The Anthem That Wasn’t, Imperial Failure and the Birth of a National Chorus

The Anthem That Wasn’t, Imperial Failure and the Birth of a National Chorus

As the solemn and soaring notes of Jana Gana Mana resonate across the Indian subcontinent each Republic Day, they affirm a unity of purpose and identity that seems, in retrospect, almost predestined. Yet, this musical emblem of nationhood, composed by Rabindranath Tagore, was the triumphant culmination of a long and fraught historical contest—not just for political sovereignty, but for cultural and symbolic autonomy. A century before its adoption, the British Empire embarked on a quixotic and revealing project: to gift India a “national anthem.” Their struggle, a comedic and ultimately tragicomic saga of mistranslation, cultural misapprehension, and paternalistic arrogance, stands in stark contrast to the organic, popular embrace of songs born from the soil of Indian resistance. This forgotten history, as recounted by Rahul Sagar, illuminates a profound truth: that a nation’s anthem cannot be imposed from above by an alien power; it must be whispered, then sung, and finally roared into existence by the people themselves. This current affairs analysis revisits this curious episode of the 1880s, exploring its implications for understanding nationalism, cultural cohesion, and the enduring power of indigenous symbols in the face of imperial hegemony.

The Imperial Conundrum: A Song for an Un-singable Empire

The trigger for this bizarre chapter was the 1877 proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. This new imperial title demanded new rituals of loyalty. God Save the Queen, the British national anthem, was to be the sonic signature of this fealty. But a problem immediately presented itself: “few Indians felt confident singing in English.” The initial solution was to encourage regional compositions, like the Poona Gayan Samaj’s Devi Shri Victoria, a ten-minute Marathi paean dismissed as “meaningless rigmarole.” Its failure highlighted the core dilemma: how to manufacture a unifying emotional experience for a populace viewed not as a nation, but as a collection of “countless races, tribes, and creeds.”

The project was taken up with Victorian earnestness by Frederick Harford, a Westminster Abbey clergyman. His mission, backed by the establishment and fueled by the belief in music’s “spiritual and emotional power,” was to create a Hindustani translation of God Save the Queen that would resonate with Indian subjects. This effort was rooted in a paternalistic and racist axiom, bluntly stated by Harford himself: Indians had “no common bond between them,” and a national anthem could “never be evolved by India from her own resources.” Therefore, “if she is to have one at all, it must be proposed to her by England.”

This premise was the project’s original sin. It sought not to discover or channel an existing sentiment, but to implant a synthetic one—a “second-hand loyalty,” as critics mockingly called it.

A Comedy of Errors: Translation, Melody, and the “Anti-Anthem” Revolt

What followed was a farcical parade of cultural blunders that exposed the fundamental impossibility of the task.

• The Linguistic Labyrinth: Harford’s team, involving Persian linguist Mirza Bakir Khan and later the eminent Bengali musician Sourindro Mohun Tagore, immediately hit the “insurmountable” challenge Tagore identified: India’s “musical proclivities” were “too diverse to fix a melody.” A tune appealing to Bengali sensibilities (based on specific ragas) alienated listeners in Bombay or Madras. Furthermore, the demand grew for versions in “20 Oriental languages.” The project ballooned, leading to the establishment of a “National Anthem for India Fund,” which raised thousands of pounds from well-meaning but misguided donors.

• The Translation Traps: The linguistic translations became minefields. The initial Hindustani version was discovered to imply, awkwardly, a wish for the widowed Queen Victoria to remarry. It was hastily scrapped for a Sanskrit version by the famed Orientalist Max Müller, only for this to be torn apart by the pandits of Varanasi, who then proceeded to feud amongst themselves. The British response—exasperation at “how fond native scholars are of criticising one another”—missed the point entirely. It wasn’t petty criticism; it was a demonstration of India’s sophisticated, and diverse, intellectual traditions that resisted a clumsy, monolithic imposition.

• The Melodic Mutiny: The most delicious rebellion came from Punjab. Ram Das Chibber submitted a Punjabi “adaptation” set not to the stately, solemn pace of God Save the Queen, but to the lively and popular folk melody Haar Phulan Di. This “jaunty” tune scandalized Victorian sensibilities. It perfectly encapsulated the central, irreconcilable conflict: London insisted the music “should be the same in India and in England” because they were “one united Empire.” But how could the “stirring” British tune, alien in its musical grammar, ever capture Indian hearts? As critic Richard Carnac Temple presciently warned Harford, “so long as the Englishman will not fall in with the Indian’s music, the hope that they will ever sing together is an idle dream.”

• The Rise of the “Anti-Anthem” Party: Throughout this, a coalition of clear-sighted Britons and Indians mocked the endeavor. They saw it for what it was: a “singularly ridiculous movement.” The Daily Telegraph offered the most poetic critique: “National songs are like flowers, they may be planted anywhere but in order to bloom the soil and seed must suit.” Harford was trying to force a British oak to grow in Indian soil, and it was withering before his eyes.

The Indigenous Answer: Vande Mataram and the Organic Nation

While Harford’s “chimerical project” sputtered and died in obscurity by the 1890s, a powerful counter-current was already flowing. As the musicologist Charles Capwell notes, at the very moment the British declared Indians incapable of unanimous spirit, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was penning Anandamath (1882), which contained the hymn Vande Mataram.

The contrast could not be more complete:

• Origin: Vande Mataram emerged not from a state-sponsored committee but from the heart of the Bengali literary renaissance, a product of indigenous genius.

• Subject: It venerated not a foreign monarch, but the motherland—Bharat Mata—a concept that could assimilate regional devotion into a powerful, unifying metaphor.

• Reception: Within a decade, it was being sung at sessions of the Indian National Congress. Within two, it was the “watchword” of revolutionary societies. It spread not by imperial fiat or fundraising, but by organic, emotional contagion.

Bankim succeeded where Harford failed because he “divined our great truth.” He understood that Indian unity was not about erasing diversity, but about finding a symbolic language that could speak across it. As Sagar explains, Indian hearts could learn to love the Maratha hero Shivaji and the Sikh hero Ranjit Singh, and Indian tongues could learn a Bengali song, “if it were equally rousing.” Vande Mataram provided that rousing, sacred center.

The Legacy: From Vande Mataram to Jana Gana Mana

The anthem saga did not end with Vande Mataram. The song itself became a subject of contention post-independence, as its overtly Hindu imagery made it difficult for some communities to embrace fully as a national anthem. This very debate, however, was a marker of a mature nation wrestling with its own pluralistic identity—a conversation impossible under imperial rule.

The mantle eventually passed to Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana (first sung in 1911). Like Vande Mataram, it was an indigenous creation of staggering poetic and musical sophistication. It did not command loyalty to a person or a single religious idea, but to the abstract, pluralistic conception of India itself—the “dispenser of India’s destiny” who awakens the minds of all her people, from the Punjab to the Dravida south, from the Himalayas to the oceans.

Its adoption was not without the “happy childhood struggle” of memorization that Sagar mentions. Schoolchildren across the nation, speaking dozens of first languages, painstakingly learned its Sanskritized Bengali lyrics. In that struggle was the active, voluntary construction of national identity. They were not taught a translated paean to a foreign queen; they were invited to participate in a lyrical vision of their own country.

Contemporary Resonances: Symbolic Sovereignty in a Globalized World

The story of the failed British anthem is not a mere historical curiosity. It offers timeless lessons about power, identity, and culture:

1. The Folly of Cultural Imposition: In an era of soft power and global cultural exports, the episode is a cautionary tale. Authentic cultural symbols cannot be manufactured and successfully implanted by external forces for political purposes. They must have deep roots in shared experience, history, and aspiration.

2. Unity in Diversity as an Active Achievement: India’s national symbols—the anthem, the flag, the constitution—were not pre-existing gifts of geography. They were hard-won achievements of a national movement that consciously built a unifying language across profound diversity. The British failure underscored their belief that this diversity was an obstacle to unity. India’s success proved it could be the very source of a richer, more resilient unity.

3. The Power of the Indigenous Voice: The triumph of Vande Mataram and later Jana Gana Mana is a testament to the power of the indigenous intellectual and artistic tradition. It was India’s own poets, musicians, and thinkers who provided the vocabulary for its nationhood, not Oxford dons or Westminster clergymen.

Conclusion: The Unforced Chorus

When we hear Jana Gana Mana today, we hear the sound of a choice made and a battle won. It is the sound of a people rejecting a manufactured, imported loyalty in favor of a complex, self-composed devotion. The forgotten struggle to impose God Save the Queen in Indian languages was more than a bureaucratic misadventure; it was a profound failure of imagination on the part of the Raj. It failed to see that the “spirit of unanimity” it deemed absent was not missing, but dormant, waiting for the right song to awaken it.

That song was not, and could never have been, a translation. It had to be an original composition, born from the soil of longing and struggle. As the “cries of Vande Mataram” accompanied the protests of 1905, “to the horror of Victorians, Indians had learnt to sing together.” They had found their own voice, and in doing so, they had begun to imagine, and then to build, a nation worthy of its anthem.

Q&A: The Failed British Project for an Indian National Anthem

Q1: What was the fundamental ideological flaw in the British project to create a national anthem for India in the 1880s?
A1: The fundamental flaw was a paternalistic and racist premise articulated by the project’s leader, Frederick Harford. He asserted that Indians had “no common bond between them” and that a national anthem could “never be evolved by India from her own resources.” Therefore, he concluded, “if she is to have one at all, it must be proposed to her by England.” This ignored the deep, existing cultural, philosophical, and historical bonds across the subcontinent and assumed that a genuine symbol of collective identity could be manufactured externally and imposed top-down. It sought to instill a “second-hand loyalty” to the Empire rather than channel any authentic, indigenous sentiment.

Q2: Why was the technical challenge of translating and setting “God Save the Queen” for India considered “insurmountable” by figures like Sourindro Mohun Tagore?
A2: The challenge was insurmountable on multiple technical fronts:

• Linguistic Diversity: Creating versions in what was demanded to be up to 20 Indian languages, each with its own poetic and phonetic structure, was a mammoth task.

• Musical Diversity: India’s “musical proclivities” were, as Tagore noted, “too diverse to fix a melody.” A rendition based on ragas familiar in Bengal would sound alien and unappealing in Madras or Bombay. There was no single “Oriental” melody that could represent all of India.

• Incompatible Musical Grammars: The British insistence that the music “should be the same in India and in England” forced Indian musicians to fit Indian languages onto a foreign melodic and rhythmic structure. This often clashed, producing awkward or absurd results, as seen in the scandal over the Punjabi version set to the folk tune Haar Phulan Di.

• Loss in Translation: Translating concepts like “God Save the Queen” while maintaining “rhyme and rhythm” led to embarrassing errors, such as the Hindustani version implying a wish for Queen Victoria to remarry.

Q3: How did the popular response to the British anthem project, like the Punjabi version set to “Haar Phulan Di,” symbolize a form of cultural resistance?
A3: The Punjabi adaptation by Ram Das Chibber was a brilliant, subversive act of cultural reclamation and resistance. By setting the loyalist lyrics to Haar Phulan Di—a popular, jaunty Punjabi folk melody—Chibber effectively colonized the colonizer’s song. He refused to accept the somber, foreign musical grammar of the British anthem. Instead, he dressed it in local musical clothing, making it sound inherently Indian and, to Victorian ears, disconcertingly informal and lively. This act symbolized the refusal to “fall in with the Englishman’s music,” as critic Richard Temple noted. It was a statement that if loyalty was to be expressed, it would be on Indian terms, using Indian cultural idioms. The British rejection of this version highlighted their inability to accept an authentic, grassroots Indianization of their symbol.

Q4: What does the simultaneous failure of the British project and the rise of “Vande Mataram” reveal about the nature of genuine national symbols?
A4: This contrast reveals that genuine national symbols are organic, indigenous, and emotionally resonant, not manufactured, imported, and imposed.

• Origin Matters: Vande Mataram sprang from Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s literary genius within the context of a burgeoning Bengali and Indian nationalism. The British anthem was a bureaucratic project conceived in London.

• Subject and Emotion: Vande Mataram invoked the deeply powerful, unifying concept of the Motherland (Bharat Mata), tapping into a primal sentiment of love and sacrifice. The British anthem invoked loyalty to a distant foreign monarch, an abstract and alien political concept for most Indians.

• Mode of Adoption: Vande Mataram spread virally—through Congress sessions, revolutionary circles, and popular protest—because people chose to embrace it. The British anthem was to be disseminated through official channels and funded by a charity, expecting passive acceptance.
  True national symbols are like the “flowers” described by the Daily Telegraph: they only bloom when the “soil and seed suit.” Vande Mataram was a native seed in fertile soil; the British anthem was an exotic cutting trying to take root in inhospitable ground.

Q5: In what way does the eventual adoption of “Jana Gana Mana” represent the resolution of the challenges the British failed to overcome?
A5: Jana Gana Mana represents the successful, indigenous resolution of the very challenges that doomed the British project:

• Unity in Diversity: The British saw diversity as an obstacle. Tagore’s anthem celebrates it, naming the regions—Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Orissa, Bengal—and the natural boundaries (Himalayas, oceans) that define India, weaving them into a single narrative of divine destiny.

• A Truly National Melody: While composed in the classical Indian tradition, its melody is accessible and solemn, designed to be universally singable and emotionally stirring across the subcontinent, avoiding the regional specificity that stymied earlier efforts.

• An Indigenous, Non-Divisive Focus: It avoids the sectarian pitfalls that later complicated Vande Mataram‘s status by addressing a abstract, pluralistic conception of India as the “dispenser of destiny,” not a specific religious figure or monarch. It is a sovereign’s salute to the sovereign people.

• Voluntary Embrace: Its adoption required the “happy childhood struggle” of memorization, a voluntary act of participation in building the nation. It was not imposed but proposed, and overwhelmingly embraced. In doing so, it proved that India could, from its own resources, produce a symbol of breathtaking beauty and unifying power that the British had deemed impossible.