Re-reading Bankim

Anandamath, Sanyasi resistance, and the Hindu awakening

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay

rime Minister Narendra Modi recontextualised the relevance of Vande Mataram while celebrating its 150 years since it was written. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is too often read narrowly as a nationalist novelist, and his momentous contribution, Vande Mataram, is too conveniently confined to the freedom struggle. Both readings are historically shallow and incomplete.

Bankim was not merely reacting to British colonialism but also responding to a much older and more profound civilisational unease. In this sense, Anandamath was not a political novel in the modern sense, but rather a cultural and spiritual call to awaken a Hindu society that had forgotten how to defend itself. The novel is rooted in the Sanyasi rebellion of the late eighteenth century. These were not imagined revolutionaries or romantic rebels inserted retrospectively into nationalist history. They were warrior-sanyasis-ascetics who took up arms when Hindu religious institutions, pilgrimage networks, and agrarian livelihoods were being systematically disrupted by exploitative revenue systems and political preda-tion. Their resistance was instinctive, civilisational, and defensive, unlike many who assume it as ideological in the modern sense.