The Congress paved the path to India’s Partition by adopting a truncated version of the Vande Mataram hymn as India’s national song in 1937, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has alleged.
He was speaking at the inauguration of a year-long commemoration of Vande Mataram, celebrating the 150th anniversary of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
“The spirit of Vande Mataram illuminated the entire nation during the freedom struggle. But unfortunately, in 1937, crucial verses of Vande Mataram, a part of its soul, were severed. Vande Mataram was broken; it was torn into pieces,” PM Modi said on November 7, adding that this division of Vande Mataram “also sowed the seeds of division of the country”.
He asked for an explanation from the Congress for the “injustice done” to the “great mantra of nation building”. PM Modi said that the current generation must understand this history, “because that same divisive thinking remains a challenge for the country even today”.
This was no novel charge. In 2018, while delivering a speech on Chattopadhyay in Kolkata, Union Home Minister Amit Shah — who was then the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s national president —said exactly the same.
“Congress’s politics of appeasement was expressed through its incomplete acceptance of Vande Mataram in 1937, and it led to the path to Partition. They divided the song and divided the nation,” Mr. Shah had said.
He had argued that the Congress made a blunder by linking the song with religion. “I am forced to draw its reference because we must take lessons from the mistakes of the past,” Mr. Shah said.
While the Hindu nationalists’ aversion to the truncated version of the song is well-known, no less known is the fact that the Congress decision of accepting only the first two stanzas of the six-stanza song as the national song came on the basis of Nobel laureate litterateur Rabindranath Tagore’s opinion.
Tagore had set the first stanza to tune when Chattopadhyay was still alive. He was also the person who first publicly sang the song — during a Congress session in Kolkata in 1896.
In 1937, when the national movement was sharply divided on the question of accepting Vande Mataram as the anthem of the Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, who was heading the committee concerned, sought Tagore’s opinion.
Prabhat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, the most authoritative biographer of Tagore, had reproduced Tagore’s response to Congress president Nehru.
Tagore wrote that he had no difficulty in dissociating the first two stanzas from the rest of the song. To him, the spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion and the emphasis it gave to beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland had a special appeal.
In contrast, having been brought up in the monotheistic (Brahmo) ideals of his father, he could have no sympathy with the rest of the poem and the novel of which it is a part.
“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,” he wrote.
He held that the first two stanzas “need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associated”. By ‘the story’, Tagore refers to the Ananda Math novel, a catalyst of Hindu nationalism in the late 19th century.
Tagore opined that the first two stanzas had “acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own in which I see nothing to offend any sect or community”. The letter also reflects Tagore’s reservations about the story of Ananda Math, the 1882 novel.
Hindu nationalists often highlight Nehru’s remarks that he thought the background of Vande Mataram was likely to irritate Muslims. It was from this sentiment of ‘Muslim appeasement” that he severed what PM Modi called parts of the song’s soul.
Nehru expressed this view in his letter to Subhas Chandra Bose on October 20, 1937. Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya quoted Nehru’s letter in his book, ‘Vande Mataram: The Biography of A Song’. “It does seem that this [the novel’s] background is likely to irritate the Muslims,” Nehru wrote to Bose.
There can be no doubt that Nehru’s observations were correct. More than the song, it was the novel that had irked the Muslims. And they cannot be said to be unjustified, as the novel does critical tampering with history to pit Hindus against Muslims.
First, he set the novel on the real life incident of the Sanyasi-Fakir rebellion of the 18th century, in which the likes of Hindu sadhu Bhavani Pathak and Muslim fakir Majnu Shah had joined hands against the British colonialists. But in Chattopadhyay’s narration, Majnu Shah and the Muslims were erased. It became Sanyasi Bidroho (rebellion).
Second, Chattopadhyay placed the Sanyasi rebellion against Muslims, not the British colonial powers. Dialogues like “maar gora” (kill the whites) changed to “maar jabon” (kill the Muslims) in the second edition of the novel.
Chattopadhyay had a curious trajectory. Known as part of the liberal sections of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia in the early years of his literary career, he gradually shifted to the conservative camp towards the end. During the early 1870s, he was busy building the Bengali national identity and Bengali nationalism, which also included Muslims, especially the Pathans (actually of Turcic origin). He took pride in Bengali rulers’ conquest of other parts of India and southeast Asia, even when they fought Hindu kingdoms.
However, towards the end of the decade, his focus shifted to building Hindu nationalism on a pan-India basis. Ananda Math is a product of that period — among his writings that Tagore considered of poorer literary value compared to his earlier work. But Ananda Math became influential for its political message that branded Muslims, too, as colonisers.
The polarising nature of Ananda Math could be guessed from what Ahmed Sofa, one of the leading intellectuals of Bangladesh, wrote in 1997. A self-proclaimed admirer of Chattopadhyay’s literary prowesses, Sofa said that it was through Ananda Math that the dream of a comprehensive Hindu Rashtra had its first full-length release.
“If any single person is to be blamed for the Partition of Bengal, it is Bankim,” he wrote in his essay, ‘Soto Borsher Ferrari Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’.
During the 1937 controversy around Vande Mataram, Bose appears to have been anxious about the fate of the song, with which he definitely had a deep emotional connection. In his October 16 letter to Tagore, Bose expressed his apprehension that the Congress Working Committee, which was scheduled to meet in Kolkata on October 26, was likely to “decide to discard the song”. Bose’s correspondences of the time, including that with the famous editor, Ramanancha Chattopadhyay, reveals the same anxiety.
However, when he actually got a chance to select a national song/anthem, as the head of the Indian National Army, he chose Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana over Vande Mataram.
After his ‘great escape’ from house arrest in Kolkata, Bose reached Germany in April 1941 and the Azad Hind Fauz adopted ‘Jana Gana Mana’ as the national anthem in November that year. The Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra played the tune as India’s national anthem in Bose’s presence in September 1942.
Why did Bose not rescue Vande Mataram from what PM Modi described as “injustice done to” it? By then, Bose, a staunch anti-communal nationalist, had surely understood the limitations of the whole Vande Mataram song in unifying the nation. And even as all efforts to prevent Partition failed, it cannot be forgotten that one-third of Muslims of undivided India chose secular India over Islamic Pakistan as their home in 1947.
On 24 January 1950, the Constituent Assembly adopted the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram as the national song, according it the same stature as Jana Gana Mana, the national anthem.
