.

The effects of the crop failure due to drought were greatly exacerbated by the exploitative taxation, hoarding and export policies of the East India Company that prioritised British profits over local relief.

In the religious-nationalist context of Anandamath, where the sanyasis rally to fight starvation and oppression, raid grain stores and attack tax collectors — actions mirroring the 1770s Sanyasi Rebellion, triggered by famine-induced desperation — the song Vande Mataram (Hail Motherland) is a war cry.

But unlike the historical Sanyasi Rebellion (between 1763 and 1800), which featured armed uprisings against the British East India Company by both Hindu sanyasis and Muslim fakirs, Bankim’s novel reimagines this slice of history with a communal overtone, where Hindu sanyasis, living in the eponymous Anandamath (Abode of Bliss) vow to liberate Mother India, personified as a starving, enslaved goddess, from the local Muslim nawabs (seen as tyrannical tax collectors) and the East India Company (symbolised as the root evil).

Tagore’s advice to Nehru was clear: ‘I freely concede that the whole of Bankim’s Vande Mataram poem, read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem susceptibilities, but a national song, though derived from it, which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem, need not suffer from that disadvantage.’

Context of the 1937 CWC Resolution

The Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in Calcutta (now Kolkata) from 26 October to 1 November 1937, under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru.

The resolution adopted on 29 October limited the singing of Vande Mataram at national gatherings to its first two stanzas, acknowledging that while these evoked ‘the beauty and abundance of the motherland’ with ‘nothing objectionable from the religious or any other point of view’, the later stanzas contained ‘certain allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India.’

The resolution was an attempt to be inclusive amid rising communal tensions post-1937 provincial elections, where the Congress had formed governments but faced protests from Muslim League members in legislatures against mandatory singing of the full song.

While Muslim nationalist leaders in the Congress — notably Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who served as Congress president (1933–34) and was a key voice for Hindu–Muslim unity — viewed the resolution positively, as a compromise fostering unity, separatist voices like Jinnah in the Muslim League were opposed to the adoption of the song even in its abridged form.

The CWC resolution was, therefore, a consensus-building move, steered by secular-minded nationalist leaders of the Congress — the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Subhas Bose, Rajendra Prasad and Sarojini Naidu. In accepting the concerns [of the League separatists] as valid, the CWC was signalling empathy for Muslim objections without compulsion.

This stand was echoed in Gandhi’s 1939 clarification: “The Congress… has retained as national song only those stanzas to which no objection could be taken on religious or other grounds.”

To then dress a ‘unity-first’ resolution as a move that sowed the seeds of division, of Partition, as Prime Minister Modi and his minions would have us believe, is not just a lie, it’s also a mockery of the very song they wish to exalt and commemorate.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai. You will find more of his writing here