(Mainstream
9 September 2006)
The Song and the Novel
by Sumit Sarkar
There is something mysterious about the current furore around the compulsory singing of Vande Mataram in schools. No mystery of course about why the BJP has enthusiastically taken up the issue, and already made it compulsory in Chhattisgarh, specifically mentioning that it has to be sung in madrasas. It likes nothing better than to provoke possible riots, and the issue enables it to avoid far more important questions that one would expect a normal Opposition party to take up, like farmers’ suicides or soaring prices. But it was the HRD Ministry that had started it all, by calling for the observance of September 7 as some kind of centenary occasion for the song. Vande Mataram was written in 1875, and published for the first time as part of Bankimchandra’s novel Anandamath in 1882.
The surprising thing is that nothing relevant to the song happened on September 7, 1906 (or 1905). The Congress did not take any decision then about its national status for the simple reason that it always met in the last week of December. The Benaras session of December 1905 did hear the song sung by Sarala Debi, in what had become a common practice since the beginning of the anti-Partition movement in Bengal a few months back. But there was no discussion or decision about a national anthem, there or in the session held exactly a year later in Calcutta in 1906.
I can make these statements with some authority, as I spent 10 years of my life researching nationalism in Bengal during 1903-08, and wrote a book about the Swadeshi movement in 1973 that is still widely read. Clearly the HRD Ministry had been wrongly advised, and has handed over an issue on a platter to the BJP, as part of the repeated Congress efforts to steal the Sangh Parivar’s thunder. One more effort at appeasement that every time proves harmful for secularism.
Vande Mataram was certainly often used as a slogan or song in the freedom struggle. But there were many other rallying cries. Let me cite two memorable instances. Bhagat Singh and his comrades threw a bomb in the Central Assembly in 1929 to protest an anti-labour law, raising the slogan ‘Inquilab Zindabad’, and Subhas Bose made Jana Gana Mana the anthem of his Azad Hind Fauj and Jai Hind its greeting, not Vande Mataram. The slogan and song, Vande Mataram, were quickly appropriated also by Hindu communalists, most evidently of course by the RSS. It has been often used as a war cry during riots, as counterpart to a similar misuse of Allah-ho-Akbar.
Muslims have objections to the deification of any entity except Allah, but what has vastly enhanced the problem is the way that the song ultimately becomes an evocation of a particular Hindu divinity. The discussions in the Congress in 1937 about the status of the song turned around the way what begins in the first two stanzas with an unexceptionable evocation of the beauty of the motherland then collapses the country into Durga. This was point made by Tagore when Nehru asked his opinion that year, and the Congress then decided to adopt only the first two stanzas. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya has recently described this debate in his book on Vande Mataram.
Vande Mataram, further, is an integral part of a novel that has been much translated and read. Anandamath is set in a Bengal ravaged by the famine of 1770, where the Company had already become the ruler, reducing the nawab to a puppet after the battle of Plassey in 1757. There were anti-British peasant revolts, sometimes led by Hindu and Muslim mendicants, sanyasis and fakirs, and Bankim was well aware of these facts. His novel, however, made the nawab and Muslims real tyrants, the British merely their compliant agents, and the whole story becomes one of aggression, brutality and violence by Muslims.
The fakir rebels disappear, and the sanyasis and peasant mobs mobilised by them call for anti-Muslim vengeance in luridly communal language:
We want to exterminate all the Muslims on this land as they are enemies of God—kill, kill the Muslims wretches…Brother, will that day ever come when we will demolish their mosques to build temples for Radhamadhav?
It has been suggested that Bankim was merely using Muslims as surrogate for the British, to evade censorship and trouble as a government official. Not perhaps an entirely convincing plea, for censorship, except on the public stage, was not really very stringent before the Swadeshi days. In any case, one needs to separate the possible intentions of the author, from the likely responses of readers. Is it really irrational for Muslims—and by no means Muslims alone—to object to the compulsory imposition of a song that collapses the country into a specific Hindu deity, and forms part of a novel full of apparently communal passages?
(Courtesy : The Times of India)