New Delhi: Ahead of the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had worn his beard and hair noticeably long—a look he changed after the polls, which the BJP lost to the TMC.
There were quiet whispers at the time that Modi could have been modelling himself after Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, drawing taunts from West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool Congress supremo Mamata Banerjee and her party colleagues.
However, the Bharatiya Janata Party did not back down. Its top leadership campaigned aggressively, promising to restore Sonar Bangla (Golden Bengal). The party’s manifesto carried the same title—inspired by the song ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, written by Tagore during the first partition of undivided Bengal in 1905.
Five years later, as Bengal heads to elections again, the BJP finds itself cornered over its Karnataka MP Visheshwar Hegde Kageri’s remark that the national song Vande Mataram, written in 1875 by another Bengali icon Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, should have been India’s national anthem instead of Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana.
Kageri’s remarks, coinciding with the Centre’s 150th anniversary celebrations of the national song, are pieces of the BJP’s latest cultural fusillade against the Congress. But its West Bengal unit has found itself pushed to the corner by the TMC, which has portrayed the comment as a slight to Tagore.
FIR for singing Amar Sonar Bangla
Adding to the BJP’s troubles is Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s recent direction to file an FIR against an elderly Bengali Congress worker in Silchar for singing Tagore’s ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’, now the national anthem of Bangladesh, at a party event last month. The move has sparked criticism and further alienated Bengali sentiment.
In sharp contrast to 2021, when it invoked Tagore to tug at Bengal’s heartstrings, the BJP now finds itself defending against accusations of slighting the bard in a state where his legacy remains deeply emotional and politically potent.
In 1937, the Congress Working Committee had adopted the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram to be sung at the party’s meetings and events, and after Independence this truncated version was made India’s national song.
The BJP claims that the Congress did so to appease sections of the Muslim community that opposed the references to idol worship in the full version of the song.
Prime Minister Modi has led the BJP’s charge against the Congress, accusing it of “sowing the seeds of partition” by adopting the truncated version.
The BJP’s popular narrative, however, sidesteps the role that Tagore played in impressing upon the Congress leadership that it would not be imprudent to adopt only the first two stanzas of the song for its “spirit of tenderness” and the emphasis it gave to the “beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland”.
The later parts of the song contain extensive references to Hindu goddesses that followers of Islam, which is a monotheistic faith, were not comfortable with, particularly with growing polarisation coinciding with the rise of the Muslim League.
The opposition also stemmed from Anandamath, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel about a rebellion in mid-18th century Bengal set against the backdrop of the famine. The song was added to the novel when it was published in 1882.
Historians have underlined that while in reality the rebellion was jointly driven by Hindu ascetics and Muslim fakirs against The East India Company, in Bankim’s fictional account, the portrayal pitted Hindu sanyasis against Muslims.
In ‘Birth of a Goddess: Vande Mataram, Anandamath and Hindu Nationhood‘, historian Tanika Sarkar writes that the novel “forces a split between the agents and victims of the famine: The agents are Muslims and the starving and dying people are always identified as Hindus.”
Vande Mataram in Bankim’s novel
Sarkar quotes a Hindu character in the novel as saying, “We do not want power for ourselves. We want to exterminate all the Muslims on this land as they are enemies of God.” The presence of ‘Vande Mataram’ in the novel in this context has been a bone of contention among Muslims in the sub-continent since then.
Yet, the powerful strains of nationalist sentiments embedded in the song played a pivotal role during the Swadeshi movement against the announcement of the partition of Bengal in 1903. Tagore himself set the tune for its first stanza, made Bankim listen to it, and first sang it at the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1896.
Tagore said he “found no difficulty in dissociating it from the rest of the poem and from those portions of the book of which it is a part, with all sentiments of which, brought up as I was in the monotheistic ideals of my father, I could have no sympathy”.
Later, when the Muslim opposition against the song grew shriller, with Mohammed Ali Jinnah taking the lead, in Bengal, it was not just Hindu conservatives, but sections of progressives, including Ramananda Chattopadhyay, the editor of the Modern Review, who had also resisted any possible truncation of the song.
In March 1938, Mohammed Ali Jinnah had written in The New Times of Lahore, “Muslims all over (India) have refused to accept Vande Mataram or any expurgated edition of the anti-Muslim song as a binding national anthem.”
Around that time, the Congress leadership, caught in a bind, had reached out to Tagore, seeking his opinion on adopting the song as the anthem of the party.
Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, the biographer of Tagore, had reproduced Tagore’s response in which he ruled out any outright rejection of the song, underlining that it “first caught on as an appropriate national anthem at the poignant period of our strenuous struggle for asserting the people’s will against the decree of separation hurled upon our province by the ruling power.
“The subsequent developments during which ‘Vande Mataram’ became a national slogan cannot, in view of the stupendous sacrifices of some of the best of our youths, be lightly ignored at a moment when it has once again become necessary to give expression to our triumphant confidence in the victory of our cause.”
However, in a nuanced shift from his earlier position in light of the changed circumstances, Tagore added that he freely concedes that the whole composition “read together with its context is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Muslim susceptibilities”.
However, he also built a strong case for the retention of the first two stanzas, saying they should “need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associated. It has acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own in which I see nothing to offend any sect or community.”
At the 1937 CWC, the Congress embraced Tagore’s advice, with Nehru saying, “The first two stanzas are such that it is impossible for anyone to take objection to, unless he is maliciously inclined. Remember, we are thinking in terms of a national song for all India.”
The CWC also adopted a resolution saying that the first two stanzas of this song have become a “living and inseparable part of our national movement and as such they must command our affection and respect.”
“The Committee recognises the validity of the objection raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song. While the committee have taken note of such objection in so far as it has intrinsic value, the committee wish to point out that the modern evolution of the use of the song as part of national life is of infinitely greater importance than its setting in a historical novel before the national movement had taken shape,” it said.
‘Convenient alibi’
Speaking to ThePrint, BJP leader and author Anirban Ganguly said that the Congress and the TMC’s attempt to use Tagore to defend the CWC’s 1937 decision was a “convenient alibi”.
Ganguly said that had the Congress been “so obedient” to Tagore, it would not have disregarded his opinion when he tried to bring about a truce between Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and the party’s high command in 1939.
“Vande Mataram was sung for three decades from 1905 to 1930s without any hindrance. And it is only when the Muslim League started protesting that the Congress began capitulating,” Ganguly added.
Former West Bengal BJP chief Dilip Ghosh accused the TMC of not paying enough respect to Bankim at a time the Centre had launched a year-long commemoration of 150 years of the song.
“The TMC is disrespecting the national icon and rather than celebrating 150 years of the national song it has gone ahead and issued a notification making a song by (Rabindranath) Tagore compulsory in schools across the State,” said Ghosh.
He was referring to the TMC government’s decision to make the singing of Tagore’s “Banglar Maati, Banglar Jol” (Bengal’s soil, Bengal’s water), composed in 1905 against the partition of Bengal, mandatory in morning school assemblies in the state.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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