4 min readAug 31, 2026 06:23 AM IST First published on: Aug 31, 2026 at 06:23 AM ISTIt took until India’s 80th Independence Day for ‘Vande Mataram’ to be rendered, for the first time, as part of the celebrations at the Red Fort. There was something strangely poignant about it. The war cry that had escaped a novel, entered the streets, unnerved an empire and accompanied bravehearts to prisons and gallows has taken nearly eight decades to reach independent India’s most symbolic ramparts.But even this sacred inheritance is not without its share of objectionable arguments. Veteran actor Sharmila Tagore and many others, like the Congress in 1937, propose restricting its national use to the first two stanzas. How can a Muslim bow to Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati invoked in its later verses? Doesn’t its origin in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath, with its difficult depiction of Muslim rule, make it exclusionary? Was India even a nation when Bankim imagined her as Mother?AdvertisementThese are not frivolous questions. But sometimes answers lie in recovering meanings we have lost. India was certainly not a modern nation-state for most of her history. India imagined herself differently. Long before passport, parliament or political boundary stood Bharatavarsha: a cultural and spiritual geography. The Vishnu Purana describes Bharata as the land north of the ocean and south of the Himalayas. Across this vastness, languages, customs, deities and philosophies differed, yet beneath them ran the same insistent question: What is the ultimate reality, and how may the human being know it? Kashmir answered through its Shaivism; Karnataka through Madhva’s Dvaita; Dwarka worshipped Krishna.India did not wait for the modern state to know herself. Her unity lay in a civilisation asking the eternal questions in a thousand different ways. This is where Sri Aurobindo helps us understand ‘Vande Mataram’. He called Bankim a rishi who had taught Indians to see India: “The mantra had been given… The Mother had revealed herself.”What Mother? Look again at Bankim’s poem. She first comes without weapons, crowns or temples. She is sujalam, suphalam: Abundant waters, cool breeze, green harvests, moonlit nights, flowering trees. Before she is Goddess, she is the land beneath our feet. Perhaps patriotism begins in such intimacy: A river remembered from childhood; the language in which one’s grandmother told stories; the smell of the first rain; food, music, mountains, festivals, memories. Slowly, geography becomes belonging. Earth becomes Mother.AdvertisementSri Aurobindo took this further. A nation, he wrote, was “not a piece of earth”. It was the shakti of its millions: A living being formed by its people, culture, civilisation, and aspiration. It helps us understand Bankim’s Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati. Read literally, and we have three Hindu goddesses and, inevitably, another TV debate. But India has always spoken through symbols. Durga is shakti; Lakshmi is abundance; Saraswati is knowledge.Strength. Prosperity. Knowledge. Which civilisation does not need all three? A Muslim need not worship Durga to value courage. A Christian need not worship Lakshmi to desire prosperity for India. An atheist need not worship Saraswati to hold knowledge sacred. The imagery is culturally Indian; what it signifies is universal.you may likeThe tragedy is in reducing ‘Vande Mataram’ to a religious quarrel. One sees a Hindu goddess and feels excluded; another sees a Hindu goddess and wishes to exclude. But if she is the “shakti of her millions”, the Muslim farmer, Christian nurse, Sikh soldier, Jain businessman, Buddhist monk, and atheist scientist are not guests in somebody else’s India. They are strands of her being.Perhaps that is why the Red Fort moment mattered. Not because everyone must now sing ‘Vande Mataram’, but because an old song returned carrying a question for our future: What do these two words ask of us?If India is merely territory, citizenship becomes transactional: What are my rights? What do I receive? But if India is Mother, the grammar of patriotism changes. Rights remain, but responsibility enters. The question turns from “What has India given me?” to “What am I giving India?” That is the enduring power of Bankim’s two words. Not an instruction to worship a nation, but an invitation to enter into a relationship with her. The nation-state may be modern. The Mother is ancient. The relationship is sacred. And so we bow to her. Vande Mataram.The writer is founder, Himalayan Institute for Alternatives, Ladakh