How the Muslim League and the Congress viewed Vande Mataram

Political thinker Aurobindo Ghosh’s translation of the song begins with the line “I bow to thee, Mother” and speaks about the figure of the mother as a giver of boons and bliss, as someone who holds strength and bestows it on her people. Later stanzas compare her to the goddesses Durga and Laxmi, and describe her as a saviour.

Muslim League’s views on Vande Mataram

In his book, Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song (2003), Bhattacharya wrote that the song took a new life after the British colonial government announced the partition of Bengal in 1905, along religious lines.

The politically charged atmosphere of the early 20th century further pushed the song to the centre stage. Bhattacharya wrote, “The emergence of the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha among the contestants in the elections of 1926; major communal riots in different parts of India… created an ambience of tension in which the song increasingly became one of many causes of Hindu-Muslim conflict.”

Primarily, the Muslim League saw the song as promoting idol worship, which is forbidden in Islam. At the Sind Provincial Muslim League Conference meeting in Karachi in October 1938, MA Jinnah said, the Congress started the Legislatures “with a song of Vande Mataram… which is not only idolatrous but in its origin and substance a hymn to spread hatred for the Musalmans.”

By the 1930s, events like the 1937 elections led to the formation of provincial governments, adding to the tensions. Bhattacharya wrote, “At this juncture we find Sir Henry Craik, then the head of the home department and member of the viceroy’s executive council, writing to Lord Baden-Powell that the song ‘actually originated as “hymn of hate” against Muslims’.”

Congress’s views on Vande Mataram

It became imperative for the Congress to take a position on the song, also because it held power in several provinces by the ’30s, wrote Bhattacharya. Additionally, the subject kept reappearing amid its outreach programs towards Muslims.

Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Subhas Chandra Bose in October 1937, saying the outcry against Vande Mataram was “to a large extent a manufactured one by the communalists. At the same time there does seem some substance in it and people who were communalistically inclined have been affected by it. Whatever we do cannot be to pander to communalist feeling but to meet real grievances where they exist”.

Bose, however, defended the song. Nehru also wrote to Tagore, who said he could not sympathise with the sentiments in the latter stanzas. In a letter to Nehru, Tagore wrote: “To me the spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion, the emphasis it gave to beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland made a special appeal, so much so that I found no difficulty in dissociating it from the rest of the poem and from those portions of the book of which it is a part, with all the sentiments of which… I could have no sympathy.”

Tagore mentioned that he “was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress”, likely the 1896 session. He added that a “national song, though derived from it, which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem, need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less of the story with which it was accidentally associated. It has acquired a separate individuality and an inspiring significance of its own in which I see nothing to offend any sect or community.”

The Congress Working Committee then attempted a resolution on the song in October 1937. Nehru helped draft the resolution, which initially said, “It is obvious that great songs and anthems cannot be produced to order. They come when genius wills it, and even when they come they have to seek the suffrage of the people.”

It said the recognition of a national anthem must wait “till such a song has proved its worth by its excellence and popularity and the sentiment that gathers around it”. However, these passages were omitted.

The final resolution spoke of the first two stanzas having become “living and inseparable part of our national movement”, and that there was “nothing in these stanzas to which anyone can take exception. The other stanzas of the song are little known and hardly ever sung. They contain certain allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India. The Committee recognise the validity of the objection raised by Muslim friends to certain parts of the song.”

It thus recommended that the song should be restricted only to the first two stanzas when sung at national events, while giving “perfect freedom to the organisers to sing any other song of an unobjectionable character, in addition to, or in the place of, the Bande Mataram song.”

Thus, the Indian National Congress adopted a part of the text as the national song. “This was the version adopted by the Constituent Assembly at the instance of Rajendra Prasad in 1951 as the national song, along with Jana Gana Mana, which was designated the national anthem,” Bhattacharya wrote.