Vande Mataram

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"Vande Mātaram" is a poem that was adopted as the national song of the Republic of India in 1950. It was written in Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the 1870s, and was first published in 1882 as part of Chatterjee's Bengali novel Anandamath. The poem is an ode to the motherland; it was officially adopted by the Indian National Congress in 1905 to serve as a pan-Indian, nationalist salutation to Mother India during the Indian independence movement, culminating in its 1950 designation as the National Song of the Republic of India, sharing equal honour with India's National Anthem. The first two verses of the song make abstract reference to the "mother" and "motherland", without any religious connotation. However, later verses mention Hindu goddesses such as Durga. The references to Hindu deities became a point of contention in 1937, after which the Indian National Congress, on suggestion of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, adopted the first two stanzas as the national song....

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