Vande Mataram and Islam

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About the Author Aurobindo Mazumdar (b. 1988), was educated at Guwahati, Assam. After practising for a few years, he joined the Faculty of Journalism, Gauhati University, in 1969, did his Ph.D. in Journalism and became the Professor and Head of the Faculty.

A prolific writer and author of many books, he has attended a number of national and international seminars. He presented research papers in Hawaii, USA, in 1985 and at Bangkok in 1993. His research included developmental, interpersonal and political communication. His book Indian Press and Freedom Struggle was reviewed by the national dailies including The Hindu. Nikhil Chakravartty praised it highly in his review in the Vidura, a Press Institute of India mass-media journal.

Foreword When we take up a new book of a historical song it is essential to realise what the lyric idea was and what the conditions were that gave the song its congenial form. We are to understand an intellectual lyric written in 1882. As we go on we find the song virtually unchanged and still asks of the old quickening of the pulses and the same power of kindling thought and increase in the sensation of life. The aim of this book is to show how in the midst of various diversities the Vande Mataram inspired different linguistic and religious people during the freedom struggle in India, how it has acted as a cementing force and how it has maintained its powers from the time when it was written to the present day.

To explain the whole process, the author has taken the help of innumerable old records. He has travelled from one part to the other part of India in quest of information without receiving any funding assistance from any quarters. Any research study that involves various Indian languages is, no doubt, extremely difficult. For the purpose of this study, the author himself learns Hindi and that helps him to go through several books of poems written by a plethora of Hindi poets.

The book reveals some important facts, which were hitherto unknown to many of us. The author has given a new interpretation to the historical misunderstanding relating to the Vande Mataram. The idea here presented may find agreement among all concerned. It is intended to arouse curiosity, stimulate thinking and broaden the outlook and understanding of people in general. This may lead to a sense of values urgently needed today.

If people are to be encouraged to think for themselves and to seek their own answers concerning national integration, they have to be confronted with errors of the past or doubts of the present with divergent judgements as well as the force of moral conviction With his meticulous study, the author has presented different views which has provided an absorbing interest. It is fascinating to read the story of the evolution of the Vande Mataram a song which has sung the whole of India. The readers-be they teachers or politicians or commoners whom this publication wants to serve will find enough useful historical information.

With all pleasures, I like to put on record a word of appreciation for the commendable service the author has done to the role of the Vande Mataram during the freedom struggle.

Introduction Since the thirteenth century, India was virtually under the domination of foreign rule. Before the advent of the British as the political master of the country, the Muslim conquerors invaded India when the latter was in the stage of feudalism and divided into a number of small kingdoms, partly theocratic and partly patriarchal. However, the political consciousness for a great unified India in the early period before the Muslim conquest was accomplished first in the third century B.C. by Ashoka, the great emperor, and again in the fourth century A.D. by Samodragupta.

Under the rule of the Muslim emperors, the great portion of the country was brought under one Central State. But it was not based on the support of loyal native nobility, who from time to time revolted against the imperial authority. The decline of the Muslim rule began with its own internal dissension together with the rise of the Sikh and Maratha powers.

At the time of the British conquests, feudal powers--both Muslim and Hindu-passed through a political chaos, having failed to maintain an established government ruling over any considerable part of India. The East India Company, a handful of British traders, took full advantage of the political situation and established its domination over the country with the help of Indian people themselves. Feudalism-be it Muslim or Hindu-did not help the development of national consciousness although people were then knitted together religiously and culturally.

During the last part of the eighteenth century of the British rule India was ravaged by widespread famines caused by the unrestricted export of foodgrains, heavy fall in the total production of food-stuff owing to climatic conditions, the transfer of extensive areas of land to the cultivation of indigo and jute and by economic suppression which was executed by destroying the Indian handicraft industry in competition with the machine production of England.

The British administrators and historians used to teach that the Indian people could never unite upon a national basis. So the British rule was indispensable for saving the Indian people from the political chaos in which they had been subjected for centuries. They persistently tried to prove that the Indians were incapable of initiative, enterprise and leadership.

The Indian people, who raised a national opposition against this attitude of the British rulers were literary men and not the politicians. Through the literatures they prepared the minds of the Indian people for reception and appreciation of the doctrine and programme of self- help and self-respects in politics. They showed the stirrings of new forces in the country that recalled Indian men and women to a new attitude towards the new life that had been knocking at the ancient doors of India.

The most powerful representative man among them was Bankim Chandra Chattapadhyaya, a genius in imaginative literature. Born on 26 June 1938 in a Bengali Brahmin family in the village of Kantalpara near Naihati in West Bengal, he introduced into Bengali literature, the fiery spirit of patriotism. He was sensitive to the intuitions of his time, was the fountain head of the patriotic inspiration and the harbinger of the then needed awakening. This was due to his mental endowments and his surroundings, to the climate of opinion in which he lived, the air which he breathed. The emergence of Bankim Chandra was pitched at a time of many agitations, a time when some signs of revolution were to be found. Bankim Chandra was, in his own way, a herald of its advance.