We learn from history that we don’t learn from history. But what we have to urgently learn as Indians is that we cannot solve problems of the present by dissection—however scholarly—of the past issues. We have too much history and too many issues which do not lead to solutions for current problems. Worse still, they confound the discussion by opening up patently useless Pandora's boxes. Same should hold for Vande Mataram and its allegedly convenient/conspiratorial curtailment.

This concoctedly raging debate (bait?) between the BJP and Congress is totally unnecessary, hackneyed and wasteful. It has no relevance to the 21st century Bharat! The present issues facing the country are not going to be solved by whether Vande Mataram is sung in full/curtailed version; in fact, even if it is not sung at all! Addressing the rot in education, appointing the much-advertised committee under Nandan Nilekani, pre-empting the would-be problems in agriculture the monsoon irregularities are bound to create, punishing the police for the excesses in Delhi during the CJP agitation and other such wet blankets should top the political agenda. Parliament should stop wasting steam over getting Amit Shah to speak in the house or exposing those who allegedly conspired to curtail Vande Mataram—Indian National Congress in 1937. None of them is around at present and cannot be held innocent/guilty! If they were right/wrong, it's no excuse to break heads after 90 years. Yet like the bad coin, this sore blight keeps coming back.

If I may reminisce, this issue had flared up in 1976 in the Yerawada Central Prison on Jan 26—the Republic Day. At the end of the mandatory flag-hoisting, the RSS detinues had insisted on singing the full 6-stanza Vande Mataram and the non-RSS detinues had disrupted the function with protest slogans. The ensuing melee was absolutely uncivilized—pushing, showering abuse, jostling—leaving even the hard-trained prison officers dumbstruck! Outside, they could have arrested the offenders for disruption of 26 Jan celebrations. But here the offenders were already under arrest!

I have described the aftermath of this unseemly incident of 60 years back elsewhere (see my Marathi book Janancha Pravaho Chalila or its translation The People’s Tide Moved On) and skip it here. The point here is that the molehill was made into a mountain because the empty minds of all jailed during the Emergency had turned into devil’s workshops and were all the while looking to take jibes at one another. The Janata Party, which was to throw out both Indira and her Emergency, was not even a pipe dream: It would take shape one year later in Jan 1977.

It has been a habit of the intellectuals and politicians of our country to rake up ghosts of the past and discuss them till they froth/foam at the mouth. In the immediate present, one was floated by NaMo himself—Congress is responsible for the negative image of the Hindu community, religion, tradition, ethos—as if ‘Hindu’ manifested perfection and harmony before Congress was born! ‘Whose sin was the partition of India’ is another such issue. One more is ‘Did India win her Independence only by non-violent Gandhian strategy’. The never-ending mud-slinging at Sawarkar is one more; so is ‘who betrayed who between Shivaji and Afzal Khan’; also whether Tipu Sultan was a patriot; was Dr Ambedkar hand in glove with Nizam of Hyderabad; and if Jinnah was the secular head of a theological state; the list can go on …

We know that we learn from history that we don’t learn from history. But what we have to urgently learn as Indians is that we cannot solve problems of the present by dissection—however scholarly—of the past issues. We have too much history and too many issues which do not lead to solutions for current problems. Worse still, they confound the discussion by opening up patently useless Pandora's boxes. Same should hold for Vande Mataram and its allegedly convenient/conspiratorial curtailment.

Let us look at this song/poem/National Anthem (capitals mine!); what occasioned it, what it means and what it came to imply during the freedom movement. Vande Mataram first appeared in Aanand Math—a very popular Bangla novel which sort of made up for the failure of the 1857 uprising through poetic justice! It is a saga of brave, selfless warriors ready to sacrifice everything for the Motherland. Like all patriotic songs, it is noble in content and diction but rather repetitious.

It has six stanzas—of which the first two and the sixth are full of high-flown adjectives for the Motherland and should be non-controversial: then and now. The third stanza mentions 14 crore hands ready with swords to protect her, and the next regards her as the embodiment of vidya (knowledge), religion (Hindu, by implication?) and the praan (vitality) of the body politic. The 5th stanza aims to substantiate this point by looking at the Motherland as the incarnation of the three (Hindu) goddesses—Durga (might, essentially military), Laxmi (wealth), and Saraswati (knowledge). The description of Durga and Laxmi is rather too faithful and picturesque—Durga with arms in 10 hands, and Laxmi gallivanting on a lotus—and can suggest idol worship—an anathema to Muslims. The reference to 14 crore swords must have irked Gandhi. But that happened much later. The song appeared in print in 1882; it was sung at the Calcutta Congress by Tagore in 1896. Nobody had any issues with it—at least they were not voiced—till 1937 when the Congress passed a resolution that only the first two stanzas would be the National Anthem. It is clear that political developments in four decades dictated the curtailment.

Here is the reason: The partition of Bengal of 1905 (a sort of dress rehearsal of 1947?) was the starting point. It was the imperial conspiracy to encourage the two-nation theory which shaped politics till 1947. This was the beginning of Vande Mataram—because of its total Sanskrit-Bangla wording—to be seen by non-Hindus as a Hindu hymn. The Muslim League was formed in 1906, and the non-Hindus realized that they had to invent their own patriotic songs. Iqbal’s Saare Jahanse Achcha (1904) was already available and must have caught the imagination of even the less Brahminical Hindu Congressmen! Bankim’s song was respected, but it had to be ‘explained’ to the masses; Iqbal spoke the language of the people.

In between, there was another interesting turn to the issue. Tagore must have sensed the growing but dormant alienation of Vande Mataram among non-Hindus and been thinking of a way out. So he set himself the task and came out with Jana-Gana-Mana in 1911 and presented it at the Congress session of 1911. But that too did not escape misinterpretation. The English press saw a welcome to George V in it and reported accordingly, while the Bengali press said it was addressed to the abstract leader of the country’s destiny. Moreover, if Tagore was meticulous to mention all major religions and linguistic regions of India, his reference to ‘east and west’ came close to the imperial boast ‘the Sun never sets on the Empire’. His choice of the word Rajeshwar (King of Kings) is perilously close to Emperor. Tagore also had another slip—he called the captain of India’s destiny both father and mother - vidhata and mata!

I presented this short overview so that readers have some feel of the problems of applying literature to politics and vice versa. Writers—at least notionally—are free of contemporary constraints, but politicians have to take them into account. So, literature cannot be straightway absorbed in politics, and all politics cannot go into literature; there are different rules that govern the two creative domains. Literature may be aware that a metaphor is basically a turn of language, but politics might take it literally—as with Durga and the 14 crore sword-wielding hands! Tagore was surely talking of an abstract maker of destiny, but the politicised press turned him into a loyal British subject. It stuck even after Tagore returned his knighthood in protest of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre!

Last but not least. I support the shortening of Vande Mataram—for my own reasons. Firstly, it is too long. Secondly, it is too Sanskritised—I have passionate love for Sanskrit, but know that it is not the language of the masses. Thirdly, there are too many tempos of singing it. Fast, where meaning is lost; medium, where it drags; and slow, where it will send the audience to sleep or excuse themselves—remember some 50 years back when the National Anthem was played after every popular movie show and became almost a joke? Unfortunately, the Jana-Gana-Mana also suffers from these negatives—a creative quirk?

I suggest that the status quo need not be disturbed, as any compulsion is bound to boomerang and backfire. The curtailment justifies itself—if not on political grounds, but from compulsions of practicality. Any knowledgeable authority of mass psychology will concede that the larger the attendance, the shorter the need to be all common observances—welcome songs, prayers, eulogies, national anthems et al…

- Vinay Hardikar
vinay.freedom@gmail.com

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