HVK Archives: Reclaiming Vande Mataram-Turning our back on the Nehruvian
Reclaiming Vande Mataram-Turning our back on the Nehruvian - India Today
Swapan Dasgupta
()
1 September 1997
Title: Reclaiming Vande Mataram - Turning our back on the Nehruvian
distortions
Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: India Today
Date: September 1, 1997
In the end it just took two words of a well-known but now largely
forgotten, mantra to instil feeling into the 50th anniversary celebrations.
The spectacular resuscitation of two words was sufficient to efface the
tackiness of the commemorative midnight session of Parliament and the
banality of the speeches. Vande Mataram did for India last week what it has
always done: bring out the innate but sublimated patriotism of the people
who have never wavered in their commitment to India.
It is a matter of minor detail that the Vande Mataram of 1997 is more
identified with composer A.R. Rahman than with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's
Ananda Math. Like most good things in life, nationalism too is prone to
bouts of renewal. What matters is the strand of continuity. Ever since it
entered the political lexicon during the swadeshi movement in 1905, Vande,
Mataram epitomised both defiance and hope. That spirit persists to this day.
Rahman's contribution to the process can hardly be understated. By
providing a contemporary musical touch to Vande Mataram, he was not merely
exhibiting his undoubted creativity, he was also contesting a very
insidious form of political correctness that has resulted in the
dissipation, of India's nationalist energies. Rahman's was a frontal
assault on the political tradition that was responsible for taking the soul
out of Indian nationalism and giving it a clinical flavour.
In today's heady atmosphere, it is necessary to recall that for much of
independent India's history, Vande Mataram was first marginalised and
subsequently driven underground. The man most responsible for this was
Jawaharlal Nehru, who, if Nirad Chaudhury is to be believed, was "usually
repelled by anything pronouncedly Hindu".
Nehru's aesthetic abhorrence of Bankim's depiction (most evident in the
second and third verses of the song) of the country as a mother goddess on
par with Durga and Lakshmi led to Vande Mataram losing its natural claim to
be independent India's national anthem. Nehru was tacitly echoing a 1937
Muslim League resolution that denounced the song as "not merely positively
anti-Islamic and idolatrous in its inspiration and ideas. but definitely
subversive of the growth of genuine nationalism in India".
The most effective retort to this misplaced disapproval was provided by
Mahatma Gandhi. "As a lad when 1 knew nothing of Ananda Math or even
Bankim, Vande Mataram had gripped me," he wrote in The Harijan of July 1,
1939. "I associated the purest national spirit with it. It never occurred
to me it was a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus. Unfortunately, now we
have fallen on evil days. All that was pure gold before has become base
metal today." Gandhi understood the ominous implications of abandoning a
national symbol on account of sectarian disquiet. Nehru was not so wise.
His secularism made an entire community vulnerable to charges of cussedness.
In repackaging Bankim for a generation untutored in either the past or
Sanskritised Bengali, Rahman has rebuffed this secular fundamentalism.
India is an ancient nation with a new republic. its sense of nationhood
cannot be manufactured in subcommittees for the promotion of a scientific
temper. To endure, the symbols of Indianness have to be rooted in real life
and culture. The Nehruvian crusaders tried to bowdlerise heritage and left
independent India with an emotional void. Reclaiming Vande Mataram could
be a first step in the larger discovery of India.
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