INQUILAB ZINDABAD! (LONG LIVE REVOLUTION!) ... 4

Photo : Chandrasekhar Azad lying in final restfulness on the bed which was the soil of his motherland after shooting himself through the temple at the end of an hour-long gun battle with a contingent of British Indian police. The British officers look on. Azad held on alone against a veritable assault battery for an entire hour before his ammunition got exhausted and, true to his earlier self-resolution that he would never be captured by the enemy alive, he reserved one last bullet for his self-martyrdom. Thus, the leader of Hindustan Socialist Republican Association became one in life and death with the soil of this nation and entered into the consciousness of all freedom-loving people of India. His inspirational life and its eventual immolation at the altar of freedom inspired a generation of future freedom fighters who battled to shake off the colonial yoke from the fallen form of the motherland.

"You do not have to arrange for interpreter for me as I know English. However, I choose to speak in my mother tongue and so may you arrange for an interpreter for the honourable judge that he may follow what I say. I so resolve to speak in my mother tongue because I feel that when one (the honourable judge) is being allowed the privilege of expressing himself in his mother tongue, so must the other (myself, Ram Muhammad Singh Azad, nee, Udham Singh) be allowed to speak in his mother tongue." ... Udham Singh's statement in the British court during his trial for the assassination of Michael O'Dwyer.

Do we deserve our freedom when we remain so very apathetic to the very discussion about the lives of the fighters for freedom? Our desire is only for the ordinary pleasures of life, sense gratification and the building up of the egocentric self. Where amidst such heavy duty will we get the time or opportunity to serve the nation's cause? Where in the name of all that stands for sustenance of the petty self is there any room for rumination on the larger cause of the patriotic self? None, my friend, none. Our lives are dedicated to the cause of self-survival, a la Darwinian evolutionary principle at work in every small mind that there be, killing out opposition and rooting out resistance in the vilest possible way that ensures the survival of the dominant being alone in a mighty affirmation of the animal that is yet to leave the precincts of the human heart.

We should re-popularise the inspiring invocation of 'Vande Mataram' to greet each other. After all, this was the clarion call of the revolutionaries who reposed faith in the Divine Mother as incarnate in the motherland. There was another band of nationalists, though, who had rejected faith in the existence of God altogether in the absence of empirical evidence for the same, and they preferred to thunder 'Inquilab Zindabad! (Long live revolution!)' Bhagat Singh and the leftist revolutionaries belonged to this category.

The entire freedom movement had 'Vande Mataram' as the clarion call of the revolutionaries, be they armed resisters of British rule or passive resisters in khaddar and the charka with non-violence and truth as their arsenal. But the subsequent communalisation of national politics in the 1930s and 1940s led to the controversy surrounding the national mantra and, the Muslims rigidly refusing allegiance to the text of the song eulogising the Goddess Durga, it became relegated to the inferior status of the National Song relative to 'Jana Gana Mana', the National Anthem. This problem of communal disharmony over 'Vande Mataram' was resolved by none other than Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose who in Germany adopted the 'Jana Gana Mana' as the National Anthem for his Provisional Government of Free India and, thus, circumvented the otherwise intractable issue. Also, he had Abid Hassan Safrani, his adjutant, coin the greeting 'Jai Hind' for all Indians. In both these endeavours Netaji came out triumphant in fostering Hindu-Muslim unity but the fact remains that 'Jai Hind' is but a poor substitute for the far more emotionally appealing call of 'Vande Mataram' which is an invocation to the Divine Mother incarnate in the motherland as opposed to the much drier and unpoetic call of 'Jai Hind'. In Bankimchandra's mantra there is suffused spirituality whereas in the Muslim-appeasing secular mantra there is a certain lack of depth and a relative prosaicness devoid of the sublimity of the former call to adoration of the motherland which ran like the 'sutratma' (the connecting thread of the Self) through the entire freedom movement. Thus did I say that we should once more adopt in real earnest the national mantra 'Vande Mataram' by way of a return to our revolutionary roots for freedom without imposing in any way its use on any that may have theological or ideological issues with it.