At the centre of the political controversy surrounding the song Vande Mataram is the novel Anandamath, written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1881–82. Although not his first novel, some scholars regard it as India’s first political novel, set against the backdrop of the Sanyasi Rebellion of the late 18th century.

Its significance lies less in the historical accuracy of that portrayal than in its impact on generations of readers. The reception of Vande Mataram, composed several years before the novel and later incorporated into it, is inseparable from the reception of Anandamath itself.

In Anandamath: A Political Myth (1982), litterateur Meenakshi Mukherjee says, “The novel consolidated certain nebulous ideals and aspirations of a people who needed a new myth.”

Bankim Chandra and his political novel

Born in 1838 to an orthodox Brahmin family in the village of Kanthalpara in Bengal, Chattopadhyay belonged to a fast-emerging English-educated middle class in 19th-century India, which sustained itself and collaborated with the British colonisers. It was the same class that led the struggle against British colonial rule. Chattopadhyay was one of the first graduates of Calcutta University and worked in the provincial civil and judicial services in the government of Bengal.

He had a near meteoric rise to literary fame with the publication of his first novel, Durgesnandani, in 1864. In the course of his literary career, he wrote 10 other novels, three volumes of short fiction, three volumes of humour and satire, four treatises on social philosophy and religion and a collection of essays. Though not the originator of Bengali prose, he is often regarded as its foremost architect.

Nares Chandra Sen-Gupta, who produced the first English translation of Anandamath in 1906, observed that Bankim Chandra “struck out for himself a path in the matter of style to which Bengali literature has clung since.”

Anandamath first appeared in serialised form in the popular Bengali monthly journal Banga Darshan in 1881-82. In its book form, it was first published in 1882 and gained immediate popularity. Before the end of the 19th century, five editions of Anandamath had already been published, and by the beginning of the 20th century, it began to be translated into the major languages of India.

Bankim Chandra’s political novel was born at a time when nationalism was emerging in Bengal, and literature played a crucial role in that process. In his writing, he sought to spark renewed interest in the region’s and the country’s history, a typical feature of nationalism worldwide at the time. Anandamath was set in 1773, a century before Bankim Chandra was writing it.

This was the year of a terrible famine in Bengal, which killed millions of people. It was also the year of the great Sanyasi Rebellion, a series of armed uprisings by Hindu ascetics against Nawab of Bengal Mir Jafar and his East India Company overlords.

In the early 1770s, the East India Company exercised revenue authority in Bengal, while the nawab remained the nominal ruler. Scholars have argued that, as a government employee, Bankim Chandra was constrained from directly criticising British rule and therefore directed his critique towards the nawab’s regime.

In his opening chapter, Bankim Chandra writes: “Cowardly Mir Jafar, the heinous traitor, was unable to protect himself; how would he protect the lives and property of the people of Bengal? Mir Jafar drugged himself and dosed. The British extorted the revenue and wrote dispatches. The Bengalis merely wept and resigned themselves to ruin.”

It is in the context of this gross misrule, followed by the devastating famine, that Mahendra Singha, a prosperous householder, was driven out of his village by the prospect of starvation. As he moved around, he was separated from his wife and child and encountered a band of sanyasis who called themselves santans, or children of the motherland. They organised themselves against the oppressive rule of the nawab, first through guerrilla warfare and then in open confrontation.

However, since there was no historical truth in projecting a victory, Bankim Chandra ended the novel with a prophetic vision in which the rebels were dissuaded from going any further. As summarised by Mukherjee, “It was necessary, he advised them, to submit to British rule for the time being, until the true religion of the Hindus could be purified from its present degenerate and corrupt state by new empirical and scientific knowledge.”

Bankim Chandra did not acknowledge the novel’s historical basis in the first edition. It is through public demand that, in the second edition, he made a note of what happened in 1773, but added that he did not want to write a historical novel. Rather, the novel reflected the concerns of Bankim Chandra’s own time, a period marked by the rise of nationalism. “Anandamath was a deliberate attempt to create a myth of national character,” writes Mukherjee.

Vande Mataram in Anandamath

Though widely associated with Anandamath, Vande Mataram was composed earlier. Historian Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, in Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song, notes that when the poem was incorporated into the novel, the first 12 lines were placed within quotation marks. “It has been rightly inferred that the author wanted to separate the first two stanzas that he had written earlier, around 1875, from the part written later,” he writes.

The latter part, Bhattacharya suggests, would have been written with Anandamath‘s context in mind and would have carried explicit images of Hinduism and idolatry, which have been objected to by many in the Hindu community.

Scholars across the spectrum agree that the song is the core of the novel. One of the novel’s other main protagonists sings the song on five occasions, and each time it signals a significant juncture in the story, thereby playing a crucial role in the narrative structure of Anandamath.

Reception and criticism of Anandamath

The novel generated immediate interest among educated Bengali readers, and gradually acquired a wider readership. Mukherjee cites a Tamil critic who described Bankim Chandra as having a “national purpose”, “attempting in the new awakening in the country, a kind of idealistic romanticised regeneration of the Hindu ethos.”

Writing about the impact of the novel on Bengal, historian R C Mazumdar in his book, History of the Freedom Movement in India, writes, “No other Bengali book – or for that matter book written in any language – so profoundly moved the Bengali youth save perhaps Sarat Chandra’s Pather Dabi written half a century later.”

The song Vande Mataram, embedded in the novel, quickly circulated beyond the text itself and began to acquire political significance from the 1890s onward. It transformed into a powerful revolutionary anthem during the Swadeshi movement between 1905 and 1911, and later as part of the nationalist movement.

Among nationalist leaders, responses to the novel were varied. Revolutionaries such as Sri Aurobindo and Bipin Chandra Pal treated it as foundational.

Mahatma Gandhi, while defending Vande Mataram’s place in the national movement, expressed reservations about its communal overtones and opposed compulsory singing. Writing in Harijan in July 1939, he stated: “It had never occurred to me that it was a Hindu song or meant only for Hindus. Unfortunately, now we have fallen on evil days… I would not risk a single quarrel over singing Vandemataram at a mixed gathering.”

Criticism also emerged from the All-India Muslim League, including its founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who objected to the song’s idolatrous imagery and the novel’s portrayal of Muslims.

The hostility towards the Muslim community is perhaps the most common critique of the novel in scholarly analyses.

In the preface to his translation, Sen-Gupta points out that the hostility of the novel’s heroes to Muslims has led him to think thrice before placing it before a larger public. At the same time, he also cautions the reader, “the feeling was not so much against Mussalmans as against the anarchy and misrule under the Mussalman kings of the age, and particularly Mir Jafar, who ruled at the time.”

In several battle scenes and speeches, Muslim rulers and soldiers were depicted collectively as tyrannical or alien. Their defeat is framed as part of the restoration of the motherland. Razing down mosques and destroying houses of Muslims are spoken about as the means to that end.

One passage reads: “The first thing the Children did was to enter the gaol, which they broke, and to kill the warders. They released Satyananda and Mahendra and began to dance with joy, and there was a great noise of Haribol. After getting them out of gaol, Children set fire to the houses of the Mussalmans wherever they found them.”

Historian Aditya Mukherjee has argued that historical context cannot justify communal hostility. “The tallest leaders of the time, including Gandhi and Nehru, had, at the suggestion of Rabindranath Tagore, decided to drop the last part of the song,” he said in an interview.

Political scientist Shamsul Islam suggests that not only does the novel carry anti-Islam rhetoric, but it also speaks against Buddhists and the teachings of Vaishnavism propagated by Mahaprabhu Chaitanya. The most important criticism of Anandamath, he says, is the fact that it ends with the idea that a Hindu Rashtra will not be possible without the establishment of the British Raj.

Scholars note that Bankim Chandra’s political ideology underwent a significant transition in the course of his literary career. Historian Partha Chatterjee, in his analysis of Bankim Chandra, has argued that his early writings “reveal his acceptance of the most radical currents of contemporary European thought.” As such, he was firmly committed to the methods of ‘science’.

His early writings confirm his views against idolatry, and of the Hindu religion being in need of reformation. In his late life, however, he became much more of a conservative, “fiercely arguing for a revived and purified Hindu religion as the true dharma of modern man,” writes Chatterjee in Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankimchandra (1986).

Bhattarcharya argues that the poem Vande Mataram seems to fall somewhere in the period of transition and is therefore open to conflicting interpretations.

More than a century later, debates around Anandamath and Vande Mataram persist. Any meaningful engagement with the novel requires situating it within the intellectual currents, political constraints, and emergent nationalism of the 1880s, rather than reading it uncritically through contemporary lenses.