National Song, Divided Meaning

On November 7, 1875, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s lines first saw the light of print in the literary journal Bangadarshan; what began as a lyrical ode in Sanskritized Bengali would, over the next century, become a civic ritual, a rallying cry and finally, by 1950, the nation’s “national song” — Vande Mataram — sharing symbolic space with Jana Gana Mana in India’s repertory of public memory. That long pedigree explains why the 150th anniversary in 2025 was never going to be a private affair: the Centre inaugurated a year-long commemoration, mass singing was organised across ministries, and the Prime Minister led public ceremonies that attempted to reconnect contemporary India to the song’s nineteenth-century imaginative call. But the anniversary has done something more revealing than pageantry: it has exposed how brittle the consensus around national symbols actually is, how historical memory is contested in the present, and how a unifying cultural practice can be refracted into partisan performance.

To revisit the spirit of Vande Mataram is to begin with its literary and political genesis. Bankim’s poem, later embedded in the novel Anandamath (1882), is simultaneously an aesthetic utterance and a mobilising image of the nation as mother, invoking natural abundance and moral strength. Its first two stanzas, which foreground the land and its visible plenitude rather than particular dogmas or rituals, were the ones embraced by national movements and later formally adopted as the national song; later stanzas, however, make explicit reference to Hindu goddesses, and it was this aspect that triggered ambivalence and political negotiation even during the freedom movement, leading leaders to pare the public text to those verses felt to be more inclusive. That compromise is, in itself, an instructive origin story: the song became national through selective inclusion: a text cropped and canonised so that it could serve a plural polity. That selective canonisation is a reminder of both the song’s power and its fragility.

What, then, is the purpose of a song like Vande Mataram in the enterprise of nation-building? A national song is not merely a lovely phrasing set to melody; it is a civic technology for common identity. It furnishes shared ritual, a phonetic script for collective memory, and a vocabulary of emotion — pride, gratitude, obligation, and many more that help ordinary people imagine themselves as part of a larger political project. When recited in schools, at public functions or in moments of national crisis, such songs bind citizens into an affective community; when they are taught as living practice, they convey historical narrative as much as abstract sentiment. The government’s initiatives around the 150th — mass singing, curricular encouragement, public broadcasts — precisely reflect the spirit of this civic function.

So why has the anniversary turned sour in parliamentary debate and public argument? The short answer is political translation: symbols that are meant to be cumulative repositories of memory can be reinterpreted as instruments of identity politics. Recently, the rituals around the 150th have been accompanied by sharp accusations in Parliament: ministers and opposition leaders have traded barbs about historical fidelity, the Congress’s alleged “suppression” of the song, and whether excisions in 1937 constituted an act of appeasement that paved the way to later divisions. Some have urged that Vande Mataram be restored to a status equal to the anthem, and that respect for it be writ into constitutional duties — proposals that, whether rhetorical or programmatic, convert symbolic celebration into legislative aspiration.

The partisan turn is not merely theatre; it matters because it changes the conditions under which the song is taught and practised. When a ritual becomes a test of political loyalty, and singing is read as a performance of partisanship rather than as an act of collective belonging, its capacity to build shared civic culture atrophies. Parliamentary exchanges this season have at times been performative rather than reflective: charges of hypocrisy from both sides, claims about who “treated” the song unfairly, and calls for mandatory singing in institutions echo an older pattern in which national culture becomes a terrain of competitive virtue-signalling rather than deliberative inclusion.

Yet the diagnosis should not harden into cynicism. The early debates around Vande Mataram, which led leaders like Gandhi and Tagore to steer public use toward the two stanzas seen as less sectarian, illustrate how pluralism can be practically negotiated. Those historical decisions are a template for contemporary resolution: instead of zero-sum contests over purity, the polity can favour practices that preserve the song’s emotive core while respecting the heterogeneity of India’s citizens. The Madras High Court’s 2017 direction that the song be sung in educational institutions — itself controversial and critiqued for its blanket approach — pointed, perhaps unintentionally, to the pedagogic potential of habitual recitation; but it also showed the hazards of judicial fiat replacing consensual cultural pedagogy. Legal compulsion does not build heartfelt allegiance; it risks converting respect into rote compliance.

So, how far have we achieved the song’s vision, and where have we failed? On one hand, Vande Mataram still enjoys institutional recognition, public visibility and official commemoration; the fact that the state has mobilised resources to mark 150 years demonstrates a continuing investment in patriotic ritual. On the other hand, the very need for an anniversary campaign underlines a deeper anxiety: public attachment to symbolic repertoire does not automatically translate to the substantive commitments the song imagines — social equity, shared prosperity, and the secular citizenship that would let diverse communities equally embrace national metaphors. The song’s motherland metaphor asks citizens to recognise a common patrimony; our political debates show that many Indians still experience the republic as unevenly distributive and culturally contested. A song cannot substitute for policy; it can only amplify or, in the worst case, mask the absence of justice.

If the 150th should leave a constructive legacy, it must be twofold. First, reinterpretation must be pedagogic, not punitive: curricular modules, contextual historical teaching, and voluntary cultural programmes can help young people understand the poem’s origins, its edited public form, and the reasons for past controversies; an informed citizenry can choose to make the song meaningful rather than coerced. Second, the song’s symbolic reclamation must be paralleled by political acts that give content to its ideals: stronger commitments to social inclusion, minority rights and civic equality will make any national hymn resonant across communities. Otherwise, poetry will be called upon to do political work that only policy can accomplish.

The 150th anniversary is thus less a celebration of a fixed triumph than a moment of interrogation. It asks whether national rituals are living bridges or brittle monuments. The answer depends on choices: whether leaders use the anniversary to reopen old wounds for present gain, or whether they use it to remind us that symbols are only as potent as the public life they animate. Vande Mataram began as a poetic summons to love and labour for the motherland; its future relevance will be decided not by parliamentary score-settling but by whether that summons becomes, in practice, an invitation to build an India where every citizen can bow to a common mother without fear that the gesture exacts exclusion. If the 150th can nudge the polity in that direction, replace diatribe with dialogue, and performative patriotism with lived equality, then the anniversary will have honoured the song’s truest purpose. If it remains a constant battleground for partisan claims, the poem’s melody will be muffled beneath the noise of politics and its promise left, once again, only partly fulfilled.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is an author, political analyst and columnist