Tagore’s role in adoption of India's National Song

The 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram - India's National Song penned by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee - is being celebrated with much fanfare.

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While the song is being extolled for its patriotic and cultural virtues, the narrative being forwarded about its truncation in 1937 - which is silent about Rabindranath Tagore's role in this - is flawed.

It was indeed Tagore who set the first stanza of Vande Mataram to tune while Chatterjee was still alive. Tagore mentioned in a letter in October 1937 to Jawaharlal Nehru about singing it in the presence of the latter. He added that he was also the "first person" to sing Vande Mataram "before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress," most likely in 1896. While this has found mention in the many pieces that have been published in the past few weeks, Tagore's critical role in truncating the song has either been ignored or glossed over.

Tagore's intervention occurred against the backdrop of the growing antipathy of the Muslim League towards Vande Mataram in the 1930s. In 1938, at the Calcutta session of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, declared in his presidential speech that the Congress, then in government in several provinces, was trying to "impose the Vande Mataram song in the legislatures" causing "bitterness and opposition." The same year, at Karachi, Jinnah asserted that Vande Mataram was "not only idolatrous but also its origin and conception a hymn of hatred to Muslims."

The Congress was aware of these sentiments with Rajendra Prasad writing to Vallabhbhai Patel in September 1937, noting that many Muslims object to Vande Mataram on the ground that it was an "invocation to a Hindu Goddess" and akin to "idol worship."