Vande Mātaram in Plain English — The whole song, line by line, and the two words it begins with
Vande Mātaram series · Volume I · Parts One to Five
The first volume. It gives the whole song and reads its first two words. Each volume can be read on its own.
Next → II · The Ten Gifts
Most Indians know two stanzas of Vande Mātaram and four of its words. Read the whole song and it surprises both sides. It never names India, never says "we bow", and in its novel was first sung to a man walking through a famine.
In Brief: The first of five articles that read India's national song word by word. All six stanzas in plain English, why the song is a vow and not a description, and what vande and Mātaram can and cannot mean. For anyone who has sung it without knowing what it says.
Vande Mātaram is a vow to make the land what it ought to be, spoken by one person at a time, and every word of it can be understood by those who sing it and by those who cannot. This first volume gives all six stanzas in plain English. It shows why a song that its novel sets in a famine praises the land as it ought to be. It reads the first word, vande, which runs from a child's greeting to a devotee's worship, and shows that the singer, not the dictionary, decides which. It reads the second, Mātaram, "the Mother", who is never named. That is how a Bengali hymn became a nation's song.
The opening
At six in the morning in Kannur, the radio in Meera's kitchen plays Vande Mātaram. Since March 2026 All India Radio has opened its morning broadcast with the full song, all six stanzas, about three minutes long.¹ Meera's mother stands in front of the oil lamp with her palms together. She learnt the first two stanzas at school, seventy years ago. The rest she is learning from the radio.
Meera teaches physics at a higher secondary school. Her son is fifteen. He is eating his puṭṭu and listening for the first time to the parts he never learnt.
"Amma, what does it mean? Not the first bit. All of it."
Meera opens her mouth and finds she can translate about four words. Vande, I bow. Mātaram, mother. Sujalām, something about water. And somewhere in the middle, a goddess. She has sung this song for thirty-five years.
Meera, her mother and her son are imagined. Their morning is real in millions of Indian homes. Most of us know two stanzas of our national song by heart and the meaning of a handful of its words. Many of the loudest arguments about it are carried on by people in the same position.
What does Vande Mātaram actually say, and what does it ask of the person who sings it?
This series answers that one word at a time. It does not ask anyone to sing. It asks everyone to understand. A person who loves the song will find more in it to love. A person who cannot sing part of it will find that his reasons are understood, and that the song itself makes room for him.
Part One — The song in plain English
All six stanzas, with a translation you can read in two minutes.
Here is the whole song. The later volumes read it word by word. This is the map.
The text is the one printed for the song's 150th year, which the Union Home Ministry now treats as the official version.² There is one difference. In the third stanza that text says koṭi-koṭi, "crores upon crores". The poet, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, wrote saptakoṭi, "seven crore". Volume III explains why the difference matters, so his word is printed here.
The song is in two languages. Most of it is Sanskrit, the old language of Indian learning, which almost nobody spoke at home even in Bankim's day. One line of the third stanza and most of the fourth are in Bengali, the everyday language of Bankim's province. The words Vande Mātaram come back as a refrain after every stanza.
Stanza one
Vande Mātaram! Sujalāṃ suphalāṃ malayaja-śītalām, Śasya-śyāmalāṃ Mātaram!
I bow to the Mother. She is well-watered and rich in fruit, cool with the wind from the southern hills, and dark with crops.
Stanza two
Śubhra-jyotsnā-pulakita-yāminīm, Phulla-kusumita-druma-dala-śobhinīm, Suhāsinīṃ sumadhura-bhāṣiṇīm, Sukhadāṃ varadāṃ Mātaram!
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. The Mother.
Stanza three
Saptakoṭi-kaṇṭha-kala-kala-nināda-karāle, Dvisaptakoṭi-bhujair dhṛta-khara-karavāle, Ke bole Mā tumi abale! Bahubala-dhāriṇīṃ namāmi tāriṇīṃ, Ripudala-vāriṇīṃ Mātaram!
O you who are terrible with the roar of seven crore throats, whose sharp swords are raised in twice seven crore arms, who says, Mother, that you are weak? I bow to her who holds great strength, who ferries across, who holds back the ranks of the enemy. The Mother.
Stanza four
Tumi vidyā, tumi dharma, Tumi hṛdi, tumi marma, Tvaṃ hi prāṇāḥ śarīre! Bāhute tumi Mā śakti, Hṛdaye tumi Mā bhakti, Tomārai pratimā gaḍi mandire-mandire.
You are knowledge. You are dharma, the right way to live. You are the heart and its innermost core. You are the breath of life in the body. In the arm, Mother, you are strength. In the heart, Mother, you are devotion. It is your image, and no other, that is shaped in temple after temple.
Stanza five
Tvaṃ hi Durgā daśapraharaṇadhāriṇī, Kamalā kamaladalavihāriṇī, Vāṇī vidyādāyinī, Namāmi tvāṃ, namāmi Kamalām, Amalām atulām,Sujalāṃ suphalāṃ Mātaram!
You are Durgā, who holds ten weapons. You are Kamalā, the goddess of fortune, who plays among lotus petals. You are Vāṇī, the goddess of speech, who gives learning. I bow to you. I bow to Kamalā, spotless and beyond compare, well-watered and rich in fruit. The Mother.
Stanza six
Śyāmalāṃ saralāṃ susmitāṃ bhūṣitām, Dharaṇīṃ bharaṇīṃ Mātaram!
Dark, simple, gently smiling, adorned. The one who holds, the one who bears. The Mother.
The journey in the song
Read straight through, the Mother does not stay in one place.
In stanzas one and two she is a land, looked at and praised. The singer admires her.
In stanza three she becomes a person, spoken to and defended. The singer is one of her many children.
In stanza four she moves inside the singer. She is his knowledge, his heart and his breath.
In stanza five she is named a goddess. The singer bows as a devotee.
At the end of stanza five, and in stanza six, she is the land again, the one who holds and the one who bears.
Almost everyone misses that last step. The song does not end on the goddess. Before the fifth stanza is over, it has gone back to its first words, sujalāṃ suphalām, well-watered and rich in fruit. The sixth stanza names no god at all. I think the goddess is the middle of the journey, not its end. A devotee may say she is the summit, and Volume V takes both readings seriously.
Part Two — A vow, not a description
Why a song that praises a starving land as rich is not a lie.
In the novel, the first person to hear Vande Mātaram was a man walking through a famine.
Bankim's novel Ānandamaṭh opens in 1770, the year of the great Bengal famine.³ Five years earlier the East India Company had taken over the collection of Bengal's land revenue. In 1772 Warren Hastings reported to the Company in London that at least a third of the people of the province had died.⁴ Modern historians think his figure too high, and their estimates differ. Nobody doubts that it was one of the worst famines in Indian history.
The novel begins in villages where no cooking smoke rises. A householder named Mahendra and his wife Kalyāṇī leave a home with nothing left in it. Later, in a forest, a monk named Bhabānanda sings a song to Mahendra, a man who doubts that anyone can do anything for the land.
The song tells him the land is well-watered, rich in fruit, cool, dark with crops, bright under the moon, full of flowers, smiling, sweet-voiced, a giver of joy. Mahendra has seen his neighbours eat leaves. He has seen fields fail and people starve. On the day the novel sets it, almost every word of the song's opening was untrue.
Bankim knew that. Later in the novel, the rebels' leader, Satyānanda, takes Mahendra into a temple and shows him three images of the Mother.³ The first is the Mother as she was. She is Jagaddhātrī, "she who holds the world", shining and adorned. The second is the Mother as she is. She is Kālī, dark and stripped, a mother who has lost everything. The third is the Mother as she will be. She is Durgā, ten-armed and radiant.
The song praises the land as she was and as she will be. It is sung in front of the land as she is.
So what kind of sentence is it? It is not a description. A description can be checked, and in 1770, and in every drought since, "this land is well-watered" has often been false. It is not flattery either. Flattery praises to please, and a famine cannot be pleased.
I think it is a vow. Indian ritual has a name for the words a person speaks before beginning something serious. It is the saṅkalpa, "the resolve". In a saṅkalpa you name the time, the place and what you commit yourself to. Vande Mātaram reads to me like a saṅkalpa written as a hymn of praise. It names the land as she ought to be, in front of the land as she is, and by bowing, the singer binds himself to the distance between the two.
Three things happen in each line at once.
What the land is. In the novel, dry and dying. The song does not deny it. It is sung in the middle of it.
What the land ought to be. Well-watered, fruitful, cool and green. The song speaks of this as if it were already true, because that is how a vow speaks of what it means to do.
What the singer takes on. By bowing to the land as she ought to be, he puts himself in her service.
This clears up a common doubt about the song. The person who sings sujalām, "well-watered", in a drought is not lying. He is doing what Bhabānanda did in the forest. The reading does not depend on the novel, though. A list of plenty, sung by people who do not yet have it, is a vow in any year. A description is believed or disputed. A vow is kept or broken.
It also helps to explain why a novelist's lyric became an oath. People do not march, go to prison or die for a description of scenery. They do all three for a vow. And it gives every singer a test, whatever else he believes about the song. The vow is not about how many stanzas you sing. It is about water, crops, cool air, safe nights, flowering trees, a smiling face, a kind voice, joy and a hand that gives.
Part Three — Vande, I bow
The first word decides who is speaking, and how deep the bow goes.
What the word says
Vande is the Sanskrit verb vand in the form that means "I do it, now". It means "I bow", "I salute", "I praise", "I honour". The traditional list of Sanskrit verb roots, the Dhātupāṭha, explains vand with two words.⁵ One is abhivādana, the respectful greeting a student gives a teacher, or a younger person an elder. The other is stuti, praise.
The standard Sanskrit dictionary, by Monier Monier-Williams, gives the full range of the word: "to praise, celebrate, laud, extol; to show honour, do homage, salute respectfully or deferentially, venerate, worship, adore".⁶
Notice the last two words in that list. People who defend the song often say that vande is only a greeting, a child's bow to a parent, and so never worship. The dictionary does not support that. Vand runs all the way from a greeting to adoration.
What the word has carried
Vande is one of the commonest words of reverence in Sanskrit. Students of Aṣṭāṅga yoga begin their practice with vande gurūṇāṃ caraṇāravinde, "I bow at the lotus feet of my teachers". Hymns open with vande addressed to Śiva, to Viṣṇu, to the Goddess. The same word is said to a teacher and to a god, and each time it means what that relationship means. Indian ears have long heard vande as a bow whose depth depends on whom it is made to.
What I think it can mean
So there are at least four ways to sing the first line, and the word allows all of them.
As a child's respect. "I bow to my mother." The country is loved as you love the person who gave you life.
As a citizen's salute. "I salute my country." Like a soldier saluting a flag, with no thought of a god.
As a poet's praise. "I praise this land." "Mother" is a figure of speech, as in "mother tongue".
As a devotee's worship. "I worship the Mother." The land is holy, and the bow is an act of religion.
The dictionary gives the range. It does not give the verdict. What vande means in one person's mouth depends on who says it, to whom, and with what faith. A devout Hindu may hear the fourth meaning and love the song for it. A Muslim may hear the same fourth meaning, which the word really can carry, and refuse it. He is not misreading the word. A secular Indian may hear the second or third and wonder what the argument is about. All of them are hearing the same word, and it really does carry all of those meanings.
This is not a weakness of the song. It is why the song could belong to a whole country. A verb that meant only worship could never have been shouted by crowds of every faith together, as Volume III shows it was. A verb that meant only "hello" could never have become a battle cry. Vande is wide enough to hold a whole people's different ways of loving their land, as long as nobody narrows it for everyone else.
Who is speaking
Whatever vande means, one thing about it is fixed. It is singular. It means "I bow". It cannot mean "we bow", which in Sanskrit is a different word. When the song bows again later, it uses namāmi, "I bend low", which is also "I". Every time this song bows, it bows as one person.
A sentence that begins with "I" presents itself as the speaker's own act. An actor who says "I am Hamlet" is not lying, and a choir singing a hymn is not always confessing a creed. Performing is not the same as asserting. But "I bow" has the shape of personal consent. It says, in the singer's own voice, this is my bow. Only the singer knows whether, and how, he means it.
Two things follow, and the rest of the series depends on them.
First, nobody can bow for somebody else. In 1905 and 1906 the British tried to stop students and crowds in Bengal from crying the words.⁷ The words spread faster. Anyone who has since tried to make an unwilling person say them has found the same thing from the other side. A government can arrange for a song to be sung. It cannot make a bow sincere.
Second, when many people sing vande together, each of them is still saying "I". A crowd of ten thousand singing the first line is ten thousand people, each making a bow of his own at the same moment. Whatever "we" a singing crowd becomes, it is made of those single voices. Volume III finds the one place where the song itself counts them.
Part Four — Mātaram, the Mother with no name
The song never says which land it is bowing to. That silence made it a nation's song.
What the word says
Mātaram is the Sanskrit word for mother, mātṛ, in the form used for the person a verb is done to. Vande Mātaram is "I bow to the Mother". In the first two stanzas every description of her, well-watered, rich in fruit and the rest, is in the same form. She is looked at and praised. She does not yet speak to the singer, and he does not yet speak to her.
She is never named
Read the whole song again, looking for a name. There is none. It never says Bhārat or India. It never says Baṅga or Bengal. It names no river, city, king, religion or enemy. It names three goddesses outright in the fifth stanza and a range of hills in the first, and nothing else. The land the singer bows to is called only "the Mother".
When he wrote the song, by tradition in 1875, Bankim almost certainly meant Bengal. His "seven crore" was the population of his province, as Volume III shows. But because the song never said so, it could grow. After 1905 people across British India sang it to a Mother who was the whole subcontinent, and in time they changed the number to fit. A song that had named Bengal would have stayed Bengali. A song that named only "the Mother" could become the song of anyone with a land to love.
I think this is the first thing the text teaches. The Mother of Vande Mātaram is not a map and not a government. She is the land as each singer knows it, and because she has no name, each singer can recognise her.
What the word has carried
The idea that the land is a mother is far older than Bankim. The Atharvaveda's Hymn to the Earth, composed many centuries before the Common Era, says mātā bhūmiḥ putro 'haṃ pṛthivyāḥ.⁸ "The earth is my mother. I am the son of the earth." The Taittirīya Upaniṣad tells a student leaving his teacher's house, mātṛdevo bhava, "let your mother be as a god to you".⁹ That shows how high Indian ethics placed the mother, and so how much is being said when a land is called one.
What Bankim added, I think, was a hymn. He gave the old idea a bow, made to a mother who was a homeland under foreign rule.
What I think it can mean
Calling the land a mother lets a people say several true things at once.
Birth. You do not choose your mother. You belong to her before you can decide anything.
Nourishment. What you have, you received: food, water, air, language.
Inheritance. From a mother you inherit a tongue, a memory and a place in a story.
Duty. A child owes a mother what no contract could list.
Protection. A mother who is insulted must be defended. The third stanza turns on exactly this.
These are good and true feelings, and they explain why people loved the song. They also carry a danger, and it should be named. If the nation is a mother, then disagreeing with the people who speak in her name can be made to sound like disobeying her. A citizen who says "I do not accept this policy" is using a right. A son who says "I will not do what my mother asks" is, in most Indian homes, doing something shameful. When the land becomes a mother, those two sentences can start to sound alike.
Read closely, the song itself does not make that mistake. Its Mother is the land, not the government. She is praised, not obeyed. She gives water and fruit. She gives no orders. Five things are easily mixed up in arguments about the song, and the song keeps them apart.
The land is the ground, the rivers, the fields and the air. The song praises it.
The Mother is the land loved as a person. The song bows to her.
The nation is the people who share that love. The song counts them once, in the third stanza.
The State is the government and its laws. The song never mentions it.
The citizen is one person with his own conscience. The song speaks in his voice, "I bow".
Keep these five apart and many of the quarrels about the song lose their force. The quarrel about the fifth stanza does not, and Volume IV gives it the whole volume it deserves. But the song never asks anyone to obey a State. It asks a person to bow to a land, in whatever sense of vande his conscience allows.
Part Five — Three things called Vande Mātaram
The text, the novel and the cry are not the same thing, and most quarrels mix them up.
For most of the people who have loved it, Vande Mātaram has been two words long. It helps to keep apart three things that share the name.
The text is the six stanzas. This series is about them.
The novel, Ānandamaṭh, came out in parts from 1881 and as a book in 1882.³ It tells of Hindu monks who rebel in the Bengal of the 1770s. Its politics are its own. It speaks of Muslims, often with contempt, as part of the order its rebels fight. At its end a mysterious figure, the Physician, tells the rebels' leader that the English must rule the land for a time before the old religion can be renewed. The novel that gave India its cry against British rule ends by accepting British rule as necessary.
The cry is what Indians made of the song's first two words between 1896 and 1947. It was a battle cry, a greeting, a badge, a flag and a vow.
The cry was born in music. In December 1896, at the twelfth session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, the young Rabindranath Tagore sang Vande Mātaram to a tune he had set himself.¹⁰ The president of that session was Rahimtulla Muhammad Sayani, a Muslim lawyer from Bombay. In 1905, when the British divided Bengal, "Bande Mātaram", as Bengalis say it, became the protest's cry. Students were fined and expelled for shouting it.⁷
In April 1906, at Barisal, under another Muslim president, the police beat delegates for marching with the words on their badges. Volume III tells that day. An English newspaper in Calcutta took the words as its name, founded by Bipin Chandra Pal and edited by Sri Aurobindo. Within a few years the words had been carried to Lahore, to London, and to a meeting in Stuttgart, where they were written across an early Indian flag.
In those years the song did something strange. It outran its novel twice. It outran the novel's enemy, because Muslims cried the words beside Hindus at Barisal. And it outran the novel's surrender, because the song became the cry against the very rule the novel accepted. Neither of these was in the book. Both happened to the song.
This matters for anyone who wants to love the song, or to understand why others do. The text names no enemy. Its six stanzas contain no Muslim, no Englishman, no Nawab and no Company. Everything that makes the novel hard to read today is outside the song. You can love Vande Mātaram without loving Ānandamaṭh, and most people who have loved the song never read the novel.
It is also true that the song was separated from the novel by a choice, and that every singer makes that choice again. When the Congress explained its decision about the song in October 1937, it said exactly this. The song was written before the novel and on its own, and should be judged apart from it.¹¹ Those who sing all six stanzas today sing them apart from the novel too. Nobody sings Ānandamaṭh. Everyone draws a line somewhere, and where to draw it is a question that runs through the rest of this series.
The ending
That evening Meera takes the printed text from her son's school bag and reads it to him slowly, the way this volume has. She tells him vande means "I bow", and that the bow can be a son's, a soldier's, a poet's or a devotee's. She tells him the Mother has no name, so he must decide for himself whom he is bowing to. She tells him that in the novel the song was first sung to a starving man, and that it was a promise, not a report.
He listens to the end. Then he asks what she cannot yet answer. "And the goddess? Do I have to bow to her too?"
"Not tonight," Meera says. "First the water."
The next volume begins with the water, and with the ten gifts the song says a good land gives.
Next → II · The Ten Gifts
Words to keep
abhivādana · the respectful greeting a student gives a teacher, or a younger person an elder.
Ānandamaṭh · Bankim's novel of 1882, in which the song first appeared.
Mātaram · "the Mother", in the form used for the one who is bowed to.
namāmi · "I bend low, I bow". The song's other word for bowing.
saṅkalpa · a spoken resolve, made before beginning something serious.
stuti · a hymn of praise.
vande · "I bow", from greeting to worship. Always said by one person.
Sources
"Akashvani to broadcast full version of National Song Vande Mataram from tomorrow to open its morning broadcast", All India Radio News, 25 March 2026. newsonair.gov.in
The six-stanza text printed for the song's 150th year (2025–26), prescribed for official functions by Ministry of Home Affairs orders of 28 January and 9 July 2026. [verify the wording of the orders before publishing]
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Ānandamaṭh (serialised in Baṅgadarśan from 1881, book 1882). English translation, Julius J. Lipner, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood (Oxford University Press, 2005). The three images are in Part I. The Physician's speech is in the final chapter.
Warren Hastings to the Court of Directors, 3 November 1772, as cited in R. C. Dutt, The Economic History of India under Early British Rule (1902). The figure is disputed by modern historians.
Dhātupāṭha, the entry vadi abhivādana-stutyoḥ.
Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899), under vand.
The Carlyle Circular of 10 October 1905, and Government of India, 150 Years of Vande Mataram (Press Information Bureau, November 2025).
Atharvaveda (Śaunaka recension) 12.1.12. Translation, W. D. Whitney, Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā (Harvard, 1905).
Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.2. Compare Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads (Oxford, 1998).
Report of the twelfth Indian National Congress, Calcutta, December 1896, president R. M. Sayani.
Congress Working Committee, statement on Bande Mataram, Calcutta, October 1937 (AICC Papers).
How this was written. I worked from the 150th-year text, the novel in Lipner's translation, the Sanskrit dictionaries and the documents of 1896 to 1937. My translations of the stanzas are plain on purpose. Hastings's famine figure is his, not a modern estimate. This volume would change if evidence showed that Bankim wrote the song as a description of Bengal in a good year, not as a promise made in a bad one. That would weaken the reading of the song as a vow, though not the meaning of its words. Meera, her mother and her son are imagined.
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