Ideally, a debate on the 150-year-old ‘Vande Mataram’ should have united all the parties in Parliament. The divine depiction of Mother India as a goddess to be worshiped and freed from bondage, the patriotic fervour that it evoked during the freedom struggle, and the spiritual aura about the lyrics truly elevated the song by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay to the status of Song Celestial.
Though written in the historical background of Bengal, the song acquired an exalted status independent of the novel Anandamath. It became a popular war cry for the lakhs who fought against the 1905 Partition of Bengal, which was annulled three years later. ‘Vande Mataram’ had by then achieved a divine status.
The latter part of the song’s lyrics truly elevates Mother India to a much higher stature, comparing the nation to Devi Durga, the embodiment of valour and Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. Though not written specifically as a national anthem, it is obvious, as Jawaharlal Nehru said, “great songs and anthems cannot be produced to order, they come when genius will it”.
National anthem controversy
Ironically, the same Jawaharlal Nehru, as Prime Minister on 21 June 1948, wrote to Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a minister in his Cabinet, that ‘Vande Mataram’ is not feasible as a national anthem. It was “chiefly because of its tune, which does not suit orchestral or band rendering”. Nehru told Mukherjee that “Jana Gana Mana, on the other hand, has already been greatly appreciated in foreign countries as well as in India, and the music of it has a great appeal to people who hear it in India or abroad”.
From Rabindranath Tagore, poet Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Dakhina Charan Sen, and MS Subbulakshmi—so many celebrated singers of India have performed the song. There have been several renditions of ‘Vande Mataram’ and all of them have achieved some level of popularity.
Clearly, music, tune, or orchestral rendering did not hinder the acceptance of ‘Vande Mataram’ as the national anthem. It was the massive opposition raised by the Muslim League and the Congress’s capitulation that brought the song under controversy. As the British strategy of ‘divide and rule’ had successfully created the twin narrative of ‘two-nation theory’ and ‘no Independence till Hindu and Muslim unity’, the Congress proposed an abridged version omitting references to the Hindu deities—but it was never accepted by the song’s opponents, leaving the issue caught in a classic stalemate.
Muslim League leaders, particularly Muhammad Ali Jinnah, spared no opportunity to attack the Congress as a ‘Hindu party’ and MK Gandhi as a ‘caste Hindu’ and a ‘totalitarian dictator’. The Muslim League’s resolution to oppose the Quit India movement went to the extent of saying, “the Congress policy is to cajole or coerce the British Government into surrendering power to Congress—a Hindu body with microscopic following of other communities in utter suppression of one hundred million of Mussalmans.”
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Lack of consensus
Seven decades after Independence, the “Hindu Congress” is accusing the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) on the same lines as the Muslim League had done. Ideally, Congress should have initiated a debate on ‘Vande Mataram’ and forced the government to accept the full version of the song as the national song instead of the truncated one. This would have made a huge course correction and set the record straight. Sadly, even on an emotive issue like this, which catapulted the Congress to the status of a political party and then to uninterrupted power for over five decades, there was a total lack of clarity in the approach. The party preferred to play the same appeasement card that led to Partition. Neither the ruling party nor the Congress and other opposition parties have conducted themselves in a manner that calls for sanity.
The ‘Vande Mataram’ debate has highlighted several strengths and weaknesses of the parliamentary system and the way its foundational debates are conducted. It is strange that there was no consensus on discussing a song that brought together various hues of freedom fighters, from the revolutionaries to the peaceful satyagrahis, from those who found merit in violent confrontation to those who meekly but valiantly offered the other cheek to British brutality.
‘Vande Mataram’ has the innate potential to ignite patriotic fervour in the present generation just as it did one and a half centuries ago. Unfortunately, the way the debate went in the House only goes to prove that all the political parties, guided by narrow political considerations, could not jettison the historical baggage.
Seshadri Chari is the former editor of ‘Organiser’. He tweets @seshadrichari. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)