"You Are Durgā" — The stanzas of Vande Mātaram some Indians cannot sing, read so that the devotee and the objector understand each other
Vande Mātaram series · Volume IV · Parts Twenty-Two to Thirty-Two
Volume III showed that the song's only "we" is a count, seven crore throats, while every bow in it is "I bow". This volume reads the fourth and fifth stanzas, where the land moves inside the singer and is then named a goddess, so its parts begin at Twenty-Two.
The stanza of Vande Mātaram that Indians argue over says "You are Durgā". Read word by word, it is where the devotee, the objector and the non-believer can all agree on what the words say, and where none of them is confused.
In Brief: The fourth of five articles that read India's national song word by word. The land inside the singer, the image in every temple, the goddess, why many Hindus love this stanza most and why many Muslims and Christians cannot say it, and what was decided about it in 1937.
The stanza of Vande Mātaram that some Indians cannot sing says plainly that the land is the goddess Durgā, and the devotee, the objector and the non-believer can all agree on what the words literally say. First the land moves inside the singer: his knowledge, his dharma, his heart and his breath. Then every image in every temple is called hers, and she is named Durgā, Lakṣmī and Sarasvatī. The devotee finds the summit of his song here. The Muslim or Christian who will not say it has read it correctly. Understanding a stanza is not the same as saying it. How both can stand in one hall is the subject of the last volume.
The opening
On 15 August the district collectorate in Kannur holds its Independence Day function, and since this year the full six-stanza version of Vande Mātaram is played at it. Meera is there with the teachers of her school. Beside her stands Salma, who teaches mathematics, and who has stood beside her at school functions for eleven years.
They sing the first two stanzas together. Through the third, and the fourth as far as its temples, Salma sings softly. At the words "it is your image", she stops singing. She does not sit, or move, or look away. She stands straight and silent through that line and the whole of the fifth, tvaṃ hi Durgā, "you are Durgā", and then sings the last two lines with everyone else.
Afterwards, over tea, Meera asks her about it. "I love this land as much as anyone on that stage," Salma says. "I cannot call it a goddess. For me only God is God."
That evening Meera's mother, who sang every word at home with tears in her eyes, says that Salma is a good woman who does not understand the song. Meera's son asks the question Meera has been avoiding. "So who is right?"
Meera, Salma, Meera's mother and her son are imagined. The silence of a person like Salma, at a function like this one, is not.
What does the stanza that says "You are Durgā" actually say, and why can some Indians not say it?
Part Twenty-Two — Two words for "you"
The singer speaks to the land in his home language, then to the goddess in the language of scripture.
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.
Two things about these stanzas matter before any single word.
The word for "you" changes language. In the fourth stanza the Mother is tumi, the Bengali "you". In the fifth she is tvam, the Sanskrit "you". They are related words. One is spoken at home, the other in the temple and the school. The singer speaks to the land inside himself in his mother tongue, and to the goddess in the language of scripture. The fourth stanza has one Sanskrit line, tvaṃ hi prāṇāḥ śarīre, "you are the breath in the body", and it stands between the two.
Tumi is the Bengali "you" used for equals, friends and one's own mother. Bengali has three grades of "you". Āpni is formal. Tumi is close and warm. Tui is the most intimate, or the roughest. A Bengali child calls his mother tumi, or tui. He does not call her āpni. The fourth stanza is the part of the song that sounds like a household.
The Mother moves. In the first two stanzas she was around the singer, as a landscape. In the third she stood before him, as a person to defend. In the fourth she is inside him. In the fifth she is above him, as a goddess he bows to. And in the sixth, as Volume V shows, she is beneath him, the ground that holds him up. I think the song walks once around the person who sings it.
There is a lesson here for every Indian who sings the song, whatever his own language. The fourth stanza is where Bankim left the shared learned language and wrote in his own household's. A national song with a stanza in one province's home language is a reminder that the nation is made of households, each with its own word for "you". A Tamil or Malayali singer's word for his mother is not Bankim's. It is his own, and it is just as close.
Part Twenty-Three — Knowledge, and what holds
The first two things the singer calls the land are true of everyone.
Vidyā, knowledge
Vidyā is knowledge or learning, from the root vid, "to know", which also gives the word Veda. The line does not say "you give knowledge". It says "you are knowledge".
Indian thought has long told apart different kinds of knowing. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad says there are two kinds of knowledge to be known, a lower and a higher.¹ The lower is all the learning of the world, the Vedas themselves included, with grammar and astronomy. The higher is the knowledge by which the imperishable is grasped.
I think that to call a land "knowledge" is to say something literally true of everyone. Nobody learns to think from nowhere. A person's first words, first stories, the shape of his reasoning, the things he takes for granted and the things he questions, all reach him from a particular place and a particular people. The language you are reading now was given to you by somebody's land. So a land is not only something you know about. It is part of how you know anything at all.
Dharma, what holds
Dharma comes from the root dhṛ, "to hold, to support". Its meanings run from law and duty to right order, virtue, and the nature of a thing.
The Mahābhārata gives the classic explanation through that root.²
dhāraṇād dharmam ity āhur dharmo dhārayate prajāḥ
"It is called dharma because it holds. Dharma holds the people together." The same root runs through this whole song, as Volume III showed. In the sixth stanza the song will call the land dharaṇī, "the one who holds".
I think the line "you are dharma" says that a land is the first thing that holds a people together, before any law is written. The rules by which people live with each other grow out of the place where they live together. That is a strong and beautiful claim, and it carries a danger that should be named at once. If the land is my dharma, then someone who claims to speak for the land can try to tell me what my dharma is.
Volume I kept apart five things that are easily run together: the land, the Mother, the nation, the State and the citizen. "You are dharma" is said to the land. It is not said to whoever governs it. A singer who means it is bound to the land's good, not to anyone's instructions about what that good requires.
Part Twenty-Four — Heart, core and breath
To love a land this way is to make yourself woundable there.
Hṛdi and marma
Hṛdi is the heart. In Sanskrit the form means "in the heart", so the line can be heard two ways: you are the heart, and you are in the heart. Marma is a vital point, a place in the body where a wound kills. The word comes from mṛ, "to die". In Bengali, Hindi and Malayalam it also means the innermost core of anything. Something that touches the marma touches the very centre of life.
Indian medicine mapped the vital points with care. The surgical treatise of Suśruta counts one hundred and seven of them, the places where a blow kills or cripples.³ And the Atharvaveda's Hymn to the Earth uses the same two ideas as the song. A man who digs the soil prays to the earth.⁴
yat te bhūme vikhanāmi kṣipraṃ tad api rohatumā te marma vimṛgvari mā te hṛdayam arpipam
"Whatever I dig out of you, Earth, may it quickly grow again. May I not strike your vital point, nor your heart" (12.1.35).
I think Bankim's line turns the Atharvaveda's around, and the two together make one thought. In the old hymn, the earth has a heart and a vital point, and the person digging must take care not to strike them. In the song, the land is the singer's heart and vital point. Each is the other's marma.
To love a land this way is to make yourself woundable there. What harms the land now harms the place in you where a wound is fatal. I think that is the deepest thing the fourth stanza says, and it says it without any god. It describes what it is to belong somewhere.
The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1943, said the same thing in modern prose.⁵ This is a comparison, not a source. "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul." The fourth stanza says it in two words, tumi marma.
Tvaṃ hi prāṇāḥ śarīre, you are the breath in the body
This is the stanza's one Sanskrit line. Tvam is "you". Hi is "indeed". Prāṇāḥ is "the breaths of life". Śarīre is "in the body". You indeed are the breath of life in the body. Prāṇāḥ is plural. Indian physiology spoke of five breaths, the currents by which life moves through the body, and the plural of prāṇa is the ordinary Sanskrit way of saying "life" itself.
I think the line closes a circle that began in the first stanza. There the land was cool with the wind from the southern hills. Here the land is the breath in the body. The wind that blew across the land in the first stanza is the same air the singer breathes in the fourth. In a plain sense, a person is made of the place where he lives: its water, its grain, its air.
Part Twenty-Five — Strength in the arm, devotion in the heart
Two words that rhyme, one body that holds both.
Bāhute tumi Mā śakti: "in the arm, Mother, you are strength". Hṛdaye tumi Mā bhakti: "in the heart, Mother, you are devotion".
Śakti comes from śak, "to be able". It is capacity, power, the ability to act. It is also the name of the goddess as cosmic power, worshipped in her own right in the Śākta traditions that are strong in Bengal. The Mother of the song belongs to that world.
Bhakti comes from bhaj. In the dictionaries its first meanings are "to divide, to share, to give a portion, to take part in", and only after those, "to serve, honour, love, adore".⁶ The oldest meaning of bhakti is a share, a portion. Over a thousand years it became the name of the great devotional movements of India, in which love of God was sung in the common languages by people of every caste.
Three readings follow, and all three are mine.
First, the pair is a single rhyme, and the song puts both in one body, power in the arm and love in the heart. Strength without devotion is force. Devotion without strength is sentiment. The singer is asked to carry both.
Second, the arm comes back. In the third stanza fourteen crore arms held swords. Here the arm holds śakti, the power to act. A sword is one use of an arm. The ability to act is the arm itself. A singer can hear this as a correction of the third stanza. The song does not call it one, and the third stanza still says what it says.
Third, bhakti as sharing. If devotion is, at its root, taking part, then devotion to a land is having a share in it. A share is a part that stays your own while belonging to a whole. That is exactly the shape of the count in Volume III, seven crore throats, each its own, together the Mother's voice. Devotion to the land, read through its root, is not dissolving yourself into the land. It is taking your portion of it, and of its care.
Part Twenty-Six — The image in every temple
The line on which the whole song turns, from the land within to the goddess above.
Tomārai is "yours", with the Bengali ending -i that means "only, and no other". Pratimā is an image or likeness. Gaḍi means "shape", "make", "build". Mandire-mandire means "in temple after temple". So the line says, it is your image, and no other, that is shaped in temple after temple.
That is a very large claim. It says that every image in every temple is an image of the Mother. I think this is where the fourth stanza turns toward the fifth. A singer who means it sees the land in whatever a temple holds. The next stanza draws the conclusion, tvaṃ hi Durgā, you are Durgā.
Pratimā is the word Bengalis use for the great clay images of the autumn festival of Durgā. Pratimā gaḍā, "shaping the image", is the ordinary phrase for the work of the craftsmen who make them each year. In Bengal those images are made, worshipped for some days, and then carried to the river and sunk. The clay goes back to the water it came from. Every Bengali who sang this line knew that a pratimā is made, honoured, and given back.
Three observations, all mine.
The image is a measure. Pratimā is built from prati, "matching", and mā, "to measure". An image is a likeness made to the measure of something. And the fifth stanza will call the Mother atulā, from a-, "without", and tulā, "a scale for weighing". She is the one who cannot be weighed. So within a few lines the song says that the Mother is shaped to measure in every temple, and that she is beyond all measure.
For the devotee there is no contradiction. An image is a measure made so that the measureless can be approached. For the strict believer in one God, there is a contradiction, and it is the whole problem. What cannot be measured must not be given a measure. Both readings start from the same two words, and the devotee and the objector each follow one.
One image was a measure in the plainest sense. In 1936, at Varanasi, Gandhi opened a Bhārat Mātā Mandir, a temple to Mother India, built by Shiv Prasad Gupta.⁷ There is no idol in it. At its centre is a map of undivided India carved in marble, with its mountains raised to scale. A map is the purest kind of pratimā, an image made strictly to measure. Abanindranath Tagore's painting of 1905, which Volume II described, is another, a Mother who gives.
The only verb in the song that might mean "we" is in this line. Bengali verbs show the person but not the number. Āmi gaḍi is "I shape". Āmrā gaḍi is "we shape". The verb is the same. So gaḍi can be heard either way. Everywhere else, the song's verbs are firmly singular: vande and namāmi, "I bow". In this one line the verb could be plural, and the act it names is not bowing but making.
I think that is exactly right. Bowing is each person's own. Making an image is something people do together. In Bengal today the great autumn images are mostly made for neighbourhoods and worshipped by them jointly, in festivals called sarbojanīn, "for all people". If the song has a "we" in its verbs, it is a "we" that builds, not a "we" that bows.
Part Twenty-Seven — "You are Durgā", word by word
The stanza names three goddesses, bows twice, and comes home to the land.
Tvaṃ hi Durgā daśapraharaṇadhāriṇī
"You indeed are Durgā, who holds ten weapons." Tvam is "you". Hi is "indeed", a word of emphasis. This is not a comparison. The singer does not say "you are like Durgā". He says the land is Durgā. Durgā is built from dur, "hard", and gam, "to go". She is the one hard to reach, hard to overcome. A durga is a fortress. Daśa is "ten". Praharaṇa is "weapon", from pra-hṛ, "to strike". Dhāriṇī is "she who holds".
Durgā is the great warrior goddess of Indian worship, and above all of Bengal. In the Devī Māhātmya, the central text of her worship, the gods cannot defeat a demon who has conquered heaven.⁸ So they pour their powers into a single shining form, and each gives her his weapon. Śiva gives his trident, Viṣṇu his discus, Indra his thunderbolt.
The same text explains her name. She will kill a great demon called Durgama, "hard to approach", and so be known as Durgā. In Bengal she is worshipped every autumn with ten arms, standing on a lion, killing the buffalo demon.
I think the ten weapons can be set beside the third stanza's swords. There, the swords were in fourteen crore human arms. Here, the weapons are in the goddess's ten. Whatever the devotee makes of the goddess, the arms holding weapons in this stanza are not his own.
Kamalā kamaladalavihāriṇī
"Kamalā, who plays among lotus petals." Kamalā, "she of the lotus", is a name of Lakṣmī, goddess of fortune, plenty and grace. Kamala-dala is "lotus petal". Vihāriṇī is "she who plays, who wanders at ease".
The lotus grows out of mud and stands above the water unstained. The Bhagavad Gītā uses it for a person who acts without clinging to results. He is not touched by wrong, "as a lotus leaf is not wetted by water".⁹ Lakṣmī stands or sits on a lotus in almost every image of her.
Two small things, both mine. The same root, hṛ, is in both lines. With pra, "forward", it makes praharaṇa, a weapon, what strikes. With vi, "apart, at ease", it makes vihāriṇī, she who plays. The same root, turned one way, makes the warrior's weapon, and turned another, the goddess's play. The song puts them side by side.
And dala returns. In the second stanza the trees' leaves were druma-dala. In the third the enemy's ranks were ripu-dala. Here the lotus petals are kamala-dala. Volume III read the enemy's ranks as a leaf broken off the tree. In the fifth stanza the same word comes back as a petal, the part of a flower on which a goddess of plenty stands.
Vāṇī vidyādāyinī
"Vāṇī, who gives learning." Vāṇī is speech or voice, and a name of Sarasvatī, goddess of speech, music and learning. Vidyā-dāyinī is "she who gives knowledge".
In Bengal's autumn image, Durgā does not stand alone. On either side of her stand two daughters, Lakṣmī and Sarasvatī, with Gaṇeśa and Kārtika beside them. The fifth stanza names the three goddesses of that image in order: Durgā in the centre, then Lakṣmī, then Sarasvatī. The stanza can be heard as a picture of the pratimā Bengal sees every autumn, the image the line before said was shaped in temple after temple.
I think the three goddesses name three goods a land must give its people. Protection belongs to Durgā. Prosperity belongs to Lakṣmī. Learning belongs to Sarasvatī. The fourth stanza began "you are knowledge". The fifth ends its list with "you give knowledge". The land that is the singer's knowledge must also give knowledge to others.
Like the ten gifts of Volume II, this triad can be read as a vow, that the land be safe, that it provide, and that it teach. That reading is mine. It is not a substitute for the goddesses, and a devotee need not accept it.
Namāmi tvāṃ, namāmi Kamalām
"I bow to you. I bow to Kamalā." Namāmi is "I bow", from nam, "to bend". It appears twice here, after once in the third stanza.
The bow deepens again, and it stays singular. Before the goddesses, the singer still speaks for himself, namāmi, not namāmaḥ, "we bow". I think this is the most important fact about the fifth stanza for anyone who will not say it. The stanza never says that anyone else bows. It is one person's confession of faith, made in the first person, and it binds no one but the person who makes it.
Amalām atulām, sujalāṃ suphalāṃ Mātaram
Amalā is "spotless", from a-, "without", and mala, "stain". Atulā is "beyond compare", literally "without a scale", what cannot be weighed. And then the stanza ends with the song's first words, sujalāṃ suphalāṃ Mātaram, "well-watered, rich in fruit, the Mother".
The goddess passage does not end on the goddess. In the middle of bowing to Kamalā, the song goes back to water and fruit. For the devotee, this shows that the goddess is the land, the spotless, measureless one is the same as the well-watered field. For the citizen, it shows that the song's journey through the goddesses comes home to the ground. Both readings are possible, because the words are the same. Volume V follows that return.
Part Twenty-Eight — How the devotee sings it
For many Hindus the fifth stanza is not an intrusion. It is the summit.
For a devotee, everything before the fifth stanza has been leading here. The land was praised, defended, found within, and is now recognised for what he believes she has always been.
Bankim stated his own view of sacred images in 1882, in a public argument with a Scottish missionary, William Hastie, who had attacked Hindu image worship as idolatry.¹⁰ The image, Bankim answered, is "the visible and accessible medium through which I choose to send my homage to the throne of the Invisible".
Applied to the song, which is my step and not one Bankim states, that view means something precise. To say "you are Durgā" to the land is not to say that soil is God. It is to say that the land is a medium through which the devotee's homage reaches what no medium contains. The pratimā leads to the atulā, the measured image to the one beyond measure.
This sits inside an old Indian way of thinking about the sacred. The Ṛgveda says ekaṃ sad viprā bahudhā vadanti, "What is, is one. The wise call it by many names".¹¹ The fifth stanza names one Mother three times, Durgā, Kamalā and Vāṇī. The Upaniṣadic instruction mātṛdevo bhava, "let your mother be as a god to you", which Volume I quoted, belongs to the same world.
For a devotee raised in it, the step from "the land is my mother" to "the land is the goddess" is not a leap. It is the natural end of a road his tradition laid down long ago.
What the devotee is owed. When Meera's mother sings the fifth stanza with tears in her eyes, she is singing her faith in public, in her national song, in the words it was written in. She is not being communal, any more than a Christian is being sectarian when she sings a hymn. To forbid her, or to call her a bigot for singing it, would make her "I" smaller just as surely as forcing the words on Salma would make Salma's smaller.
What the devotee must not ask. She can sing her summit. She cannot require her neighbour to climb it. The stanza itself tells her so, because its verb is namāmi, "I bow", not "we bow". What this costs her is set out in Volume V.
Part Twenty-Nine — How the objector hears it
The objector has read the stanza correctly. That is the first thing to understand about him.
Muslim objections to the song were raised from the first decade of the twentieth century. The plainest statement of what the fifth stanza says came in 1937, from Rabindranath Tagore, the song's first great singer.
Writing privately in Bengali to Subhas Chandra Bose in October 1937, Tagore said this.¹²
"The core of Bande Mataram is a hymn to the goddess Durga; this is so plain that there can be no debate about it."
No Muslim, he added, could be expected patriotically to worship "the ten-handed deity" as his country.
Tagore was a Brahmo, a member of the reformed movement his father had helped lead, which worshipped one formless God. A week later, in a public statement written at Jawaharlal Nehru's request, he said he could separate the song's opening "from the rest of the poem and from those portions of the book of which it is a part, with all the sentiments of which, brought up as I was in the monotheistic ideals of my father, I could have no sympathy".¹³ The clearest reader of the fifth stanza in 1937 was a Hindu-born poet who loved the first two.
What the objection rests on
For a Muslim who holds the classical view, the centre of faith is tawḥīd, the oneness of God. The gravest sin is shirk, setting anything beside God in worship. Prostration, sujūd, belongs to God alone. A Muslim may greet anyone with salām, "peace". He may not say of anything except God that it is divine, or bow to it in worship.
Put the fifth stanza beside that and the result is exact. "You are Durgā … I bow to you" is, on its face, a statement that the land is a goddess and an act of bowing to her. Many Christians hold a similar view. Some, like Jehovah's Witnesses, will not sing even a national anthem.
Why "I don't mean it literally" does not help
People sometimes tell the objector to sing the stanza as poetry, meaning nothing by it. For some traditions, that misunderstands what words are. In the classical view of many Muslim scholars, to say on purpose words that call anything but God divine is itself a grave act, whatever one privately intends. Volume I separated saying a sentence as a performance from saying it as a claim.
For the devotee and the poet, that difference is real. For the objector, in this stanza, it may not be open to him. The words are the act. That is not stubbornness. It is a serious view of how much words weigh.
Muslims have not answered with one voice
Fairness needs this said plainly.
Some sing all of it. They hear the Mother and the goddesses as poetry and personification.
Many sing the first two stanzas. They take vande as a salute, in the sense of A. R. Rahman's song of 1997, written by the lyricist Mehboob, which sets the refrain Vande Mātaram beside the line Mā tujhe salām, "Mother, I salute you".¹⁴
Some sing none of it. They hold that bowing to the Mother in any stanza is bowing to something other than God. In 2006 the seminary of Darul Uloom Deoband issued a ruling against singing the song, and in 2009 the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind endorsed it, saying that patriotism does not require the singing of Vande Mātaram.¹⁵
Each of these is a real position held by Indians. None of them is a position against India. The last is the hardest for many Hindus to hear, but the Jamiat's sentence is, on its own terms, true. Love of country does not consist in singing a particular song.
A poet's couplet, and what it does not prove
In 1905, in a poem called Nayā Shivālā, "The New Temple", Muhammad Iqbal told a Brahmin that he had taken God to be in images of stone, while to Iqbal every particle of the homeland's dust was a god, a devtā.¹⁶ The couplet is not a Muslim position. Calling dust a devtā is itself something a devout Muslim would not say, and Iqbal left the idea behind.
It supports neither the goddess stanza nor the objector. I mention it only because it shows, in one poet, how sharply the land and the image can be pulled apart, the land made sacred and the stone image refused. That is almost exactly the line between the fourth stanza's first five lines, the land within, and its last, the image in every temple.
The novel
Some objections are not to the stanza but to the book around it. Ānandamaṭh is a story of Hindu monks fighting the Muslim rulers of Bengal, and it has passages hostile to Muslims. Some readers also find its ending, in which the monks are told to accept British rule for now, troubling for other reasons.
To that objection there is a real answer, which the Congress and Tagore gave in 1937. The song can be sung without the novel, as it has been since. To the objection against the fifth stanza itself, separating song from novel is no answer at all. The stanza says what it says.
What the objector has done. He has read the stanza correctly. He is not confused, and no amount of explanation will, or should, talk him out of his faith. What explanation can do is show him what his neighbour means by the words he will not say. Then he can stand beside his neighbour while she says them, and know that nothing is being asked of his faith.
Part Thirty — How the non-believer hears it
A fourth listener the quarrel usually forgets.
There is someone else in the hall, the person who believes in no god, or in none of these, and who loves the country.
Can a land be loved without being worshipped? I think the song answers yes, in four stanzas outright and in most of a fifth. The ten gifts of the first two need no god. The count of the third needs none. The fourth stanza says the land is knowledge, dharma, the heart, the vital core, the breath in the body, strength in the arm.
As the lines about the heart and the breath showed, all of that describes what it is to belong to a place, and an atheist can say it truthfully, except perhaps its last line about the temples. The sixth stanza, as Volume V shows, names no god.
How such a person hears the fifth. For the poet and the non-believer, "you are Durgā" is a figure of speech, like the figures other nations have made of themselves, Britannia with her trident, Marianne in her cap. This is a comparison only. Neither is a goddess to the people who use her, and that is the point. Many people in many countries sing words they do not believe, in hymns and carols and anthems, as part of what they have inherited.
India's own philosophy has always included people who doubted the gods, from the materialist Cārvāka school onward. A non-believer who sings the fifth stanza as poetry is doing something honest, as long as he knows it is poetry to him and faith to his neighbour.
Meera is close to this listener, the one Volume V calls the poet. She teaches physics, and the goddesses are her mother's faith, not hers. She sings the fifth stanza for her mother's sake and hears it as poetry.
The question the citizen must answer. The citizen, believer or not, has one more question that the devotee and the objector, busy with their own, do not always ask. It is not "is the land Durgā?" It is "what may a republic ask of people who disagree about whether the land is Durgā?" No stanza answers that. The republic does, and Volume V takes it up.
Part Thirty-One — Three questions, kept apart
Most of the quarrel comes from running three different questions together.
Most of the argument about the fifth stanza comes from mixing three different questions. They can be separated cleanly.
What does the stanza say? It says the land is Durgā, Kamalā and Vāṇī, and the singer bows to her. On what the words literally say, people who have read them hardly disagree. Tagore and the most devout worshipper of the Goddess agree. Salma and Meera's mother agree. Anyone with a dictionary can check it.
Is it true, or allowed, to say so? Is the land a goddess? May a believer in one God say that it is? These are questions of faith, and each tradition answers them in its own way. No article, court or government can settle them, and none should try.
What may a republic ask of its citizens? May the State require someone to sing the fifth stanza? May it require him to stand while others do? May anyone stop the devotee from singing it? These are questions about a free person and the State, answered by law and the Constitution, not by theology.
In my own work I use three levels of truth, and they help here. They are my framework. Some things are true for one person, held by him and binding on him. I call that pauruṣeya. Some things are true for many observers and can be checked by any of them. I call that apauruṣeya. And some things lie beyond anyone's knowing. I call that para-pauruṣeya. I borrow the words from the old Mīmāṃsā school, which used apauruṣeya to mean "not made by any person", and I give them my own meanings.
Whether there is a Durgā, in the end, lies beyond anyone's knowing. What the fifth stanza says is true for many and can be checked, and so is the fact that a land without water cannot feed its people. The devotee's faith that the land is the goddess, and the objector's faith that it is not, are each true for the one who holds them. A people can share completely what is true for many, while differing on what each holds for himself. It does not need to settle what no one can know before it sings.
From this follows the most useful distinction in this series. Understanding is not uttering. A person can understand the fifth stanza completely, know what it means to the devotee beside him, even find it beautiful as poetry, without saying it. This series asks every reader to understand all six stanzas. It does not ask anyone to say any of them. Salma, understanding the fifth stanza, can stand in a hall while it is sung and know exactly what Meera's mother is doing. Meera's mother, understanding the objection, can sing her summit without needing Salma's voice to make it true.
Part Thirty-Two — 1937, the line drawn through the song
The decision that made the first two stanzas the national song was a decision about these two.
Volume II promised the fuller story of how the first two stanzas became the national song. It belongs here, because it was a decision about the fourth and fifth.
In October 1937 the Muslim League objected to the song, and the Congress, which now governed most of India's provinces, had to decide what to do. Nehru, its president, read the novel to understand the objection and judged it partly sincere and partly stirred up. Tagore wrote to Bose privately, and then, on 26 October, publicly, in the statement Volume II quotes.
At the end of October the Congress Working Committee met in Calcutta and issued a short statement.¹⁷ It said the song should be judged apart from the novel. It spoke of the long record of sacrifice bound up with the song. It said the first two stanzas "described in tender language the beauty of the motherland and the abundance of her gifts", and that there was "absolutely nothing in them to which objection would be taken from the religious or any other point of view".
It said the other stanzas contained "certain allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India". And it recommended that at national gatherings only the first two stanzas be sung, "with perfect freedom to the organisers to sing any other song of an unobjectionable character, in addition to, or in the place of, the Bande Mataram song".
Three things about that decision matter for understanding the song.
The line fell exactly where the Mother stops being only a land. Whether or not the Committee thought of it this way, its cut came where the song turns from describing the land to speaking to a person, and, two stanzas later, to a goddess. In the language of this series, the national song kept the part where the Mother is around the singer, and left the parts where she is before him, within him and above him.
It took out more than the goddess. With the fourth and fifth stanzas went the third and the sixth. With the third went the count, the seven crore throats, the song's only way of saying that many people were singing. The swords went too, and the Bengali lines. With the sixth went the stanza that comes back to the earth and names no god, the ground nearly everyone can share. The national song the Republic inherited is one person bowing to a land, in Sanskrit, with no word in it for the many who sing it.
It made the song optional at the movement's own meetings. The words "in the place of" have been forgotten by both sides. The Committee did not only shorten the song. It said a national gathering could sing another song instead. That was a larger concession than dropping four stanzas. In practice the song went on being sung.
The decision did not end the quarrel. Within months, by Nehru's own account of the demands put to him, the League wanted the song given up entirely.¹⁸ It has been said since, and was said again in 2025, that the cut sowed the division of the country. Others hold that the division had much deeper causes. I think the evidence of 1938 supports the second view. The song was then one item on a list that also included a flag, a language and a system of elections, a token of the conflict rather than its seed.
What the decision left behind was a habit both sides learned, that the national song is something to be put on a table, given up, and demanded back. This series tries to take it off the table by reading it.
In 2026 all six stanzas were made the official version for official functions.¹⁹ The goddess came back into the national song, and with her the swords, the Bengali and a count, though not Bankim's count. That brings the question of 1937 back into the hall, in a new form. In 1937 the question was which stanzas the nation should sing.
Now all six are in the song, and the question is what each person in the hall does when the fifth stanza begins. The song has already answered half of it. Its fifth stanza says namāmi, "I bow", and binds only the one who says it.
The ending
That night Meera answers her son. She tells him that his grandmother and Salma agree completely about what the fifth stanza says. They disagree about whether it is true, and neither of them is confused. She tells him the stanza's verb is "I bow", so it binds only the one who says it. She tells him that understanding a stanza is not the same as saying it.
He thinks about this. "So what do I do on Republic Day?"
"Read it first," she says. "All of it. Then decide what your own mouth will say. And whatever you decide, don't look round to see who else is singing."
The song does not end on the goddess. Before the fifth stanza is over, it has come back to the ground, sujalāṃ suphalām. Its last stanza names no god at all. It calls the land by two words, dharaṇī and bharaṇī, the one who holds and the one who bears, and Volume V asks what it means for a land, and a people, to bear many.
Words to keep
atulā · beyond compare, literally "without a scale". What cannot be weighed.
bhakti · devotion. At its root, a share or portion.
Durgā · the warrior goddess, "hard to reach". A durga is a fortress.
gaḍi · Bengali "I shape" or "we shape". The verb does not say which.
Kamalā · "she of the lotus", a name of Lakṣmī, goddess of fortune.
marma · a vital point, where a wound kills. The innermost core.
pratimā · an image, a likeness made to the measure of something.
prāṇa · breath, life. The plural prāṇāḥ means life itself.
śakti · power, the ability to act. Also the goddess as cosmic power.
shirk · in Islam, setting anything beside God in worship.
tawḥīd · in Islam, the oneness of God.
tumi · the Bengali "you" used for a mother.
Vāṇī · speech, and a name of Sarasvatī, goddess of learning.
vidyā · knowledge, learning.
Sources
Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad 1.1.4–5. Compare Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads (Oxford, 1998).
Mahābhārata 8.49.50 (critical edition).
Suśruta Saṃhitā, Śārīrasthāna 6, on the 107 marmas.
Atharvaveda 12.1.35. Translation, W. D. Whitney, Atharva-Veda Saṃhitā (Harvard, 1905).
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (L'Enracinement, written 1943, published 1949), translated by Arthur Wills.
Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Oxford, 1899), under vidyā, dharma, dhṛ, hṛd, marman, prāṇa, śak, bhaj, bhakti, pratimā, mā, durga, praharaṇa, hṛ, vāṇī, amala, tulā.
On the Bhārat Mātā Mandir at Varanasi, opened by Gandhi in 1936, the standard accounts. [verify the date of the opening]
Devī Māhātmya, chapter 2 (the weapons) and chapter 11 (the name Durgā).
Bhagavad Gītā 5.10.
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, letter in the controversy with William Hastie, The Statesman (Calcutta), 1882. [verify the wording of the quotation]
Ṛgveda 1.164.46.
Rabindranath Tagore to Subhas Chandra Bose, 19 October 1937, in Bengali. Discussed in Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Vande Mataram, The Biography of a Song (Penguin, 2003). [verify the English wording against a printed translation]
Rabindranath Tagore, statement of 26 October 1937, in The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 3 (Sahitya Akademi, 1996).
A. R. Rahman, Vande Mataram (1997), "Maa Tujhe Salaam", lyrics by Mehboob.
Darul Uloom Deoband, ruling of 2006. Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, resolution at Deoband, November 2009, as reported in the national press.
Muhammad Iqbal, Nayā Shivālā (1905). Iqbal revised the poem for Bāng-e-Darā (1924), and the couplet about the dust survived the revision.
Congress Working Committee, statement on Bande Mataram, Calcutta, October 1937 (AICC Papers). [verify the quoted wording against the printed text]
Jawaharlal Nehru to M. A. Jinnah, 6 April 1938, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, first series.
Ministry of Home Affairs orders of 28 January and 9 July 2026, as described in the petition in T. M. Krishna v. Union of India, W.P.(C) No. 1183 of 2026, reported by LiveLaw, 22 September 2026.
How this was written.
I read the two stanzas in the dictionaries and the texts named above. I set out the devotee's and the objector's positions in their own terms before giving mine, and the Muslim positions come from published rulings and statements. The three levels of truth are my own framework, which a reader may reject. This volume would change if a major Islamic school held that speaking the fifth stanza as poetry is permitted. That would widen what the objector may do, not what the stanza says. Meera, Salma, Meera's mother and her son are imagined.
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