Awakening the national sentiment

Reliving the past: Nirmalchandra Bhattacharyya's memoirs provide an engrossing account of a critical period of modern India Hiranmay Karlekar The Pioneer Thursday, April 19, 2007

With television dominating leisure and minds shying away from serious engagement, the reading habit has gone for a six. Most people read to relax. The premium is on fiction that one does not have struggle with. Serious stuff is read provided it is about something of compelling importance and is an easy read. This is why memoirs are important. Well-written, they read like fiction and, unlike impersonal narratives of events, causes, effects and analyses of social dynamics, talk about people and places and recall anecdotes, sights, sounds and ambiences.

All this came to my mind while reading late Prof Nirmalchandra Bhattacharyya's Bishmrita Bangla or Forgotten Bengal, particularly the part that talks of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya's National Song Vande Mataram. Bankimchandra used to keep small prose pieces and poems ready to be inserted as fillers in spaces left blank after the completion of the layout of his famous magazine Bangadarshan. His brother Purnachandra writes, according to the author, of an incident in which an employee of the Bangadarshan printing press found a poem written on a small piece of paper and said it was not bad for use as a filler. That was the song Vande Mataram. Bankimchandra was a trifle annoyed and said, "You won't realise now whether it is good or bad. You will realise some time later. I will possibly not be alive then." Saying this, he put the paper inside a drawer. Later, Vande Mataram was included in the famous novel Anandamath.

Vande Mataram, the song that became a rallying cry, inspired generations of freedom fighters. Nirmalchandra Bhattacharyya writes, "Sri Aurobindo accepted the song Vande Mataram as the complete symbol of India's national consciousness. From the beginning of the age of Swadeshi (1905) till today, the song Vande Mataram has been considered as the best mantra for awakening the national sentiment." Nirmalchandra Bhattacharyya, who witnessed the agitation against the partitioning of Bengal in 1905as a child, joined the Anushilan Samiti in 1912 and later became active in the Indian National Congress.