![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Bankimchandra Chatterjee wrote Vande Mātaram when the genre of the patriotic song started to flourish in Bengal in the decades following the Revolt of 1857, a time which also saw Bengali literature take a decisively nationalist turn. Despite similarities in verbal content, there were crucial musical differences between Bengali and European patriotic songs, differences that were progressively bridged in the compositions of Rabindranath Tagore and Qazi Nazrul Islam. This essay traces a history of musical and verbal differences and argues that because Vande Mātaram belonged to an earlier phase in the history of the Bengali patriotic song, its function in Indian national culture came to be quite different from that of ‘La Marseillaise,’ the French national anthem, with which Bankimchandra’s song was initially compared. Furthermore, because of the lack of a stable and iconic melody that can be traced back to the moment of the song’s creation, Vande Mātaram has fared less well as a patriotic song than it has as a poem or (above all) as a slogan. For the same reason, however, it has been adapted more frequently than any other European or Indian patriotic song, and it is primarily through adaptations that Vande Mātaram has retained its relevance for Indians across a spectrum of different identities and political positions.
Acknowledgement
I thank Siddharth Satpathy for his support, and Anupama Mohan, Anna Schultz, Subhasis Sen, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on draft versions of this essay.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Abbreviations
Notes
1. All throughout this essay, Vande Mātaram in italics indicates the song, and “Vande Mātaram” in quotation marks indicates the slogan.
2. The two underlying fundamental assumptions behind the “work” concept of music is that, firstly, a musical “work” can be fixed with respect to the score and is repeatable in performances and, secondly, that “performances themselves are transitory sound events intended to present a work by complying as closely as possible with the given notational specifications”: see Goehr, “Being True to the Work,” 55. On the philosophical problems behind such underlying assumptions and contestations from various angles of the “work” concept in Western music (including that of dating the emergence of such a concept in Western music), see Goehr “Being True,” and The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works; White, “If it’s Baroque”; Steingo, “The Musical Work Reconsidered”; and Butt, “What is a ‘Musical Work’?”.
3. Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, admitted that it would be impractical to expect a singer to reproduce a melody with the same degree of precision as that in a recording. Considerable liberty was also given to the performer in Western music, ranging from the use of figured bass in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the use of improvised embellishments to the melodic line till the early decades of the nineteenth century. Even early nineteenth-century works by composers as canonical as Ludwig van Beethoven are nowadays performed, as a result of the historically informed performance practice movement, with embellishments that depart from the written score. For an illustration of this point, hear, with the score in hand, the first movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for piano and violin, op. 47 (1804) in the widely acclaimed 2009 recording by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov.
4. See, for example, S. Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram (henceforth VM); T. Sarkar, “Birth of a Goddess” (henceforth “Birth”); Lipner “Icon and Mother” (henceforth “Icon”), and the introduction to his translation of Ānandamaṭh.
5. All throughout this essay, I will refer to the names of Bengali poets and musicians by their first names in keeping with Bengali-language scholarly practice.
6. “National Anthems” in Grove Music Online.
7. See Matthew Gelbart, The Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” 234.
8. See Frédéric Robert, “de Lisle,” in Grove Music Online.
9. See Prout, “Weber’s ‘Kampf und Sieg’,” 110. An account of how Weber wished for the fragmentation of the “Ça ira” melody to be interpreted can be found in his article, “On composing the cantata Kampf und Sieg” (26 January 1816); English translation in Martin Cooper and John Warrack, trans. and eds., Carl Maria von Weber: Writing on Music, 159–63, esp. 162.
10. Like ideas more generally, tunes travel across cultures as well, often in versions different from those found at the earliest traceable source. Hence, for example, the melody of a late sixteenth-century Italian madrigal, “La Mantovana,” in a rhythmically altered form and in a slightly slower tempo became the principal theme for Vltava (first performed in 1875), the second of six patriotic symphonic poems collectively known as Má vlast (My Homeland), by the Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, while a Romanian variant of the same madrigal melody eventually became “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. There is nothing inherently Czech, or Jewish, or nationalistic in the melody, for the (Italian) words of the first two lines of “La Mantovana” are as follows: “Flee, flee, flee from this sky,/Harsh and unyielding, relentless and freezing.” My point here, therefore, is only descriptive – how Europeans read the political in patriotic songs – since the assumption that traditional, popular, and folk melodies somehow embodied the purported characteristics of their nations of origin was undoubtedly problematic.
11. See Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music, 16. A useful collection of essays on Ratner’s concept of musical “topics” can be found in Danuta Mirka, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory.
12. The most well-known example of such a melody is that of the current German national anthem, originally composed by Joseph Haydn in 1797 as the Austrian national anthem, and subsequently used by the composer in the slow movement of his Emperor String Quartet in C major, op. 76 no. 3.
13. Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, Prabandha Panchāśat (henceforth PP), 78.
14. Rosinka Chaudhuri traces some of the earliest nationalist texts, written in English by Bengali writers, back to the 1830s: see her “Hemchandra’s Bharat Sangeet,” 216. In her anthology of Bengali nationalist songs and poems, among the earliest proto-nationalist Bengali poems that Anuradha Roy includes is an undated song, “Nānān deśer nānān bhāṣā” (The different languages of different nations) by Ramnidhi Gupta (1741–1839), which could have been composed as early as the 1760s, and “Swadeś” (Motherland; 1830) by Ishwarchandra Gupta (1812–1859). See Roy, Swadeśprem, 77–81, 477–480.
15. Bankimchandra may have used these two languages in order to highlight the connections between a modern Indian language such as Bengali (his mother tongue) and Sanskrit, a language that was central to discourses on Aryanism and, therefore, carried prestige among Europeans and upper-caste Indians.
16. See Roy, Swadeśprem, 105–21, 482–84.
17. Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, Bankimchandrajībanī (henceforth BJ), 201.
18. Chaudhuri, “Hemchandra’s Bharat Sangeet,” 214. As has been noted by several Bankimchandra scholars, the revolutionary activities of Vasudev Balwantrao Phadke from 1873 onwards in the Bombay province were known and widely admired by the Bengali intelligentsia, and parallels have been drawn between Phadke’s guerilla-style tactics and that of the rebels (“Santan”-s or “children” of God) in Bankimchandra’s Ānandamaṭh. Phadke’s activities also offered a real-life parallel to the militant nationalism envisioned by Hemchandra, although Phadke appears to have hoped for a free Indian republic rather than for a specifically Hindu country. The Russian Orientalist Ivan Pavlovich Minayev, who described Phadke and his political aspirations in positive terms in his diary entry of 14 Feb 1880, is known to have have met Bankimchandra during his first and third visits to India (1874–5, 1885–6). Ānandamaṭh, in which Vande Mātaram was finally inserted, was written after Minayev’s first visit to Bankimchandra, but before Minayev’s third visit to India. Hence, if he took inspiration from Phadke’s political activities for his novel, Bankimchandra must have followed the matter on his own. For more on Bankimchandra and Phadke, see C. Bandopadhyay, Ānandamaṭh Utsasandhane, 29–67.
19. Tanika Sarkar, “Birth,” 3965. Sarkar identifies the play as Kiranchandra Ray’s Bhāratmātā, while S. Bhattacharya identifies the author as Kiran Chandra Chattopadhyay: see his VM, 77 and 117 n. 15. Asitkumar Bandopadhyay states that a play called Bhārate Yavana (Non-Hindus in India) by one Kiranchandra Bandopadhyay was staged at the Great National Theatre, established in 1873: see his Bānglā Sāhityer Itibritta, vol. 8, 408–9. Some of Tagore’s relatives published an anthology of patriotic songs, set to texts from Bhāratmātā, Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nīl Darpan, and other contemporary plays: see Santidev Ghosh, Rabīndrasaṁgīt, 106. On the image of the nation-as-Mother, see Bagchi, “Representing Nationalism,” WS65–71.
20. It was, however, first published in 1906 [Pouṣ 1313 BS]: see Roy, Swadeśprem, 112 and n.
21. For an English-language overview of the genre, and of Nazrul’s contributions to it, see Goswami, Kazi Nazrul, 35.
22. Indeed, by the late 1920s, Rabindranath, too, started composing patriotic songs such as “Sankachero bihbalatā” (1929), which can be notated in 6/8 metre.
23. Although Jadubhatta (Jadunath Bhattacharya) is often cited as the first musician to set Vande Mātaram to music, the attribution is not correct. Bankimchandra knew Jadubhatta and studied music with him (Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, BJ, 406), but did not approach him to set the song. For the attribution to Jadubhatta, see, for example, Chandvankar, “Vande Mataram”.
24. A European poem that brought together prayer and militancy is “Gebet während der Schlacht” (Prayer during the battle) by the poet Theodor Körner (1791–1813), which was set to music by Weber (1814) and Franz Schubert (1815).
25. Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, BJ 533. It is imaginable that l. 10 of the song might have been changed in order to make it singable in the Qawwali metre specified in all five editions that Bankimchandra published during his lifetime.
26. see Bor, Raga Guide, 118; and Daniélou, North Indian Music, 2: 236–45.
27. Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 243, citing Richard Widdess.
28. S. Bhattacharya, VM, 24.
29. See Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Rachanāvalī (henceforth BR), 2: 72.
30. Amitrasudan Bhattacharya (PP, 77) provides a different date of publication for this essay. However, the date I provide is based on an actual copy of Bangadarśan, the first series of which is available in its entirety, in PDF scans of the original volumes, in various online sources.
31. P. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 102.
32. Raychaudhuri, Europe Reconsidered, 114. As Amiya P. Sen has pointed out, the theme of lack of professional recognition is at the centre of Bankimchandra’s satirical work, Muchirām Guḍ (1884), and he “developed a strong dislike for the world of the ‘Deputy’ (Magistrate),” the rank he held for most of his career as a civil servant: see his Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, 31–32.
33. For a detailed analysis of the responses of these now-forgotten writers, responses that reveal the contextual background for Bankimchandra’s own change to a conservative position, see P. Chatterjee, Nation, 97. In 1860, Rajnarayan Basu suggested to the poet Michael Madhusudan Datta that he write a poem on the mythical conquest of Sri Lanka by the Bengali prince Vijaya. Citing Camões’s Lusiads as a model, Basu clarified that poetry was different from history, and that history could be altered substantially in order to create the kind of epic poem he had in mind, one that was “much required to infuse patriotic zeal and a warlike spirit into the breasts of our degenerate countrymen.” For Rajnarayan’s letter (in English) to Madhusudan, see Yogindranath Basu, Michael Madusudan Datter jīvan-charit, 240–245. For an analysis of the possible reasons for Madhusudan’s move away from the kind of literature Rajnarayan felt was the need of the day, see Suddhaseel Sen, “Colonial Education.”
34. A useful anthology of nineteenth-century Bengali patriotic poems and songs is Anuradha Roy, Swadeśprem. Roy’s Nationalism as Poetic Discourse is a meticulous monograph, in English, on these patriotic texts.
35. See, for example, the essay, “Bāngālār Itihās” (1875; Bangdarśan 3.10 [Magh 1281 BS], 448–53) and especially “Bāngālār Itihās sambandhe kayekti kathā” (1880; Bangdarśan 7.8 [Agrahayan 1287 BS], 362–69). In the latter, Bankimchandra describes the Muslim historian as a “cow-slaughtering, head-shaving” person, as well as being “full of vanity about the superiority of his own race, deceitful, and Hindu-hating”: see Bankimchandra Chatterjee, BR 2: 291. He added that a Bengali who took a Muslim historian’s work at face value was, in his opinion, unworthy of being called a Bengali.
36. Quoted in Dutta and Robinson, Tagore, 60.
37. The Marathi and Kannada translations were followed by those in Gujarati (1901), Hindi and English (both 1906), Telugu (1907), Malayalam (1909), and Tamil (1919), while those in Assamese and Manipuri were published after Indian Independence: see S. Bhattacharya, VM, 54.
38. Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, PP 76–77.
39. Bankimchandra Chatterjee, BR 1: 663–665; Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 144–47.
40. In a letter that forms part of his controversial exchanges with Rev. William Hastie on the subject of idolatry, Bankimchandra wrote: “Modern science has shown what the Hindus always knew: that the phenomena of nature are simply the manifestations of force. They worship, therefore, Nature as force. Sakti, literally and ordinarily means force or energy. As destructive energy, force is Kali, hideous and terrible, because destruction is hideous and terrible. As constructive energy, force is the bright and resplendent Durga” (The Statesman, 28 October 1882; rpt. in BR 3, 214; emphases in the original).
41. A translation of the final version of Vande Mātaram can be found in Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 144–46.
42. Sri Aurobindo also made a verse translation that begins as follows: “Mother, I bow to thee!”.
43. The official version of Vande Mātaram as national song ends here (https://knowindia.india.gov.in/national-identity-elements/national-song.php, accessed 27 Aug 2019).
44. Sarala Devi Chowdhurani replaced the number “Sapta-koti” (Seventy million) with triṅśa-koti (three hundred million) by during her performance at the INC in Benares (1905), a number retained by Seemab Akbarabadi in the first Urdu translation of the song.
45. Sarala Devi changed the dvi-saptakoti (twice seventy million) here with dvi-triṅśa-koti (twice three hundred million). Akbarabadi’s Urdu translation, however, translates this line as follows: “Hum sāth karoṛ bāzuon mein talwār lekar terī hifāzat karenge” (With swords in our seventy million hands we will protect you; translation mine). The first Urdu translation, therefore, did not reflect this numerical doubling, found in both Bankimchandra’s original and Sarala Devi’s alteration.
46. This line was changed to “Abalā keno mā ato bale” in later editions. Bankimchandra may have made this change in consultation with his friend Kshetranath Mukhopadhyay, the first to set the poem to music.
47. The quotation marks ended here in the original edition.
48. An allusion to the Goddess Lakshmi (Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 245).
49. An allusion to Saraswati (Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 245).
50. Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 147; for the original Bengali, see Bankimchandra Chatterjee, BR 1:665.
51. Lipner, Ānandamaṭh, 144; for the original Bengali, see Bankimchandra Chatterjee, BR 1:663.
52. So little known was Kshetranath’s setting of Vande Mātaram that, in 1937, Tagore could tell Jawaharlal Nehru that Tagore “had the privilege of originally setting its first stanza … when the author was still alive” and that he “was the first person to sing it before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress”: see S. Bhattacharya, VM, 21. It seems reasonable to surmise, therefore, that Kshetranath’s setting in Malhār never circulated in any form except the cryptic instruction regarding rāga and tāla in multiple editions of Ānandamaṭh.
53. Williams, “Music,” 493.
54. This version, published in Bālak (Jaishta 1292 BS), is reproduced in C. Bandopadhyay, Ānandamaṭh Utsasandhāne (henceforth AU), 159.
55. This version, published in Śatagān (n.d.), is reproduced in C. Bandopadhyay, AU, 160–164. The printed scores for both Pratibhasundari Devi’s transcription and this one use the term rāginī (i.e. a female rāga). It is interesting to note that Deś, a rāga associated with the territory (country, state, native land, region, or village) was traditionally classified as a female rāga, rather than as a male one.
56. S. Bhattacharya, VM, 20–21.
57. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn9AULGtgGI (accessed 25 Aug 2019).
58. Quoted in Amitrasudan Bhattacharya, PP 77; translation mine.
59. S. Bhattacharya, VM, 23.
60. S. Bhattacharya, VM, 80.
61. Simab Akbarabadi was the nom-de-plume of Aashiq Hussain Siddiqui (1882–1951). Akbarabadi’s translation is given in full in C. Bandopadhyay, AU, 372.
62. As I have noted in my footnote to l. 9 of the song, Akbarabadi writes sāth karoṛ (seventy million) even though Bankimchandra’s original puts the number at twice seventy million, while Sarala Devi puts the number at twice of three hundred million.
63. For a relatively recent example of such an objection, see Lipner, “Icon,” 33.
64. See Lipner, “Icon” 38; T. Sarkar, “Birth” 3964.
65. Lipner, “Icon,” 38–39.
66. The Times of India, 16 Sep 1930, 6.
67. The Times of India, 21 Oct 1937, 18.
68. Tagore’s letter, dated 30 Oct 1930, is quoted in B. Sarkar, Rabindranāther Bankimchandra, 421.
69. S. Bhattacharya, VM, 70.
70. See Som, Rabindranath Tagore, 65–66. Gandhi, then a lawyer based in South Africa, was present at this performance.
71. Turino, Nationalists, 174 (emphasis mine).
72. Ibid, 175.
73. See, for example, Karim’s book Bankimchandra O Musalmānsamāj.
74. I have not been able to trace either the composer of what is perhaps the most popular of the musical settings the song, or the date in which it was created. A recording of this version can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfqMmypbACg (accessed 16 Oct 2020). Although the names of Jadubhatta (Jadunath Bhattacharya) and Ravi Shankar usually come up in this context, neither of them is the composer of this popular version. I have discussed earlier in this essay the misattribution to Jadubhatta. Various popular websites have also cited Ravi Shankar as the composer of the tune of this version of Vande Mātaram and of another popular Indian patriotic song, “Sārey jahān se acchā.” Ravi Shankar set only the latter poem to music, and never made any claims as the composer of the popular version of Vande Mātaram. I thank Ravi Shankar’s biographer Oliver Craske for sharing the information pertaining to Shankar’s purported authorship of Vande Mātaram (email communication, 6 Sep 2019).
75. Lipner, “Icon,” 33.
76. See “The World’s Top Ten,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/us/features/topten/profiles/index.shtml#vande (accessed 24 Aug 2019).
77. The category of “stable” musical texts forms a continuum. Any rendition of “Jana gana” varies from one performance to another, but so do (to a lesser extent) performances of any piece of Western music, except those in which sounds are produced using computers exclusively, and the music does not make use of aleatory techniques.
78. In his essay “Copyright Law,” Booth discusses recent legal measures taken in India regarding the status of printed music, but limits his discussion to popular music. I argue that the recognition of a notion of authorship involving written music, one that parallels copyright protection to literary writers and dramatists, for example, needs to take place at both legal and musicological levels, involving music from earlier periods, where applicable – this includes the songs of Tagore, Nazrul, and others.