Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram grew far beyond the novel in which it first appeared, becoming a powerful voice of the freedom struggle and a lasting part of the country’s collective memory.

As a song that belongs to the whole nation, the question of which version Indians should sing together calls for accommodation rather than religious or political assertion.

The Congress Working Committee reached that answer once already, in 1937. 

Objections had come in about parts of the poem, and the committee drew a line inside it. 

The opening two stanzas describe the motherland through rivers, harvests, breezes and moonlight, images any citizen can embrace without hesitation. The stanzas that come after move into different territory, addressing the country through the figures of Hindu goddesses. 

The committee’s solution was to confine national renditions to the first two stanzas. 

Rabindranath Tagore, who gave the poem its tune, recognized the same divide. None of this insulted Bankim or diminished the poem. It simply acknowledged that India holds more than one faith inside it.

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On 24 January........

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