150th anniversary of Vande Mataram!
History of the National Song, how it was called ‘anti-Muslim’ and given a communal colour, and how Congress found it ‘not suitable as national anthem’
Posted from OP India on 7-11-2025
Muslims argue that since the Vande Mataram song was an ode to Mother India, singing it is against the “tenets of Islam” and a “sacrilege against Allah” because a Muslim can bow to only Allah and no one else.
7th November 2025 marks the 150th anniversary of India’s National Song ‘Vande Mataram’. Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the year-long commemoration of the iconic song at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium in the national capital.
150 years ago, Bankimchandra Chatterji, also known as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, wrote the Vande Mataram song on the auspicious occasion of Akshay Navami, which was on 7th November 1875. Appearing first in the literary journal
“Bangdarshan” as a part of Chatterji’s iconic novel Anandamath in 1882, the song invoked the motherland as a shining embodiment of strength, unity, prosperity and divinity. The song became synonymous with devotion to Bharat.
Chatterji’s composition transcended its literary origins and became a rallying cry for freedom fighters and nothing short of a national anthem during the independence struggle. Decades later, Vande Mataram became the national song of India, connecting Indians of independent Indian with those who fought and won freedom from the British colonial rule.
In the year 1896, Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore sang the poem for the first time at the Kolkata session of the Indian National Congress. It was officially adopted as the national song by the Constituent Assembly of India on 24th January 1950. At that event, Dr Rajendra Prasad had declared that Vande Mataram should be honoured equally with the national anthem, Jana Gana Mana.
Set against the backdrop of the Bengal famine of 1770, which claimed 10 million lives, the novel Anandamath portrays a dystopian Bengal ravaged by exploitation, starvation, deaths and oppressive foreign rule.
Vande Mataram is a lyrical ode to the motherland. It personifies India as a divine feminine figure akin to Goddess Durga. Rabindranath Tagore performed the song for the first time in front of an audience in 1896 during a meeting of the Indian National Congress.
Vande Mataram and the Fakir-Sanyasi Rebellion
At the heart of Anandamath and Vande Mataram lies the Sanyasi-Fakir Rebellion of the 18th century. The rebellion was a gritty precursor to the intensified resistance against British colonial rule.
Spanning 1763-1800, the Sanyasi-Fakir Rebellion united Hindu Sanyasis and Sufi fakirs or Derveshis in guerrilla warfare against the East India Company and its puppet Nawabs in Bihar and Bengal. The rebellions torched British outposts, raided Company treasuries, and disrupted revenue collection over the British bans on pilgrim taxes, tolls and grants by Zamindars. Earlier, when Zamindars were affluent, they used to give grants to ascetics; however, since the East India Company seized the Diwani or tax collection rights, demands for tax from zamindars increased. Resultantly, the zamindars were neither able to pay taxes to the Company nor give grants to Sanyasis and Fakirs.
Back in 1771, over 150 Hindu Sanyasis were killed for no apparent reason, triggering an uproar and violence in Natore (now in modern-day Bangladesh). The Britishers deemed the Sanyasis as plunderers and wanted to stop them from collecting money from zamindars or headmen en route to shrines. Many sects of Hindu ascetics, including the Dasanami Naga Sadhus, participated in this rebellion.
Drawing heavily from the history, Bankim Chandra fictionalised the Sannyasis as secret warrior-monks in Anandamath, the abbey of bliss or sacred abbey. These warrior-monks rise against a famine-stricken Bengal struck by the dual tyrannies, British mercantilism led by Governor Warren Hastings and the misrule of Nawab Mir Qasim. The rebels chanted Vande Mataram as their rallying cry, and the song went on to become the paean of Indian resistance against British colonial rule.
Vande Mataram given a communal colour due to its critique of the Bengal Nawab’s misrule, which led to famine
Anandamath was founded during the Bengal agrarian crisis, when the region was struck by three successive famines in the early 1770s, against the backdrop of the Fakir-Sannyasi Rebellion. However, interestingly, the novel blamed the agonising conditions on the ruler Nawab Mir Qasim and charged that the state’s downfall was caused by his tacit consent to the East India Company.
In Anandamath, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay unflinchingly depicts the Muslim Nawab of Bengal, modelled on Mir Qasim, as an absolutely corrupt tyrant whose policies exacerbated the famine in 1770. While the scenes of Nawab’s soldiers looting granaries and oppressing peasants, while the East India Company pulled the strings from afar, the novel fuelled allegations by the Muslims that it vilified Muslims as oppressors.
This, however, was far from the truth. The Bengali Muslim elite at that time, installed by the Mughal tyrants and subsequently co-opted by the British, were indeed complicit in the oppression of common people.
Muslims had a special objection to the invocation of Maa Durga and Hindu temple imagery in the Vande Mataram song, arguing that it was idolatrous and against Islamic monotheism.
“The East India Company was then calling the shots from behind the facade of a puppet Muslim Nawab. It was rack-renting peasant surplus to augment revenues from which the Company extracted a massive tribute. The drive was so relentless that three successive droughts produced a famine of catastrophic proportions in 1770. Much of the land returned to waste and approximately one-third of the population starved to death,” noted historian Tanika Sarkar in “Birth of a Goddess: Vande Mataram, Anandamath and Hindu Nationhood.”
The account, according to her, held “the Nawab responsible not just for widespread death and starvation, but also for a deliberate and total destruction of Hindus, of their honour, faith, caste and women. In other words, it forces a split between the agents and victims of the famine: the agents are Muslims and the starving and dying people are always identified as Hindus.”
All India Muslim League to Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Vande Mataram got characterised as an ‘anti-Muslim’ song
First sung by Rabindranath Tagore in 1896, Vande Mataram evolved into a battle cry during the 1905 partition of Bengal and quickly advanced to become a strongly evocative representation of the freedom movement. However, the Muslim leadership at that time failed to see and embrace the nationalistic song beyond their narrow fundamentalist mindset. They argued that since the Vande Mataram song was an ode to Mother India, singing of Vande Mataram is against the “tenets of Islam” and a “sacrilege against Allah” because a Muslim can bow to only Allah and no one else.
Sadly, this Islamist viewpoint remains prevalent even in contemporary India, as many Muslim maulvis and Islamists in general refuse to sing Vande Mataram.
Many of the Muslim leaders in British-ruled India, who labelled Vande Mataram as some sort of ‘anti-Muslim’ or ‘Hindu nationalist’ song, ended up being the proponents of the separatist agenda that culminated in the creation of Pakistan. These Islamists not only derided Vande Mataram as idolatrous and anti-Muslim but also argued that the deification of the motherland amounts to ‘shirk’.
All India Muslim League President Syed Ali Imam while speaking at the organisation’s second session in December 1908, declared, “I cannot say what you think, but when I find the most advanced province of India put forward the sectarian cry of ‘Bande Mataram’ as the national cry, and the sectarian Rakhi-Bandhan as a national observance, my heart is filled with despair and disappointment; and the suspicion that, under the cloak of nationalism, Hindu nationalism is preached in India becomes a conviction.”
Three decades later, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who partitioned the country on Islamic lines, echoed similar views in an article dated 1st March, 1938, published in The New Times of Lahore:
“Muslims all over India have refused to accept Vande Mataram or any expurgated edition of the anti-Muslim song as a binding national anthem.”
Muslim League members walked out and Jinnah used the episode for his divisive agenda and to rally Muslim support for the same.
Notably, the main offence over the full Vande Mataram song stemmed from the lyrics “त्वंहिदुर्गादशप्रहरणधारिणीकमलाकमलदलविहारिणीवाणीविद्यादायिनी, नमामित्वाम्नमामिकमलांअमलांअतुलांसुजलांसुफलांमातरम् (Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen, With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen, Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned, And the Muse a hundred-toned, Pure and perfect without peer, Mother lend thine ear, Rich with thy hurrying streams, Bright with thy orchard gleams, Dark of hue O candid-fair In thy soul, with jewelled hair And thy glorious smile divine, Loveliest of all earthly lands, Showering wealth from well-stored hands! Mother, mother mine! Mother sweet, I bow to thee, Mother great and free.)
Jawaharlal Nehru truncated Vande Mataram to placate Jinnah and other Islamists
The Congress party’s ‘placate the Muslims at the cost of Hindus’ policy is not a post-independence phenomenon. Rather, the INC began to cede Hindu interests one at a time to appease Muslims, even in the pre-independence era. Since the Muslim community was offended by the Vande Mataram song due to its later stanzas mentioning Maa Durga, the Congress, instead of countering the Islamists by emphasising Bharat’s Hindu cultural and traditional foundation, chose to genuflect before the Islamist intransigence.
In consequence of Congress’s abject surrender, the Vande Mataram song was mutilated, and four stanzas were dropped out of six to satisfy those who, just years after, betrayed the nation.
It would not be wrong to say that, besides the support of Islamists, Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s biggest strength was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. M.K. Gandhi’s suicidal empathy for Jinnah and the ‘Muslim cause’ and undeserved attention helped Jinnah stay relevant and influential.
In 1937, Gandhi, apparently wary of alienating his Muslim ‘allies’, advocated that only the first two stanzas, which do not mention overt Hindu religious imagery, be sung. Thus, in the Faizpur Congress Session in that year, only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram were sung. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also highlighted this fact in his speech on Friday.
To understand how submissively the Congress leadership acquiesced to appease Jinnah and other Islamists, one needs to go through the correspondence and addresses of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
In a letter to Urdu poet Ali Sardar Jafri, Nehru stated that the song Vande Mataram is unrelated to the Congress and is “not suitable as a national anthem.”
“The Congress has not officially adopted any song as a kind of national anthem. In practice however the Bande Mataram is often used in national gatherings together with other songs. The reason for this is that 30 years ago this song and this cry became a criminal offence and developed into a challenge to British imperialism,” Nehru wrote.
Although Nehru acknowledged the popularity and significance of the Vande Mataram song in uniting Indians against the British, he further tried hard to reinforce Congress party’s secular credentials and wrote, “I do not think anybody considers the words to have anything to do with a goddess. That interpretation is absurd. Nor are we concerned with the idea that the author of the book, which contains this song, had in his mind when he wrote it, because the public does not think on these lines.”
In his pursuit of distancing Congress from ‘Hindu nationalism’, Nehru went on to write, “It contains too many difficult words which people do not understand and the ideas it contains are also out of keeping with modem notions of nationalism and progress. We should certainly try to have more suitable national songs in simple language.”
Similarly, in his letter to Subhash Chandra Bose dated 20th October 1937, Nehru said that the Vande Mataram song was meant to “irritate the Muslims.”
“I have managed to get an English translation of Ananda Math and I am reading it at present to get the back- ground of the song. It does seem that this background is likely to irritate the Muslims…There is no doubt that the present outcry against Bande Mataram is to a large extent a manufactured one by the communalists. At the same time there does seem some substance in it and people who are communalistically inclined have been affected by it. Whatever we do cannot be to pander to communalists’ feelings but to meet real grievances where they exist,” Nehru wrote.
Similarly, in his letter to Subhash Chandra Bose dated 20th October 1937, Nehru said that the Vande Mataram song was meant to “irritate the Muslims.”
“I have managed to get an English translation of Ananda Math and I am reading it at present to get the back- ground of the song. It does seem that this background is likely to irritate the Muslims…There is no doubt that the present outcry against Bande Mataram is to a large extent a manufactured one by the communalists. At the same time there does seem some substance in it and people who are communalistically inclined have been affected by it. Whatever we do cannot be to pander to communalists’ feelings but to meet real grievances where they exist,” Nehru wrote.
Gandhi and Nehru’s arbitrary truncation of Vande Mataram to appease Muslims reminds of another similar doing of MK Gandhi. The corruption of the Hindu bhajan ‘Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram’ to secularise it and include ‘Allah’.
Although Gandhi is credited with popularising this hymn by using it during his famous Dandi March in 1930, the lyrics were taken from Shri Nama Ramayanan, an old religious text penned by Sri Lakshmanacharya, and modified by Gandhi.
While Gnadhi inserted “Ishwar Allah tero naam, sabko sammati de Bhagwan”, the original lyrics made no mention of Allah. Raghupati raghava rajaram, patita paavana sitaram, Sundara vigraha meghashyam, Ganga tulasi shaligram. Bhadra girishwara sitaram, Bhagat janapriya sitaram. Janaki ramana sitaram, Jaya jaya raghava sitaram.
Be it the truncation of Vande Mataram or bastardisation of Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram song, these episodes showed unmatched alacrity in stripping Hinduness of a song evoking nationalist fervour and distorting a Hindu religious song to address the reservations held by Muslims showed that just like in the post-independence Congress era, even in pre-independence times, it was always the responsibility of the Hindu majority to accommodate the demands of the Muslim minority while expecting nothing but betrayal in return.
Neither Gandhi nor Nehru nor the Congress party ever denounced the verses in the Holy Quran that call idol-worshipping a shirk/sin and ordain capital punishment for idolatry. Gandhi embraced the Khilafat Movement, which eventually gave strength to Muslims in Malabar and resulted in the Hindu genocide, also known as the Moplah riots of 1921. Gandhi embraced Jinnah, who eventually declared Direct Action Day, resulting in the killings and rape of thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and other non-Muslim communities.
No wonder Nehru was opposed to the restoration of the Somnath Temple, citing ‘Hindu revivalism’.
History tells us that a Hindu departure from its religious roots has only pushed Muslims towards their religious extremist foundation. The more secular the Hindu leadership becomes by ceding its religious ground, the further Islamists expand their tentacles.
Vande Mataram: India’s National Song that does not get celebrated by all Indians
On 24th January 1950, Vande Mataram was adopted as independent India’s national song by the constituent assembly based on a proposal by President Rajendra Prasad. While the song is sung in school assemblies, Independence Day events, and patriotic programs, the portions truncated by Congress back in 1937 remain comparatively lesser known and sung. Such is the impact of Congress’s surrender.
Even today, the Muslim bodies in Jammu and Kashmir, including Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema (MMU) and Anjuman-e-Ahl-e-Hadith, have come out in opposition against a government directive asking schools across Jammu and Kashmir to commemorate the 150th Vande Mataram anniversary.
These Muslim bodies have given the same old excuse of infringement upon Muslim religious freedom and “against our religious beliefs”. They have also called an order to commemorate Vande Mataram, as “a deliberate attempt to impose an RSS-driven Hindutva ideology on a Muslim-majority region under the guise of cultural celebration.”
Islamists in general, too, have been opposed to singing Vande Mataram or raising Bharat Mata ki Jai slogans, calling it against their religious tenets. As the nation commemorates the sesquicentennial of Vande Mataram, India must remember the historical communalisation and derision of the song by Islamists and take measures not to repeat the sinful mistake Congress leadership made back then. Accommodating the unreasonable demands of Islamists does not bolster secularism or ensure peace; it rather amounts to tightening the noose around one’s own neck.
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Shraddha Pandey is a Senior Sub-Editor at OpIndia, where she has been sharpening her edge on truth and narrative. With three years in experience in journalism, she is passionate about Hindu rights, Indian politics, geopolitics and India’s rise. When not dissecting and debunking propaganda, books, movies, music and cricket interest her. Email: shraddha@opindia.com
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Tags- OPINDIA, Vande mataram, History
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