On 7 November, the lyric that has lodged itself in the political and emotional memory of modern India – Vande Mataram – completed 150 years since its composition. What b e gan as a spontaneous, Sanskrit-tinged Bengali poem by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in the 1870s grew into a rallying cry for an emerging nation, then into a contested symbol, and finally into the Republic’s national song.

To mark this sesquicentennial is to revisit not only the poem’s literary origin but also the contested cultural conversations it has carried through generations – about religion and nationhood, about modernity and tradition, and about the languages in which we imagine India. The song first appeared in his celebrated novel “Anandamath” (published in 1882), which vividly captured the anti-colonial spirit

See Full Page