The secular cleansing that wasn’t: “Vande Mataram” and the expurgated story of Indian nationalism

ABSTRACT

This article shows the religious iconography of Indian nationalism by observing the manner in which the defining text of the Hindu Right came to legitimize an unapologetically majoritarian nationalism. It revisits the history of the Indian independence movement through its architects’ handling of the song “Vande Mataram” and its idolization of the nation as a Hindu goddess. Tracing its relevance to the hegemony of Hindutva in India today, the article then reads Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s 1881-82 novel Anandamath to study the connection between the song and its parent text, and to thereby understand the politics of secular cleansing which strives for the secular by purging from the communal that which is unambiguously sectarian. Consequently, the article argues that the story of “Vande Mataram” becomes an unparalleled example in Indian history of how the secular is structured on the ideological foundations of the communal and is therefore conceptually intertwined with it.

KEYWORDS:

• Indian nationalism
• “Vande Mataram”
• secularism
• Indian Muslim
• Anandamath
• majoritarianism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Incidents of Muslims getting beaten up for not saying “Bharat Mata ki Jai” have become commonplace in India, as seen in a report in The Wire (2022).

2. Studying the lyric form, Sandeep Banerjee (2019) has offered a reading which explores the idealizing and idolizing impulse of the song.

3. Rishis, as enlightened men, are believed to have composed the hymns in the ancient Hindu/Brahmin scriptures.

4. Broadly speaking, the Fakirs are the Muslim counterparts to Hindu Sanyasis.

5. The RSS has around 66,000 shakhas or branches in India and plans to have around 100,000 by 2025. See https://indianexpress.com/article/cities/ahmedabad/plans-to-open-one-lakh-shakhas-by-2025-rss-7816005/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sania Hashmi

Sania Hashmi is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, USA. Her primary areas of interest include theory, Marxism, the 20th- and 21st-century anglophone novel, Indian literature, and anti-Muslim racism. She is the author of the forthcoming book Tolerant Indians with Muslim Friends.