“It was thirty-two years ago that Bankim wrote his great song and few listened;” Aurobindo wrote in Bande Mataram on April 16, 1907, “but in a sudden moment of awakening from long delusions the people of Bengal looked round for the truth and in a fated moment somebody sang Bande Mataram. The mantra had been given.” The time lag noted by Aurobindo suggests that the meaning and the reception of a text can change depending on the historical context.
The keenest insight into the character of the song at the time of its composition was offered by Benoy Kumar Sarkar. “Chatterji’s patriotic doctrine of the country as the object of worship,” he wrote, “is integrally associated with his Comtist religion in which humanity (and not divinity) commands adoration. Bande Mataram is a Comtist hymn, an anti-theocratic ode of rationalism, freed from the cult of gods.” The mere mention of goddesses in the later stanzas of the song did not alter its fundamental humanistic orientation. Sarkar was right in observing Bankim’s debt to Auguste Comte, even though the Bengali author drew as much from the affective as the rationalist aspect of Comtist thought. Sarkar proposed the equation: Bankim’s Dharmatattva=ComtexGita. A further influence in the 1870s was Giuseppe Mazzini’s religion of humanity.
Bankim introduced another context to his song when he inserted it into his novel, Ananda Math, first serialized in Bangadarshan in 1881 and then published as a book in 1882. It was this context, not the song itself, that Jawaharlal Nehru reckoned in 1937 was “likely to irritate” the Muslims once he read the novel in an English translation. Bande Mataram was first set to music and sung in public by Rabindranath Tagore at the Calcutta Session of the Indian National Congress in 1896. Yet, at this stage, the song had not acquired any special status beyond that of other patriotic songs like Amra Milechhi Aaj Mayer Dake (1886) or Oi Bhuban Manmohini (1896). It required the tumult against George Nathaniel Curzon’s partition of Bengal and the swadeshi upsurge of 1905 for the affective charge inherent in Bande Mataram to catch fire.
Bande Mataram became an electrifying political slogan from August 7, 1905, as a huge procession wound its way from College Square to the Calcutta Town Hall where the resolution to boycott British goods was adopted. The fervour soon spread to the Bengal countryside. In Barisal on May 20, 1906, “an unprecedented Bande Mataram procession of Hindus and Mussalmans numbering over ten thousand men” led by the redoubtable Ashwini Kumar Dutt “passed through all the principal streets of the town, singing national songs and crying Bande Mataram and Allah-o-Akbar. Both Hindus and Mussalmans carried Bande Mataram flags.” (The Bengalee, May 23, 1906).
Fourteen years later, during the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920, Mahatma Gandhi in consultation with Shaukat Ali proposed three national slogans — Allah-o-Akbar, Bande Mataram or Bharatmata ki Jai, and Hindu-Mussalman ki Jai. He preferred Bande Mataram to Bharatmata ki Jai as it would be “a graceful recognition of the intellectual and emotional superiority of Bengal” (Young India, September 8, 1920). Both Hindus and Muslims wished to contribute their cultural symbols to the cause of a unified, anti-colonial struggle.
Culture does not divide communities, using culture to flaunt political
triumphalism does. In 1937, the beautiful song that had inspired patriotic
resistance since 1905 began to be performed in provincial legislatures to demonstrate an electoral victory. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who is not known to have objected to Bande Mataram until then, now made it a part of his criticism of Congress ministries in seven provinces.
The matter required a dignified resolution in the larger cause of unity in the nationalist movement against the British among all religious and linguistic communities of India. It is with this larger purpose in mind that Subhas Chandra Bose proposed taking Rabindranath Tagore’s advice on this sensitive issue. “In our national quest we need peace, unity, good sense, (shanti chai, oikya chai, shubhobuddhi chai),” Tagore wrote to Bose on October 19, 1937, “we don’t need endless rivalry because of one side’s obstinate refusal to yield.” Once Bande Mataram was transformed into a national slogan, Tagore said in a press statement, many noble friends had made unforgettable and huge sacrifices for it. Tagore argued that the first part of the song stood on its own and had an inspirational quality, the part that he had sung in 1896. During the AICC meeting in Calcutta in October and in November of 1937, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were staying as guests of the Bose brothers in Sarat Chandra Bose’s Woodburn Park home. The Congress leadership collectively accepted Tagore’s advice and resolved that the first part of the song would be sung in national meetings. There was nothing to prevent the entire song to be sung in other settings. My father, Sisir Kumar Bose, has described how a frail Tagore came to see an ailing Gandhi and had to be carried up the stairs in a chair by Sarat and Subhas Bose, Nehru and Mahadev Desai.
In a lengthy interview given to my parents, Sisir Kumar Bose and Krishna Bose, and me in March 1976, Netaji’s close associate, Abid Hasan, described the vigorous discussion led by Netaji held at the Free India Centre in Berlin to select India’s national anthem. Netaji had already chosen Jai Hind as India’s national greeting or salutation. The three wonderful shortlisted songs were Bankim’s Bande Mataram, Iqbal’s Sare Jahan se Achha, and Rabindranath’s Jana Gana Mana. Netaji’s verdict was in favour of Jana Gana Mana. An elaborate orchestration was done and played with great gusto by the Hamburg Radio Orchestra as India’s national anthem in Netaji’s presence on September 11, 1942.
When Netaji accepted the leadership of the Indian Independence League from Rashbehari Bose in Singapore on July 4, 1943, Bande Mataram was sung in the Cathay Theatre by a women’s choir. On the eve of the proclamation of the Azad Hind government on October 21, 1943, Netaji, Abid Hasan and the lyricist, Mumtaz Husain, produced a Hindustani version of Jana Gana Mana based on three of the five stanzas of Tagore’s song. The talented INA Orchestra conducted by Ram Singh wrote a score following Dinendranath Tagore’s tune but with a few subtle variations. Subh Sukh Chain Ki, the Hindustani rendering of Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana, was sung as the Azad Hind anthem as Netaji proclaimed India’s freedom. Once I supplied the notation of Subh Sukh Chain Ki obtained by my father from Malaya for the archives of Netaji Research Bureau, T.M. Krishna and his students have been performing this anthem with deep sensitivity and passion in musical concerts worldwide to thunderous applause.
Two weeks after independence and Partition, on August 29, 1947, Bande Mataram was sung at Gandhi’s prayer meeting in Calcutta. Everyone on the stage and in the audience, Hindus as well as Muslims, including Huseyn Suhrawardy, stood up to show their respect. Gandhi alone remained respectfully seated, explaining that standing up for a national song was a Western practice and not a requirement of Indian culture.
Bande Mataram has had a chequered history in the service of the nation. If we abide by Rabindranath’s sage advice given in 1937 about its performance at national gatherings, the song will help unite and not needlessly divide our citizenry.
Sugata Bose is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University