It is in this context of an emergent geopiety that Bankim Chandra’s famed
hymn “Bande Ma ̄taram,” “Homage to [the] Mother,” was first published in 1875
in his journal Banga ̄darshan.^3 Incorporated later into his 1882 novel A ̄nandamath
[Abbey of Bliss], and set to music by Rabindranath Tagore and sung publicly
in 1896 at the Indian National Congress Party’s Calcutta session, the hymn
celebrated an unnamed “mother” in the following terms:
I bow to you, Mother,
well-watered, well-fruited,
breeze cool, crop green,
the Mother!
Nights quivering with white moonlight,
draped in lovely flowering trees,
sweet of smile, honeyed speech,
giver of bliss and boons, the Mother!
Seven crore^4 voices in your clamorous chant,
twice seven crore hands holding aloft mighty scimitars,
Who says, Mother, you are weak?
Repository of many strengths,
scourge of the enemy’s army, the Mother!
(quoted in Bose 1997: 53)Although the hymn is not explicitly or even implicitly territorial, nor does it
unambiguously identify “the Mother” it celebrates, nevertheless it soon became
the rallying cry for an emergent patriotic cult of Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ from the early years
of the twentieth century in the context of the “Swadeshi” movement that swept
across Bengal, Madras, the United Provinces, and other parts of British India
(Bagchi 1990; Goswami 1998: 431–43; Sarkar 1973, 1987). From the mid-
1880s, but especially from 1905 with Abanindranath Tagore’s well-known
painting featuring her, Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ also becomes an object of “visual piety”
(Morgan 1997), as artists sought to convert poetic musing into pictorial reality
(see, for example, figure 26.2). In doing so, they invariably turned, as many
scholars have noted, to the emergent practices of picturing Hinduism’s numer-
ous deities in “god-posters” and “calendar art” (Guha-Thakurtha 1991; Larson,
Pal and Smith 1997; Mitter 1994). Pictorial practice thus reaffirmed Bha ̄rat
Ma ̄ta ̄’s status as an ancient “Hindu” goddess that poetic imagination had already
conferred on her.
In the course of the past century, her numerous devotees have invariably
insisted that Bha ̄rat Ma ̄ta ̄ is a manifestation of Devı ̄ or Durga ̄, of the female prin-
ciple embodied in the paradigmatic female divinity, S ́akti. So, Bankim’s Bande
Ma ̄taram concludes by addressing the Motherland thus:
You are Durga ̄ bearing ten weapons of war,
Kamala at play in the lotuses,
Goddess of Learning, giver of knowledge,
I bow to you
(quoted in Bose 1997: 62)558 sumathi ramaswamy