Vande Mataram was Once a Song of Hindu-Muslim Unity

Published in The Indian Express

Two weeks ago, Sumit Sarkar left our mortal society. Accolades have poured in from admirers across the world for his extraordinary intellectual legacy. Almost every book he wrote is now akin to a scholarly classic. One of the best ways to commemorate that doyen of world-facing Indian scholarship is to return to his writings with a deeper commitment to the constitutional ideals that the historian himself stood for. In this regard, Sarkar’s first book, the history of the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908 (1973), perhaps outshines his other works, given the context in which we are living today. This is particularly so because India’s national song, “Bande Mataram,” written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1875, has come under intense scrutiny—both from those who want it sung in its entirety and from those who have historically espoused the song for nationalist reasons but nonetheless acknowledge the importance of restraining its performance to its first two stanzas. During the Swadeshi movement, the Bande Mataram was a battle-cry against the British administration, as well as communalism. To those open to learn, Sarkar’s history teaches us something critical for our present.

Bande Mataram’s British Colonial Repression

The Partition of Bengal was announced on July 19, 1905, by Viceroy Lord Curzon, with its implementation scheduled for October 16. A little over six years later, in December 1911, the partition was to be annulled. However, the months between its announcement and implementation marked a frenzied time in the career of Bande Mataram. Before looking directly into Sarkar’s book, it is also important to point out that between October 1905 and September of the following year, the British colonial government undertook a major clampdown on Bande Mataram, naturally seeking to counteract the solidarity that the song had galvanized among Bengalis of almost all factions. It began with R. W. Carlyle, the Chief Secretary of the Government of Bengal, issuing a circular in October that enjoined collectors and magistrates to suppress the participation of students in the Swadeshi movement and threatened schools with the withdrawal of subsidies, recognition, and the like if students were found singing Bande Mataram. On November 3, in Rangpur, present-day north-western Bangladesh, students defied the circular and sang Bande Mataram, in an incident that became the precursor to the Anti-Circular Society, founded the very next day by Krishna Kumar Mitra and Sachindra Prasad Bose. Sarkar informs us that this also spurred the National Council of Education movement.

Then there was P. C. Lyon, the first Chief Secretary of Eastern Bengal and Assam, who assumed office on October 16, 1905, and within a month executed a wave of repressive actions at Rangpur, Madaripur, and Barisal, all in present-day Bangladesh. He was followed by Bamfylde Fuller, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Eastern Bengal and Assam, who is known to have banned the song completely on November 7 that year, for it was believed by the administration to be “an incitement to violence.” He even deployed Gurkha troops in Barisal and its adjacent townships and villages to curb the spread of Bande Mataram, with the threat that any chanting of the song “would invite instant reprisal, even on the elderly.” And then there was T. Emerson, the District Magistrate of Barisal, who presided over the enforcement action at the Barisal Provincial Conference held in April 1906. He was at the helm of the police force that carried out a lathi charge on the procession of delegates, including Surendranath Banerjee and, very likely, Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal, who were known to have sported Bande Mataram badges while singing the song itself.

A Song of Communal Harmony, Almost

There were, Indians, too, who contributed to the administrative suppression of Bande Mataram, including Nawab Salimullah, the fourth Nawab of Dhaka and a founding member of the Muslim League that was seeded in the December of 1906, at his estate, Ahsan Manzil—present-day old Dhaka. The Nawab’s ideological bitterness towards the song, following his open support for pro-partition rallies across East Bengal that enforced the loyalty of the Muslim peasantry and Muslim student bodies towards the administration of Eastern Bengal and Assam. His loyalists countered the political success of Bande Mataram with the slogan “Allah-u-Akbar”—a chant that, along with Bande Mataram, would become the pretext for communal clashes that unfolded from 1906 to 1907 in Comilla and Mymensingh.

No matter this disproportionate scale of administrative suppression, between August and October 1905, Bande Mataram transformed into a cross-communal slogan of nationalist solidarity and Swadeshi allegiances. Joint Hindu–Muslim demonstrations that marked those months on the streets of Calcutta and Dhaka coupled Bande Mataram with Islamic invocations. In that political epistemology, all the slogans stood for a shared declaration of cultural autonomy, political independence, and the will to Swaraj. “Brahmin pundits and Muslims,” wrote Sarkar, “embraced each other,” as cries of Bande Mataram and Allah-ho-Akbar resonated in with the monsoon winds. The earliest recorded instance, according to Sarkar, of Bande Mataram being sung during Swadeshi processions that year occurred on August 29, in Hooghly, as reported by the Amrita Bazar Patrika of that day. Another such procession was held at at Muktagacha in Mymensingh, on October 18, 1905, where the two slogans were again paired to assert the autonomy of a pan-Bengali ethnic identity.

Previous agitations and Town Hall congregations, between December 1903 and July 1905 may well have witnessed instances of the song’s chanting, albeit unrecorded. By October 1905, the song was institutionalized for fundraising with the formation of the Bande Mataram Bhikshu Sampradaya, whose “principal purpose,” remarked Sarkar, was “of collecting funds through processions, singing this ‘Grand National Anthem.’” The wave of street singing of Bande Mataram seems to have begun with Ramakanta Roy, and the song’s institutionalization quickly assumed interfaith forms. By the middle of 1906, no Swadeshi gathering was deemed proper without its chanting, including by Muslims.

Muslim Revolutionaries Chanting Bankim’s Hymn

Among the most vivid instances of Hindu–Muslim sloganeering of Bande Mataram was witnessed during the Printers’ Union victory celebration on June 16, 1906. This, too, for Sarkar, was one of the most manifest examples of Hindu-Muslim unity within the career of Bande Mataram, whose performance was punctuated by the Islamic slogan. The celebration was conducted at City College in Calcutta, presided over by Krishna Kumar Mitra and attended by five thousand Hindus, Muslims, Madrasis, and Eurasians. Sarkar called this “a considerable social achievement.” Muslim nationalists and Muslim revolutionaries openly espoused Bande Mataram as the slogan and song of the Swadeshi movement.

Several individual Muslim revolutionaries are also known to have espoused Bande Mataram. These included Liakat Husain, of Patna, whom Sarkar described as “the great Muslim patriot,” organized nocturnal musical processions dedicated to songs of nationalism. The Anti-partition and Swadeshi Procession Party, organized by Husain, was reported in November 1906 to be “going out every evening from College Square, carrying lamps,” to sing “national songs in the streets of Calcutta.” Husain’s person suffered for his patriotism. In May 1907, his anti-British appeal published in Mymensingh’s nationalist weekly, Charu Mihir, attracted a raid on the newspaper. Since Husain was marked as a critic of the Muslim orthodoxy, besides the Curzon administration, a faction of public opinion swung in favor of him being tried for sedition; he was subsequently sentenced to three years of “rigorous imprisonment,” informs Sarkar. But he was no lone wolf.

Husain’s Muslim compatriots included Abdul Rasul, Abul Kasem, Abdul Halim Guznavi, Abul Husain, Din Muhammad, Dedar Bux, Abdul Gafur, and Ismail Husain Shiraji, who were, to Sarkar, “every bit as patriotic and sincere” as their Hindu brethren. Kasem hailed from Burdwan, and had served on Congress committees. Guznavi was a zamindar from Tangail, and a lawyer based in Calcutta. Rasul was an Anglicized barrister from Comilla, who represented swadeshi Muslimness—a critical faction of the Swadeshi movement, according to Sarkar. And, all them were practically “indistinguishable in social position and outlook from the usual middle-class Hindu Congress leader” of the revolution, according to Sarkar.

On September 23, 1905, Rasul led a mass of 10,000 Hindu and Muslim students and civilians that declared its unwavering allegiance to “the same mother-country—Bengal.” The fact that Rasul would become the secretary of the Bengal Mohammedan Association and one among a pro-Muslim faction of the Calcutta Congress is significant within the communal history of the song, in that it had its sympathizers even among leaders with active Muslim cultural ties. Alongside him, Din Muhammad (born as Monoranjan Ganguli, and a convert to Islam), was closely linked to the Brahmo-led Anti Circular Society. He led meetings in Jessore, in present-day Bangladesh, and Ranaghat and Gobardanga, where Muslims actively participated and exceeded Hindu counterparts in numbers, even in the singing of Bande Mataram that inaugurated the anti-partition mass-meetings. Husain and Gafur, the relentless agitators, shuttling between the two Bengals, addressed large gatherings in Nadia, Dinajpur, Pabna, Tippera, Dacca, Bakargunj, Noakhali, Chittagong, Burdwan, and Mymensingh, where the Bande Mataram rent the air as slogan and song.

A Song Beyond “Hindu” Revivalism?

The instances cross-communal acceptance of Bande Mataram, that Sarkar pointed out, occurred against a background of knowledge about the song’s dwelling in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel, Anandamath (1882), still percolating. By the end of 1906, the author of Bande Mataram came to be heavily criticized in the Muslim press. On December 14, 1906, the Muslim weekly, Mussalman—co-edited by Mujibur Rahaman—attacked what it saw as Chatterjee’s ‘anti-Muslim bigotry.’ On April 26, 1907, it also slammed “the nationalist plans for holding a Bankim anniversary,” with explicit references to passages from Anandamath that were suspected to be vociferously anti-Muslim. Seen against these later assertions of orthodox Islamic subjectivity, the Muslim adoption of Bande Mataram during the Swadeshi movement may look pragmatic, and strategic on the part of Muslim revolutionaries, while they labored to conceal the tensions emerging from the then small, though organized Islamic orthodoxy.

Knowing Sarkar as a subaltern historian allows us to extrapolate—though not excessively—for the sake a productive historicist thesis that can try informing the present. Sarkar was critical of both the Cambridge School of history as well as Marxist historiography, which he found sometimes intertwined with nationalist historiography. What emerges as a possible conclusion, from what Sarkar provides the evidence for—though he does not explicitly say so—is as follows.

In Sarkar’s account of Bande Mataram, it transformed from a tool of protest against Curzon’s highhanded, unilateral decision to partition Bengal, to a vehicle of internal cross-communal social discipline between the revolutionaries. As Bande Mataram became the rallying cry of processions involving picketing and burning of foreign cloth, the collateral damage of the movement had to be borne, sometimes disproportionately, by Marwari and Muslim tradesmen. As the processions multiplied, and Muslims continued to join, the “Swadeshi enthusiasm,” eventually, came to be seen as an attack on the livelihoods of ordinary Indians—including Muslims—in addition to British imperialism. The organized force of the British administration in sowing seeds if discord, too, needs special emphasis, here. Curzon tried his utmost, and wonderfully succeeded, in luring the Nawab of Dhaka with economic incentives in curbing Muslim participation in the revolution.

The purported textual provenance of Bande Mataram, as a song from Anandamath—although it was affixed to the novel seven years after its original inception—became a liability when the identity of the original adversary, partition and colonialism, seemed to erode in Islamic eyes. Muslims sang the song as a patriotic anthem, often alongside chants of Allah-ho-Akbar, ignoring Bande Mataram’s religious coding until the time the Islamic orthodoxy was practically won over by the promise of economic and identitarian emancipation. After that point, Bande Mataram was increasingly seen as representative of Hindu revivalist symbolism—with imagery revolving around Durga and Kali—that obscured its anti-imperial registers. The adversary itself was bifurcated and fragmented from the erstwhile villain of the British regime to Hindu cultural revival and assertion, in Islamic eyes, and orthodox-Islamic resistance to the revolution, potentially, in Hindu eyes.

It is also important to underscore that Sarkar saw the history of the Swadeshi movement as having unfolded, mainly, under the character of a bhadralok leadership, which included Muslims and Hindus. He believed that the movement had not secured the participation of peasants and the working class. The different factional categories of Bengal (and elsewhere in India) that came to be affected by the Partition and the Swadeshi movement contain critical values of social, cultural, and economic identity. How we translate those to the registers of the twenty-first century will determine how well we articulate the powers of a song like Bande Mataram, without dismissing its complications, or letting its symbolism—wherever it alienates us—monopolize social democracy. Perhaps that would be a most fitting tribute to Sarkar, the magnanimous historian. The song itself, however, will not lose its sacred essence.