Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote the first major Bengali novels and the song that became India's national song, while serving thirty years as a magistrate for the government his readers would come to oppose. He was among the first graduates of the University of Calcutta and joined the colonial administration as a deputy magistrate, a post he held until 1891 with the friction that implies. His novels made prose fiction respectable in Bengali and made Bengali respectable for fiction, and Anandamath, published in 1882, is the one that mattered politically. Set during the Sannyasi rebellion and the famine of 1770, it describes a band of ascetic warriors fighting to free the motherland, and it contains Vande Mataram, a hymn to the mother-country that became the anthem of the independence movement, was sung at Congress sessions from 1896, and was banned by the British. It is India's national song, distinct from the national anthem, and it remains contested: its imagery is explicitly Hindu, the novel's villains are Muslim, and the Constituent Assembly adopted only its first two stanzas for that reason. He died in 1894, thirteen years before the agitation that made the song famous and fifty-three before independence. Rabindranath Tagore set Vande Mataram to music and sang it at the Congress session of 1896, which is how it spread. Bankim also edited Bangadarshan, the journal that carried most of the significant Bengali prose of the 1870s, and wrote on Hindu religious reform. His fiction invented a readership: before him Bengali prose existed mainly for tracts and translation, and after him it was a literature. He wrote fourteen novels. The government he served never disciplined him for Anandamath, which says something about how slowly the British recognised what the book would become.

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