December 11, 2025 06:15 AM IST First published on: Dec 11, 2025 at 06:15 AM IST There are certain instances when poems or songs transcend their immediate contexts and become slogans. They represent public sentiment, face censorship and political contestations, and carry memories of multiple renditions. For colonial and post-colonial India, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s ‘Vande Mataram’, first written and published in Bangadarshan in 1875, later included in his novel Anandamath, and turned into a song by Rabindranath Tagore, is one such. So, when both Houses of Parliament spent hours debating the poem’s journey, it was inevitable that there would be omissions, misinterpretations, anachronisms and ahistorical spinning of facts, tuned to contemporary ideological tensions. In the debate, however, conspicuously missing was the story of another ‘Vande Mataram’, or ‘Bande Mataram’ as it is pronounced in Bengali, a song written and composed by Tagore. It was used as a slogan of unity on the streets of undivided Bengal when Lord Curzon announced Bengal’s partition in 1905. Far from the religious invocation of Chattopadhyay’s ‘Vande Mataram’, Tagore’s song …