India is marking the 150th anniversary of national song 'Vande Mataram' today (November 7). With that, attention returns to Anandamath, the novel that introduced the song to the world.
Written by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Vande Mataram translates to “Mother, I Bow to Thee”. Over the years, the composition has inspired freedom fighters and nation builders alike, emerging as a lasting symbol of India's national identity and collective spirit.
From Serialisation To A Nation's Song
Before appearing as a book, Anandamath was serialised in Bangadarshan, a Bengali monthly magazine founded and edited by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. The song Vande Mataram featured in the very first instalment of the serialisation in the March-April 1881 issue. Bankim Chandra later incorporated the hymn when the novel was published in 1882, and Rabindranath Tagore set it to music.
Inside Anandamath
The central storyline of Anandamath revolves around a group of sanyasins known as the santanas, meaning “children”. They dedicate their lives to their motherland and worship the land of their birth as the mother goddess. Vande Mataram is sung by the santanas within the novel. The song stands as the symbol of the “religion of patriotism,” which forms the core theme of Anandamath.
According to Britannica, Vande Mataram appeared as a six-stanza devotional poem in Anandamath. The novel is set during the sannyasi rebellion, an early anti-colonial uprising led by Hindu ascetics against the East India Company, alongside the devastating Bengal famine of 1770. The story follows Mahendra, a wealthy zamindar who loses his home and family in the chaos. He finds refuge with a group of rebel sanyasins, and in one of the key moments of the novel, they worship the motherland as a goddess and recite “Vande Mataram.”
Inside their temple, the santanas placed three forms of the Mother symbolising the nation. One represented the glorious past, another showed the present filled with suffering and the third depicted a future full of strength and dignity.
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee: Writer, Thinker, Nationalist
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894), the creator of Vande Mataram, remains one of the most significant literary figures of 19th-century Bengal. As a novelist, poet and essayist, he played a major role in shaping modern Bengali prose and expressing an emerging Indian nationalism. His works, including Durgeshnandini (1865), Kapalkundala (1866), Anandamath (1882) and Devi Chaudhurani (1884), mirror the social, cultural and moral concerns of a colonised society striving for identity.
