It took until India’s 80th Independence Day for ‘Vande Mataram’ to be rendered, for the first time, as part of the celebrations at the Red Fort. There was something strangely poignant about it. The war cry that had escaped a novel, entered the streets, unnerved an empire and accompanied bravehearts to prisons and gallows has taken nearly eight decades to reach independent India’s most symbolic ramparts.

But even this sacred inheritance is not without its share of objectionable arguments. Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore and many others, like the Congress in 1937, propose restricting its national use to the first two stanzas. How can a Muslim bow to Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati invoked in its later verses? Doesn’t its origin in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, with its difficult depiction of Muslim rule, make it exclusionary? Was India even a nation when Bankim imagined her as Mother?

These are not frivolous questions. But sometimes answers lie in recovering meanings we have lost. India was certainly not a modern nation-state for most of her history. India imagined herself differently. Long before passport, parliament or political boundary stood Bharatavarsha: a cultural and spiritual geography. The Vishnu........

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