MADRAS, India -- India has a national song, and a national anthem. The first, "Vande Mataram (Salute to the Mother)," signified the cry for freedom from British brutality. The song pushed the nation into a nationalistic frenzy that often caused fear and panic among the occupying British forces. The first two words of the song had such power to incite men and women that the British at one point banned the song and arrested anybody found singing it.
Today, Vande Mataram -- the song that once drove Indians to unite and fight superior British forces -- is dividing the country along religious and political lines. The song is disliked by India's Muslims because it evokes the Hindu Goddess Durga and can be construed as a veiled call for a motherland free from Islamic rule. Another reason for Muslim antipathy was a recent government notification that school students, irrespective of their faith, should sing it.
Vande Mataram was written by the great Bengali thinker, poet and novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1876. The song was later incorporated into his pathbreaking novel "Anandamath (A Hut of Joy)." This literary masterpiece, written in the Bengali language, was first serialized in Chatterjee's magazine, "Banga Darshan," in 1881, then published as a book the following year.