Zenith of patriotic ardour

A novel whose central message is so frighteningly obscurantist

Opinion > ASHOK MITRA The Telegraph Friday, October 13, 2006

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s first publication in 1856, when he was barely eighteen, was a slim volume consisting of both prose and poetry. Twenty years later, he published a volume exclusively of verse. He gradually moved away and concentrated on works of fiction. That marked the beginning, really and truly, of modern Bengali literature...

Vandemataram cannot be detached from Anandamath. The song is integrally linked to the novel; it cannot be considered without taking into account the central message the novel conveys. Bankim was one of the greatest writers this country has produced. His Bengali prose has an incomparable majesty. He deserves all the homage the nation is capable of offering to a writer of his stature. Even so, how does one tear oneself away from the horridness of the last chapter of Anandamath, where the messiah-like character commands the crusading sannyasi, Satyananda Thakur, along the following lines:

“Do lay down you arms. Your deed is done, the musalman rule has been crushed. There is no particular hurry to establish a Hindu raj immediately; that task could wait. It is a good thing the British have taken over; the Enlightenment their rule would bring is bound to transcend us to a state of beatitude which in turn would assist us usher in the sanatan Hindu dharma”?

Indians will have to make up their mind. A song associated with a novel whose central message is so frighteningly obscurantist is ill suited to unite a nation that professes to take pride in its diversity. It was, therefore, plain silly on the part of the ministry of human resource development to issue the kind of circular it did, which has been responsible for exhuming a long-buried controversy.

This is not to dispute the fact that Vandemataram as an invocatory slogan did lift hundreds of thousands of our countrymen to the zenith of patriotic ardour during the freedom movement: it had a tremendous relevance in that phase. Unfortunately, sections of the Hindu community debased its sanctity by using Vandemataram as a sectarian war cry from the late Twenties onwards to counter the Muslim orison of Allah-ho-Akbar during the communal riots in different parts of the country. What was once deployed to divide the nation cannot possibly unify it.