The Ten Gifts in Vande Mātaram — What the two stanzas every Indian knows praise, and what they ask of the person who sings them

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Vande Mātaram series · Volume II · Parts Six to Twelve

Volume I gave the whole song and showed it is a vow, said by one person at a time, to a land it never names. This volume reads the two stanzas most Indians know, so its parts begin at Six.

← I · The Whole Song · III · Seven Crore Throats →

The two stanzas of Vande Mātaram every Indian knows are one sentence with ten gifts in it. Water, fruit, a wind from Kerala's hills, crops, moonlight, flowers, a smile, a kind voice, joy, a giving hand. Not one weapon. Not one god.

In Brief: The second of five articles that read India's national song word by word. What each of the ten gifts in the opening stanzas means, plainly and in older Indian texts, and why each is also a task anyone who sings it can be held to.

**"To praise the land is to inherit the responsibility of caring for everything it gives."**

The two stanzas of Vande Mātaram that most Indians know are a single sentence praising a good land for ten gifts, and there is not one weapon or one god among them. The gifts are plain good things: water, fruit, a cool wind, crops, moonlit nights, flowers, a smile, a kind voice, joy and a giving hand. Read alongside older Indian texts, each also carries a deeper meaning. Because the song is a vow, each gift is also a task. Whatever a singer believes about the rest of the song, he can be asked whether the land he praises is becoming what he says it is.

The opening

In April the well behind the house in Kannur that Meera shares with her mother goes dry for the first time in forty years. The panchayat tanker comes on Tuesdays and Fridays. Every morning the radio still plays Vande Mātaram, and every morning the first word about the land is sujalām, well-watered. Meera's mother still sings it with her palms together. Meera is not sure whether to find that beautiful or absurd. Meera and her mother are imagined.

On 21 September 2026 the Karnataka Legislature met for a special session called because of a severe drought across the state.¹ Its sitting began with the song.

The first word the song says about the land is "water". It seemed worth asking what the rest of the sentence says.

What exactly do the two stanzas everyone knows praise, and what do they ask of the person who sings them?

Part Six — One sentence, ten gifts

The opening of the song is one long sentence. It looks at the land from the ground up.

Vande Mātaram! Sujalāṃ suphalāṃ malayaja-śītalām, Śasya-śyāmalāṃ Mātaram! Śubhra-jyotsnā-pulakita-yāminīm, Phulla-kusumita-druma-dala-śobhinīm, Suhāsinīṃ sumadhura-bhāṣiṇīm, Sukhadāṃ varadāṃ Mātaram!

I bow to the Mother. She is well-watered, rich in fruit, cool with the wind from the southern hills, dark with crops. Her nights thrill with white moonlight. She is lovely with trees in full flower. She smiles sweetly and speaks sweetly. She gives joy, and she gives what is asked of her.

In Sanskrit these seven lines are one sentence. There is one verb, vande, "I bow". There is one object, Mātaram, "the Mother". Then come ten descriptions of her, all in the same grammatical form as Mātaram. Nothing happens in the sentence except the bow. The land does not act or answer. She is looked at and praised.

I think the ten descriptions are not a random list. In order, they rise from the ground to the face and the hand, the way you might look at a person from her feet upward.

The body of the land. Water, fruit, a cool wind, crops. What keeps people alive.
The beauty of the land. Moonlit nights and trees in flower. What makes life worth living.
The land as a person. A smile, a sweet voice, joy, and an open hand. By the end of the sentence the landscape has a face, a voice, a heart and a hand.

So by the end of the second stanza the land has begun to become someone. In the third, the singer will speak to her.

In October 1937 the Congress described these two stanzas as speaking "in tender language" of "the beauty of the motherland and the abundance of her gifts".¹² That is exactly what they are. They are a list of plenty, written about a famine. Here they are, one at a time. With each I add what I think it asks of the person who sings it.

Part Seven — Water and fruit

The first two gifts are the ones a hungry land lacks first.

Sujalām, well-watered

Su means "good" or "well". Jala means "water". Sujalām is "well-watered", "rich in good water".

Water comes first in Indian reverence too. One of the best-known hymns of the Ṛgveda begins āpo hi ṣṭhā mayobhuvaḥ, "Waters, you are the bringers of well-being".² Rivers were mothers and goddesses. The Gaṅgā and the Yamunā, the Sindhu and the Sarasvatī are praised in hymns as givers of life. Many Hindu rites begin with water, sipped, sprinkled or held in the palm. In many of them the saṅkalpa, the spoken resolve, is made with water cupped in the right hand and then let fall.

In the novel, the song is sung in a famine, and the first thing it says of the land is "water". I do not think that is an accident of rhythm. A famine is, first of all, a failure of water: a monsoon that does not come, a field that does not drink. To call a starving land well-watered is to name the very thing whose absence is killing it. And if the song is a vow, its first word about the land is the element in which Indian vows have long been taken.

Water has a second meaning for a national song. Nobody owns a river. It passes through many villages, districts and states, and it is used by people of every faith and none. I think a well-watered land is one that has learnt to share what flows through it. The first gift the song names is the one thing no community can have alone.

What it asks. That the land have water, and that it be shared. Whoever sings sujalām, in whatever sense he means "I bow", has said the land should be well-watered. He can be asked, and can ask himself, what he is doing about the wells.

Suphalām, rich in fruit

Phala means "fruit". Suphalām is "rich in fruit".

In Sanskrit, phala means more than a mango on a tree. It is the ordinary word for a result, the outcome of an action. The Indian vocabulary of karma, action, is built around it. Karma-phala is the fruit of action. The best-known instruction in the Bhagavad Gītā is about it. Act, but do not make the fruit of action your motive.³ Every Indian who hears phala hears both the mango and the result.

I think a land that is suphalā is a land where work bears fruit. The orchard is the plain picture, a tree looked after for years and finally heavy with fruit. The deeper picture is a society in which effort is rewarded. A farmer's labour feeds his family. A student's study leads somewhere. A worker is paid. A land can be fertile and still not be suphalā in this sense, if the fruit of one person's labour is taken by another.

What it asks. That work bear fruit for those who do it. This is the money part of the vow, and it is as hard to keep as the water.

Part Eight — A wind from Kerala's hills, and fields dark with crops

A Bengali poet cooled his land with a wind from the other end of India.

Malayaja-śītalām, cool with the southern wind

Malaya is the Sanskrit name for the mountains at the southern end of the Western Ghats, the hills of today's Kerala and Tamil Nadu, famous for sandalwood. Malayaja means "born of Malaya". In the dictionaries it means sandalwood first.⁴ In the poets it is also the wind from those hills. Śītala means "cool". So the phrase can be read "cool as sandal" or "cooled by the breeze from the Malaya hills". Most translators take the second, and so do I.

The Malaya wind is one of the oldest pictures in Sanskrit poetry. In the old Purāṇic map of India, Malaya is one of seven great mountain ranges that hold the land in place.⁵

For a thousand years poets everywhere in India used the southern breeze as the sign of spring and of love. Jayadeva, a twelfth-century poet whom Bengal and Odisha both claim, sets one of his best-known songs of Kṛṣṇa in a spring grove "where the soft wind from Malaya caresses the clove creepers".⁶ By Bankim's time the Malaya breeze was so familiar that no Bengali reader would have stopped at it.

Stop at it now. A Bengali poet, writing in Bengal about Bengal, cools his land with a wind from hills nearly two thousand kilometres to the south. The east of India is cooled by its south-west. A land is refreshed by something from beyond its own borders. Sanskrit poetry had drawn a shared map of India, its mountains, winds and rivers, long before any census, railway or Congress. Bankim used that map without needing to say so. I think it is one reason a hymn from one province could later be sung everywhere.

Śītala also means more than cool. It is the word for what is calm, free of fever, at peace. In a hot country "cool" is close to "well". A land that is śītalā is a land that is not burning.

What it asks. Two things. The first is the hills themselves. The wind that cools the song comes off the forests of the Western Ghats, whose rains feed rivers across the south. A land whose hills are cut bare loses the wind it sings about. The second is a temper. A land that does not run a fever is one whose arguments do not burn.

Śasya-śyāmalām, dark with crops

Śasya means the standing crop in the field. Śyāmala is a colour, dark and deep, the blue-black-green of a rain cloud or of a paddy field just before harvest. Śasya-śyāmalām is "dark with crops".

Śyāma is one of the most loved colours in Indian devotion. Kṛṣṇa is Śyāma, the dark one. Rāma is described as dark. In Bengal, Kālī is called Śyāmā, and her autumn festival is Śyāmā Pūjā. In Indian poetry dark is the colour of rain clouds, and so of fertility, mercy and love. It is not the colour of mourning.

I think this word ties the song to the novel's darkest picture. In the temple of the novel, the Mother as she is now appears as Kālī, dark and stripped. The song's first colour for the land is the same darkness, but filled with crops instead of emptied by famine. The land is dark either way. In one it is the dark of hunger. In the other, the dark of ripening grain. The vow is to turn the one into the other. The same colour comes back in the song's last stanza.

What it asks. Soil, and the farmers who work it. A land is not dark with crops because it is painted green on a map. It is so when fields are planted and harvested, and when the people who plant them can live on what they grow.

Part Nine — Nights that thrill, and trees in flower

The song counts beauty among the things a good land gives.

Śubhra-jyotsnā-pulakita-yāminīm, nights that thrill with moonlight

Śubhra means white or bright. Jyotsnā is moonlight. Yāminī is night. Pulakita means "thrilled", and it is the word for skin prickling and hair standing on end with delight. Together: "whose nights thrill with white moonlight".

Pulaka is a technical word in Indian art and devotion. The Nāṭyaśāstra, the classical book on drama, lists hair standing on end among the signs the body gives of deep feeling, beside tears, trembling and a breaking voice.⁷ In devotional poetry, the devotee's skin thrills at the presence of his god. The word belongs to the language of ecstasy.

Bankim gives that ecstasy to the land. Her nights do not only shine. They thrill, as a devotee's body does. I think this is the second stanza's first step toward a person. The land has skin, and it feels.

There is a plainer meaning too. A land whose nights are a pleasure is a land where the night is not feared. In a famine, a war, a riot or a curfew, nobody walks out to look at the moon. I read moonlit nights that thrill as, among other things, safe nights.

What it asks. That the night be safe, for the traveller on the road, for the woman walking home, for the family asleep. It is the most homely of the ten gifts, and one of the hardest to give.

Phulla-kusumita-druma-dala-śobhinīm, lovely with trees in flower

Phulla and kusumita both mean "in flower". Druma is a tree. Dala is a leaf or petal, a piece of the whole. Śobhinī means "lovely", "shining". Together: "lovely with trees in full flower".

The flowering tree is everywhere in Indian art and poetry. The aśoka is said to bloom at a woman's touch. The kadamba shades Kṛṣṇa's groves. The pārijāta grows in heaven. The season of flowering is spring, the season of love, and the Malaya wind of the first stanza is its messenger.

What matters most, I think, is that the song counts beauty among the land's gifts at all. It does not stop at water, food and soil, the things that keep people alive. It goes on to moonlight and flowers, the things that make life worth living. In a song set in a famine, that is a claim. A good land does not only feed its people. It delights them, and beauty belongs to everyone, not only the rich.

There is an order in it too. Flowers come before fruit. I read this gift as the promise of the second.

What it asks. Trees, planted, protected and allowed to flower. And a kind of attention, the habit of counting beauty when a country counts its wealth.

Part Ten — A smile and a kind voice

The land gets a face and a voice, and the voice is a lesson for the people who argue about her.

Suhāsinī is "sweetly smiling", from su, well, and hāsa, laughter. Sumadhura-bhāṣiṇī is "sweetly speaking". Madhu is honey, madhura is sweet, and bhāṣiṇī is one who speaks. Here the land gets a face and a voice.

Kind speech is one of the oldest virtues in Indian ethics. The Manusmṛti puts it in one verse that is still often quoted.⁸

satyaṃ brūyāt priyaṃ brūyān na brūyāt satyam apriyampriyaṃ ca nānṛtaṃ brūyād eṣa dharmaḥ sanātanaḥ

"Speak the truth, and speak what is pleasing. Do not speak a truth that is unpleasant, nor a pleasant untruth. This is the eternal way." The verse admits that the true and the pleasant can come apart. It asks for speech that is both.

The song says the Mother speaks sweetly. It never says in which language. In Bankim's day a singer would have heard Bengali. By 1905 the song was sung by people whose mothers spoke Punjabi, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Malayalam and a hundred other tongues. I think that silence is a gift. The Mother of the song speaks every language her children speak, and speaks all of them kindly.

There is a harder reading, and it is the one this volume most wants to leave with you. A land that speaks sweetly is a land whose people speak kindly to each other. That does not mean everyone agrees. It means people can disagree, even about the deepest things, without contempt.

Now apply that to the song itself. For a hundred years people have argued about Vande Mātaram in words that are not sweet at all: "anti-national", "communal", "traitor", "fanatic". By the song's own measure, those arguments have failed one of its ten gifts. Whatever a singer believes about the fifth stanza, he can be asked whether he has spoken about it, and about those who disagree with him, in the voice the song gives the Mother.

What it asks. That people speak the truth to each other, and speak it kindly. Of all ten gifts, this is the one most fully in each singer's own power.

Part Eleven — Joy and the open hand

The last two gifts finish the person the land has been turning into.

Sukhadā is "giver of joy", from sukha, happiness or ease, and dā, to give. Varadā is "giver of what is asked". A vara is a boon, the thing you ask for and receive.

The dictionaries record an old explanation of sukha. It may once have meant "having a good axle-hole", a wheel that turns smoothly on its axle, while duḥkha, sorrow, was a wheel that grinds.⁹ The explanation is uncertain, and I use only the picture. Joy, in that old image, is not a thrill. It is smooth running, a life in which things turn without grinding.

Varada is also a gesture. In Indian sculpture a god or goddess often holds one hand low, palm outward, fingers pointing down. It is called the varada mudrā, the gesture of granting, the hand that gives what is asked.

I think these last two gifts complete the person the land has been becoming. She has a face that smiles and a voice that speaks kindly. Now she has a heart that gives joy and a hand that gives what is asked. The landscape of the first line has become, by the end of the second stanza, a mother who answers her children.

What it asks. A land where life runs without grinding, and where asking is answered. A citizen who asks for water, schooling, justice or help should find a hand held open. No single singer can keep that vow. Every singer can be held to it.

Part Twelve — Why these two stanzas became the nation's song

No weapon, no enemy, no god, and no demand.

Read the ten gifts again and notice what is missing. There is no weapon. There is no enemy. There is no god. There is no demand. The Mother of the first two stanzas gives and gives: water, fruit, wind, crops, nights, flowers, a smile, a voice, joy and blessings. She asks for nothing back except the singer's bow.

In 1905 the painter Abanindranath Tagore, Rabindranath's nephew, painted a Bhārat Mātā, Mother India, that is these two stanzas in a single picture.¹⁰ She is a young woman in saffron, standing calmly, with four arms. In her hands she holds a book, sheaves of paddy, a white cloth and a string of prayer beads. Sister Nivedita, who championed the painting, read the four as learning, the life of the spirit, food and clothing.

It is a mother who gives, not one who fights. Four hands hold what her children need. No hand holds a weapon. Volumes III and IV meet the other mother, the one with swords.

These two stanzas are what most Indians know as Vande Mātaram, for three reasons.

They belong to no one's home language. They are in Sanskrit, which almost no Indian spoke at home, and so it belonged equally to every region. Their pictures, the Malaya wind above all, come from the shared map of Sanskrit poetry, not from one province.

They name no god. For most singers they hold nothing that must be refused. Some Muslims hold that a bow to the Mother, in any stanza, is owed only to God. Volume IV gives that view the full hearing it deserves.

They were the part the first great singer loved. Rabindranath Tagore set the song to music and sang it to the Congress in 1896. In October 1937, asked by Jawaharlal Nehru for his view, he wrote that the "tenderness and devotion" of the song's first part, and its stress on "the beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland", had always appealed to him, and that he could easily separate it from the rest of the poem.¹¹

Days later the Congress Working Committee recommended that only these two stanzas be sung at national gatherings. It said there was "absolutely nothing in them" to which anyone could object on religious grounds.¹² Volume IV tells that decision in full, because it was a decision about the later stanzas.

None of this makes the first two stanzas the whole song, or its better half. The song goes on, and its later stanzas are loved for reasons the next volumes explain. But it does explain why, when India sings Vande Mātaram, it most often sings a mother who gives.

The ending

Ten gifts, ten tasks.

If the song is a vow, each of the ten gifts is also a task. This list is mine, not Bankim's. But it is what the song's form as a vow implies.

Sujalām, well-watered. That the land have water, and share it.
Suphalām, rich in fruit. That work bear fruit for those who do it.
Malayaja-śītalām, cool with the southern wind. That the forests stand, and the land not burn.
Śasya-śyāmalām, dark with crops. That the soil be kept, and its farmers live.
Śubhra-jyotsnā-pulakita-yāminīm, nights that thrill. That the night be safe.
Phulla-kusumita-druma-dala-śobhinīm, trees in flower. That beauty be counted as wealth.
Suhāsinīm, sweetly smiling. That the land's face be glad.
Sumadhura-bhāṣiṇīm, sweetly speaking. That its people speak truly and kindly to each other.
Sukhadām, giver of joy. That life run without grinding.
Varadām, giver of what is asked. That asking be answered.

This list has one great merit. Every singer can take its test, whatever he believes about the rest of the song.

A devotee who sings all six stanzas as his faith, a citizen who sings two as a salute, a poet who hears "Mother" as a figure of speech, and a Muslim who sings the land and stands silent through the goddess may disagree for ever about the fifth stanza. They cannot disagree about whether the reservoir is full, whether the farmer is paid, whether the hills have trees on them, whether the night is safe, or whether their own speech is kind.

On Friday the tanker comes. Meera's mother fills her brass pots, and then, before she goes in, she fills a small clay bowl and sets it on the wall for the crows. Meera watches her do it. Then she goes inside and phones the panchayat office about the old pond behind the school, which has been full of plastic since the monsoon.

The next stanza asks a different question. Having praised a mother who gives, the song turns to face anyone who would call her weak, and counts the children who will answer.