The Indian Spirit and the World's Future

Our Real National Anthem

OUT of all the fatuities with which modern India is infested, the most egregious is the long drawn-out discussion on the choice of a national anthem. The two songs that have been pitted against each other are really like two worlds apart and it is supreme lack of insight to set them up as equal candidates for election posing us a most perplexing problem. Once we understand, first, the prerequisites of the ideal national anthem and, secondly, the living associations and potencies of Bankim Chandra's Bande Mataram on the one hand and Tagore's Jana Gana Mana on the other, there cannot remain the slightest doubt that nothing except Bande Mataram can be the creative cry and the sustaining call on the lips of resurgent India.

We are often told that the prime consideration is that a national anthem should be suitable for collective singing, that it should have an effective orchestration. But these are, for all their importance, purely technical points. And woe betide the nation which appoints a committee of technicians to decide its anthem! Orchestral skill has certainly to be brought into play and a popular song which ultimately fails to be made suitable for collective singing will never get accepted. But such a song exists only in the imagination: the very fact that a song has been popular implies that it has possibilities of collective and orchestral treatment. The right kind of treatment may not be easy to come by; yet to say that there is a fundamental defect in the popular song, rendering the right kind impossible, is to indulge in extreme partisanship for a rival ditty and in gross underestimation of a country's musical talent: already we have more than one excellent notation of Bande Mataram, to balance that for which Jana Gana Mana has been commended. In the controversy about a national anthem, the prime consideration, where a popular song is concerned, can never be a technical one . We have to go down to its significance and its emotion, we have to look at its history and its impact on the times.

What would be the ideal national anthem? Most people would

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think immediately of the stirring language and music of La Marseillaise. If we look at the history of this song and its impact on the times , it will be seen to fulfil every demand we can stipulate: it appeared at the right psychological moment, expressed the precise mood of revolutionary France wanting to be a republic, and on its magnificent flood an entire country swept to liberation from century-old bond age. It is also intensely inspired every word rings authentic and carries the high passion that filled both philosopher and commoner, the passion for man 's erect and unobstructed growth. We cannot hope for a fierier strain packed more creatively with a whole nation's yearning for liberty, equality and fraternity . But, though from a political and social angle it is the example par excellence of what a national anthem should be, it leaves certain wider and deeper needs unsatisfied.

The Reality of National Being

The ideal national anthem must not only express the political and social man or even the complete self of thinking and feeling individuals composing a people, but also bring home to us the reality of national being. What is a nation? Of course, a nation must have certain common cultural features in all its geographical distributions and linguistic differentiations. These common features require for their complete crystallisation, so to speak, a well-defined territory, a distinguishable physical shape of the land in which they have emerged. Certain collective confrontations of momentous and perilous issues turn all the more concrete the common and widely prevalent traits of cultural consciousness held within marked boundaries of mountain and river and ocean. But if we stop with these definitions and believe that we have done with nationhood when we have applied them to an aggregate of individuals we shall be committing a folly to which the modern mind is excessively prone – the folly of regarding the diversity of existence as real and concrete and the underlying unity as merely conceptual and abstract. But a nation can never be an aggregate of individuals any more than a country is just a large piece of land. When we speak of India we are alive to the presence and power

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of a single being whose outermost shell is the territorial expanse indicated on our maps and whose more subtle and plastic body is the collection of human beings living in that expanse and sharing and expressing certain cultural characteristics. But our too intellectual turn leads us to dismiss this awareness as a figurative mode of feeling: we declare that we are only practising patriotic personification and that there is no actual entity beyond the individuals inhabiting the land. But this is a patent self-deception. No patriot has ever fought and died for anything except a vast, moving and mighty supra-individual personality - a hidden Goddess, a gigantic Beloved, a great Mother. Especially as a great Mother this personality inspires him, for a country is felt as either fatherland or motherland and the latter aspect is the most intimately alive and commanding. Not in the cold dissecting rational mind but in the heart with its mysteries and profundities, its intuitions of the beyond, its inexplicable visions of the superhuman and the divine, the essence of patriotism, as of every other individual-transcending passion, lies. A patriot who does not stir to the call of the great Mother that is his country and that is the unifying force of the millions inhabiting it is an impotent imposter. Or else if one feels the tremendous Presence and yet intellectually denies it one is effective for various ends but the schism within him will always impair his effectivity and his very triumphs will be unrounded and carry a proclivity to defeat.

The Vital Value of Nationalism

The ideal national anthem, therefore, brings out in full the reality of the single Being whose multiple expression is the myriads living in a country. And, mind you, it is the national Being and not just the Spirit of Man or the universal Spirit that is to be present in it. Nationalism has no meaning without this particularity. We may argue against the power of Nationalism, we may say that modern progressive thought minimises Nationalism in the hope of achieving a world-unity. But the very fact that we are talking of a national anthem implies the importance of the national Being. And the implication is perfectly justified. In point of fact,

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this Being is so far the only supra-individual entity that has concretely emerged in human consciousness. The sense of the Supreme Divine may be very strong in individuals, it may even be an effective force in certain human collectivities or nations, but not every collectivity or nation possesses it, whereas the sense of a Britannia, a belle France, a Cathleen ni Houlihan, a Bharat Mata is most vivid. Millions have lived and died for the national Being. Even avowed atheists are instinctively awake to it. Even the Russian Communists have a feeling of "Holy Russia", and if there will be a split in World Communism it will come, as portended in the case of Yugoslavia versus Russia, by way of an intense awareness of the distinct character of a national collectivity. Furthermore, not only is the national Being an already realised if not always intellectually acknowledged entity, but also is it a valuable, an essential part of the scheme of human evolution. Neither the consciousness of the one Spirit of Man in all countries nor that of the universal Spirit should annul the consciousness of nationhood. The wonderful world around us and above us and within us is never a featureless and colourless unity: it is a one-in -many, a unity-in-diversity, and we should err as much by stressing the single and the uniform as by concentrating exclusively on the multi fold and the various . Life is not necessarily divided and broken up by being myriad-aspected; it is made richer, more capable of self-expression, more free and fiery, provided the inner unity is not forgotten or erased. Just as the uniqueness of the individual must never be regimented out of existence but carefully woven into a social symphony, so too the uniqueness of the national collectivity must be cherished without setting it at odds with the rest of mankind. Every large human aggregate has its distinct qualities of culture that are precious and that could never emerge if the aggregate did not stand out in its own rights. Nationalism is vital to the full development of humanity. Consequently,

no national anthem can be ideal unless it brings , however subtly and refinedly, to the forefront the typical national Being of a country: even if all humanity or all divinity be hymned, there must be in the face and figure of the invoked Spirit something clearly and fervently national.

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The Typical Genius of the Indian Nation

When we say "national", we must not mean merely a vague image of the country's consciousness. There must be a powerful suggestion of the precise colour and shape of the country's culture. Aggressiveness and fanaticism are, of course, to be avoided, though not at all the martial mood which keeps the sword ready and the soul keen-edged to combat any attempt at physical conquest or psychological enslavement. The powerful suggestion that is desirable cannot wholly come without this mood of manly self-sanctity, this ardent defensive attitude. But such an attitude itself is not sufficient to give the needed force of national individuality. What must be articulated is the typical genius of a nation. Thus, England's genius is a practical dynamic expansive life-instinct, with a background of vague poetic idealism. France's genius is an ordering brilliant clarity of intellect allied with a warm and often tempestuous enthusiasm for personal rights. The genius of India is in the first place an intense mysticism deriving from an ineradicable intuition of the Godhead that is the All and even more than the All, a creatively emanating and manifesting Consciousness and Delight, and in the second place a richness of varied, complex, adventurous, even fantastic-seeming forms of existence which yet carries a certain stability and self-balance by being rooted in a spontaneous organic energy. Something quintessential of this genius must pervade any anthem that aims at being ideally national in India. And here a point of considerable moment is the true meaning of Indianness.

When we speak of Indian spiritual culture expressing itself harmoniously with a varied vitality we mean the culture whose initial significances and original splendours are to be found in the Rig Veda and whose wide and luminous developments are in the Upanishads and the Gita and the Tantra and whose culmination and complete outburst of light we find today in the poetry and prose of Sri Aurobindo. This is not a narrow religion that cramps and divides: it is a profound synthesising multi-faceted movement of revelatory and transformative power not only expressed in inspired sutra or sloka, penetrating exposition or evocative

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exegesis, but also in the very stuff of the living consciousness and in the very gesture and action of the living body. Indian spiritual culture, true to the multiply-single Divinity of its vast intuition and experience and to the élan of its audacious diversely creative life-force, stands like a parliament of all faiths and philosophies, a federation of all ethical and social forms . No doubt, a few lines of growth have become rigidly assertive, but, in their exaggeration of some aspects out of the many that were natural to the Indian genius, they are not fundamental. Not these unplastic survivals of certain necessities called for by particular circumstances are what we mean by cultural Indianness. They conflict with the norms and forms set up by several religions. But the basic. soul and shape of cultural Indianness can take into itself the uniqueness, the subtle nuance, of every religion. This remarkable quality of it has been evident to the students, in the West no less than in the East, of its prolific scripture and literature. Hence Indian spiritual culture cannot be objected to as being sectarian. But, on the other hand, we should be de-nationalising it if we refused to admit whatever ideas or terms in it distinguished it from the Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Sikh, Jain or even Buddhist culture. It has, for all its catholicity, characteristics of its own, and these characteristics it must retain in one manner or

another if it is to be in any valid sense Indian. Take away these characteristics and it ceases being what the world knows it to be. Expunge them from a national anthem which claims to be Indian and you have a general non-descript religious terminology, lacking in all national savour and drained of all distinguishable and dynamic vitality. The Godhead hailed must bring the light and colour and configuration of what the descendants of the Rishis have felt and seen. The feeling and seeing are, because of their essential catholicity of motive, really acceptable by even a person who though in India does not think and pray with a consciousness in direct tune with the typical Indian spirituality; but if anyone takes objection to them because of their non-Islamic, non-Christian, non-Jewish, non-Zoroastrian, non-Sikh, non-Jain and even non-Buddhist suggestion, then he fails to understand what ultimate India is and he is trying to rob her of all genuine cultural

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value and to suppress a national genius that is, from the mystical and metaphysical viewpoint, the most wonderful in existence and, from the worldly and pragmatic viewpoint, no less wonderful by its wealth of varied creativeness and its capacity of almost unlimited organic assimilation. The concept of secularity prominent today in our Constitution must never encourage us to water down this genius: its function is discharged as soon as it ensures freedom of religious belief and ceremony, absence of bigotry, nondiscrimination on communal grounds. Over-touchiness with regard to the minorities is a blunder no less serious than riding roughshod over them. As settled dwellers in this sub-continent they are to be granted equal civic and individual rights with the majority that is called Hindu; but for their sake the majority must never diminish the marvellous potentialities of cultural Indianness. The national anthem of India cannot be ideal without burning with historical India's own distinct beauty of worship together with her broad vision of the universal Divine. If it does not thus burn, the India whose representative utterance it claims to be is just an artificial construct and not a grandly alive entity: she will be just a gilded simulacrum and the sum-total of her history will be a cypher.

A last hint remains now to be given about the ideal national anthem for us. When a country's genius itself is cast in the mystical mould, when to be truly Indian is to be charged with an instinct of the Divine and a presence of the Eternal in a way not common to other nationalities, the ideal national anthem will hardly echo the essential nature if it sings of God as a Power separate from the national Being rather than as having a core of identity with it. To draw everywhere a line, however faint, between the two and to suggest merely that God presides over or guides the Being that is India is to make the song miss the exquisite finishing touch that is the ever-so-little-more without which we are worlds away from truth and perfection. Our national Being, the Mother-Power whose children we are, must itself be visioned and voiced as ultimately the Supreme and the Eternal standing here in the evolving cosmos and in the process of time with the face and figure of our country's Soul but with all the

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glories of the Infinite Mystery suffusing them and spreading from them to the ends of the earth. Break up the core of direct identity and you at once muffle the master-tone of the anthem.

The Merits and Defects of "Jana Gana Mana"

Let us proceed to ask: does Tagore's Jana Gana Mana fulfil the several desiderata we have mentioned? There is no denying its noble sentiment, poetic merit and musical charm. After all, it was the incomparable Rabindranath who composed it, and it has a fine accent of country-wide friendliness as much as of gentle devotion to God. We must dismiss at once the ludicrous charge that it is an eulogy of George V on the occasion of his visit to India or even the cunning accusation that it lends itself easily to the apotheosis of any particular Indian deemed worthy of praise, say, Gandhi. The phrase running like a refrain through the whole poem "Thou dispenser of India's destiny" – cannot be interpreted in its context as signifying anything except God, for this dispenser is addressed also as "Eternal Charioteer". Nor must we allow ourselves to be misguided by the contention that, because Jana Gana Mana refers only to certain provinces and not to all, it is insufficiently national: the song is intended to be a hymn to the one God who is pictured as looking after and uniting the diverse races of India, and the geographical names thrown in are poetically suggestive of some of the physical and ethnological features of the country, no aim is there to make an exhaustive inventory of places and races: the aim is to give a notion of India in her broad and general entirety moving in rhythm to the will of the Lord. Yes, Tagore's piece has a fineness deserving respect. But has it the qualities that are wanted in the ideal national anthem for India?

Unfortunately it fails on every count. There is not the intense consciousness of India as a mighty supra-individual Being: the mention of the country or of the nation is on the purely ideative or nobly sentimental level; the deep heart has not felt the huge presence and the words are vacant of its intimate force. India the puissant and beloved Mother does not flame out of the poem. There is not even an apostrophe to her as the Mother. The one

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sentence which brings in the term runs in Tagore's own translation: "Thy mother-arms were round her and thine eyes gazed upon her troubled face in sleepless love..." Here it is not India but God who is the Mother. This clinches the point that the poem is not directly an invocation of the national Being, much less does it visualise this Being in all its powerful particularity. As a result the ardour to preserve and defend it from losing that particularity is absent: the warrior and the hero are dumb in Jana Gana Mana. Neither does it embody the essence of historical India, the country that had created sublime scripture and royal epic and beautiful drama, gripped life with a happy inexhaustible versatility, built grandly in stone and wood, fashioned majestic institutions, cast the lines of harmonious polities and thrilled with the luminous colourful patterns of the careers of memorable men, the country that had grown a passionate pilgrim of both eternity and time and developed a flexible yet ineradicable individuality numerous centuries before Islam's crescent ever dawned on its farthest horizon. Where in Jana Gana Mana are the recognisable features of cultural Indianness? We have only a blurred beauty, a diffused light which can never serve to draw forth the deep swabhava of the national Being which has broken through all bonds and risen again with its world-unifying yet characteristically Indian face. Those two words, "Eternal Charioteer", are scarcely clear enough to stamp any vivid Indianness upon it: they make just a poetic image, they do not call up the figure of Sri Krishna who charioted Arjuna at the same time to triumph over his enemies and to the Vision of the Cosmic Deity - the Vision that is itself so typically Indian. Throughout the poem we feel a disappointing though never undignified washing away of the fact that the force of unification cannot come by an assembled and outwardly constructed "universal religion" but only by plunging into the wide vibrating heart of the Indian spiritual consciousness which, behind all sectarian excrescences, holds in its multi-rhythmed rapture the secret of a spontaneous fundamental universality. To achieve lasting and natural unity of being we must not annul Indianness but be Indian in the central infinity-focussing sense and develop out of its ancient spiritual potencies a new

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vision that is no less recognisably Indian for all its modernism and secular State-idea. Lastly, Jana Gana Mana keeps a cleavage between the concept of India and the concept of the Divine, instead of making them converge and fuse: India here is only the country whose destiny is dispensed by God, she is collectively held to be separate from the Supreme in the phrase about the latter, "Thy finger points the path to all people." and in the sentence about the former, "My country lay in a deathlike silence of swoon." There is indeed a pervading suggestion that India has a spiritual aspiration and adventure, but it is not set aglow and her spiritual origin and destiny are not revealed with a flaming finality by making the Supreme shine out through her Soul.

The Paramount Qualities of "Bande Mataram"

All that Jana Gana Mana, despite its fineness , fails to convey is brought out with rare felicity in Bande Mataram. The unique union , as Sri Aurobindo puts it, of sweetness, simple directness and high poetic force in Bande Mataram is difficult to translate with absolute accuracy into English verse from the original Sanskrit interspersed with a few Bengali words. But the inspired drive of it is admirably caught in general in Sri Aurobindo's own rendering which is born of his having felt it in his very bloodstream during the days when he led the revolt of Bengal against foreign rule:

Mother, I bow to thee!

Rich with thy hurrying streams,

Bright with thy orchard gleams,

Cool with thy winds of delight,

Dark fields waving,

Mother of might,

Mother free.

Glory of moonlight dreams,

Over thy branches and lordly streams, –

Clad in thy blossoming trees,

Mother, giver of ease,

Laughing low and sweet!

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Mother, I kiss thy feet,

Speaker sweet and low!

Mother, to thee I bow.

Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,

When the swords flash out in twice seventy million hands

And seventy million voices roar

Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?

With many strengths who art mighty and stored,

To thee I call, Mother and Lord!

Thou who savest, arise and save!

To her I cry who ever her foemen drave

Back from plain and sea

And shook herself free.

Thou art wisdom, thou art law,

Thou our heart, our soul, our breath,

Thou the love divine, the awe

In our hearts that conquers death.

Thine the strength that nerves the arm,

Thine the beauty, thine the charm.

Every image made divine

In our temples is but thine.

Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,

With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen,

Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,

And the Muse a hundred-toned.

Pure and perfect without peer,

Mother, lend thine ear.

Rich with thy hurrying streams,

Bright with thy orchard gleams,

Dark of hue, O candid-fair

In thy soul, with jewelled hair

And thy glorious smile divine,

Loveliest of all earthly lands,

Showering wealth from well-stored hands!

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Mother, mother mine!

Mother sweet, I bow to thee,

Mother great and free!

Not a single demand in order to get the ideal national anthem for India is left unanswered here by a poetic language and rhythm that come with the mystical inevitability of what is called the mantra - the visionary word springing by some identification of the hidden poetic self with the deep heart of the thing to be uttered, and catching in the moment of identification the secret divine truth and reality which has figured forth that thing. Not only is each phrase replete with precise and necessary significance, but the various phrases form an unfolding scheme both artistically and philosophically satisfying, a three-stepped progression which, in a speech delivered at the end of January 1908 in the grand square of the National School of Amraoti, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have explained. As with the individual, so with the nation, there are three sheaths or bodies - the gross or outer, the subtle or inner, the causal or higher. The first consists of the physical elements, the shape, the visible organic functioning. In Bankim Chandra's poem it is the rapid rivers and the glimmering orchards, the winds and the harvests waving, the moon-magical nights in forest and on riverside. A transition from the outer body of the Nation-Mother to the inner is through the human populations, the warrior men who are the physical instruments of the fine frenzy of freedom that is hers. Their teeming vitality is the cry of independence she sends forth from the inner to the outer the inner that is a formation of beautiful disciplined powers, an inspired energy, a pure passion, an illumined thought, a righteous will, an aesthesis enchanting and refining. This subtle sheath of her being bears hints of a still greater mode of her existence and by those hints the supra-individual and national self of her mingles, in our enthusiasms as well as in our meditations, with all the symbols of the Infinite and the Eternal our religious nature instals everywhere in our land . That still greater mode is the prime creative archimage, at once single and many-aspected, whose evolving expression is the vast world with its nations and peoples.

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Cause and controller from its transcendental status, it is the Divine Truth of all formulated being, the ever-living supreme Personality whose power and bliss and knowledge are the perfection towards which we aspire in this country of ours when we love so vehemently the soil sanctified by hero and saint and seer and when we fling ourselves so happily into the service of the majestic and maternal Presence that we feel to be the indivisible India stretched in a myriad harmonious moods across space and time.

The revelatory vision and the mantric vibration distinguishing Bande Mataram throw Jana Gana Mana entirely into the shade. And it is no wonder that not Tagore's but Bankim's song has been the motive-force of the whole struggle for India's freedom. Until it burned and quivered in the hearts of our patriots and rose like a prayer and incantation on their lips, the country was striving with an obscure sense of its own greatness: there was a vagueness, a lukewarmness, a fear: we were overawed by the material prowess and pomp of our foreign rulers and our efforts to find our true selves were spoiled by either an unthinking imitation of the West or else a defensive anti-Western conservatism. We had not struck upon the master-key to the problem of national existence. Then, out of a book that had been neglected when it first appeared, the music of Bande Mataram rang into the ambiguously agitated air of the nation's reawakening consciousness. Sri Aurobindo was at that time the political guru of Bengal. He realised at once the creative energy packed into this poem. With a gesture as of an ultimate world-secret found at last, he scattered the words of Bankim Chandra all over idealistic Bengal from whose "seventy million voices" that are rightly celebrated in the poem they spread to Gujarat and Maharashtra and beyond. In his own life he incarnated the presence of the mighty Mother with her aura of mystical consciousness. Under the spell of this presence a giant determination and zest took birth in the entire land, beginning a movement whose goal was bound to be independence. No sacrifice was too exacting, no suffering too poignant to be endured, not death itself could terrify. Laughing and singing, the patriots fought and served and died. Through all the

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long years during which the struggle for swaraj went on, Bande Mataram stimulated and supported the peoples of India, instilling into them a hope and a strength beyond the human. It is the one cry that has made modern Indian history; not political speeches, but this magical strain breaking through Bankim Chandra from the inmost recesses of resurgent India's heart and interfused by Sri Aurobindo with India 's mind and life as the true national anthem, brought us, in 1947, on the fifteenth of August which was also the seventy-fifth birthday of Sri Aurobindo, our political liberation. To put such a saviour-song on any other footing than that of national anthem is to be disloyal to the Power that has given us a new birth . To overlook the fact that it has been a saviour-song because it is ideally the national anthem of India is to set ourselves out of tune with the glorious future calling to our glorious past.

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