The song Vande Mataram has lived many lives. It was by no stretch of imagination Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s best song. It did, however, go on to become his most famous and contentious, for reasons that had less to do with the song and more with the context. The song was written in 1875 and later incorporated into his historical novel Anand Math. Set against the background of the Sanyasi rebellion in Bengal during the second half of the 18th century, it featured Muslim administrators as the main villain.

The song was publicly sung for the first time in 1896 by Rabindranath Tagore at the Congress session in Calcutta. It became a slogan and a symbol of anti-imperialism during the Swadeshi movement (1905-08). In 1905, both singing the song in public and sloganeering were banned by the

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