Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Vande Mātaram and the Patriotic Song Tradition in India

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.