Imagining the nation: the sense of collective belonging

Detail

Why culture mattered as much as agitation

• A nation is not only made by protests, strikes and jail-going. It is also made by cultural work — history writing, folklore, songs, printed pictures, symbols.
• These gave people a feeling of collective belonging: the idea that crores of strangers were part of one "we".
• Sense of collective belonging partly grew from the shared experience of united struggle against the British. But images, ideas and everyday culture made that unity feel real between one struggle and the next.
• Print was key. Cheap lithograph and calendar prints carried the same image into thousands of homes, so people far apart saw one shared symbol.

Bharat Mata — the nation as a mother figure

• Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote the hymn "Vande Mataram" in the 1870s, first for his magazine, later placed in his novel Anandamath.
• External detail: the poem was first published in the journal Bangadarshan on 7 November 1875, and was later included in Anandamath (1882) [2].
• Rabindranath Tagore sang it at the 1896 Calcutta session of the Congress; it became a political slogan from 7 August 1905 [2].

• 24 January 1950 — Dr Rajendra Prasad, in the Constituent Assembly, said "Vande Mataram" had played so big a part in the freedom struggle that it should be honoured equally with the National Anthem; it was adopted as the National Song [2].

• The hymn imagined the motherland as a goddess. It was sung widely during the Swadeshi movement in Bengal after the 1905 Partition of Bengal.

• Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata in 1905.
• She is shown as an ascetic figure — calm, composed, divine, spiritual. Not angry, not armed.
• She gives four gifts to her children: learning, food, clothing and spiritual strength.
• External detail: Britannica describes her as a four-armed goddess in a saffron/orange sari, holding beads (faith), the Vedas (knowledge), paddy/rice stalks (food) and cloth (clothing) [3].
• Abanindranath was the lead figure of the Bengal School of Art, which turned away from Western academic oil painting and revived Mughal and Rajput styles; he was also influenced by the Japanese artists Okakura Kakuzo and Yokoyama Taikan [3][4].

• External detail: the idea of the country as a divine mother had already been sketched in Bankim's Anandamath (1882) — Abanindranath gave it a visual form [3].

• Later prints changed her look. Artists added the trishul (trident), a lion and an elephant beside her — signs of power and authority, not just calm giving.

• Devotion to this mother figure became a test of patriotism. To bow to Bharat Mata was read as proof you were a nationalist.

Folklore revival — finding the nation in village culture

• Nationalists argued that true Indian culture survived among the common people, in villages, not in the English-educated city elite. Colonial rule and modern city life had "corrupted" the top layer.
• To recover that culture, they collected folk tales, ballads, myths and legends and printed them.
• Rabindranath Tagore himself collected ballads, nursery rhymes and myths in Bengal and led the folk-revival movement there.
• In Madras, Natesa Sastri published the four-volume The Folklore of Southern India.
• His argument: "folklore is national literature" — the most trustworthy record of the people's real thoughts and character, free of foreign influence.

Flags — a symbol you could carry

• During the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, a tricolour flag was designed — red, green and yellow.
• It carried eight lotuses, standing for the eight provinces of British India.

• It carried a crescent moon, standing for Hindus and Muslims together.

• By 1921 Gandhiji had designed the Swaraj flag — again a tricolour (red, green and white) with a spinning wheel (charkha) at the centre.

• The charkha stood for self-help: Indians spinning their own cloth instead of buying British mill cloth.

• Carrying the flag in a procession was itself an act of defiance. Holding it aloft during marches was a public refusal to obey — a mass, visible sign of resistance.

Rewriting history to build pride

• Indians were told by the British that they were backward, incapable of ruling themselves. Nationalist writers answered by rewriting Indian history.
• The story told: a glorious ancient past — great achievements in art, architecture, science, mathematics, religion, craft, trade — followed by decline under colonial rule.
• Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay's Bharatbarsher Itihas (1858) is an early example of this history writing.
• The purpose was political: readers should feel proud of the past and feel angry at the present, and so act to change it. Pride was used as a spur to struggle.

The exclusionary edge — the chapter's own caution

• Problem: the glorified past was mostly a Hindu past.
• The ancient golden age described was largely Hindu in its heroes, texts and achievements.
• The national symbols — Bharat Mata as a goddess, "Vande Mataram" from a novel with a Hindu devotional setting — drew on Hindu iconography.

• Result: people of other communities felt left out. A symbol that unites one group can quietly exclude another.

• This is the NCERT's standing warning: many different groups joined the national movement with different hopes, and unity built on one community's symbols is fragile.

Note: PIB dates "Vande Mataram" to 7 November 1875 (Bangadarshan) [2]; NCERT places the writing in the 1870s and its later use in Anandamath. No contradiction — the PIB date fixes the year inside the NCERT decade.

Prelims Hooks

• "Vande Mataram" — written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in the 1870s; first published in Bangadarshan, 7 November 1875; included in the novel Anandamath (1882) [2].
• Rabindranath Tagore first sang "Vande Mataram" at the 1896 Calcutta Congress session; it became a political slogan from 7 August 1905 [2].
• 24 January 1950 — Constituent Assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad: "Vande Mataram" given equal status with Jana Gana Mana as the National Song [2].
• Abanindranath Tagore painted Bharat Mata in 1905 — shown as an ascetic, calm, divine figure.
• Britannica: Bharat Mata is four-armed in an orange sari, holding beads, the Vedas, paddy stalks and cloth [3].
• Abanindranath Tagore founded the Bengal School of Art, reviving Mughal and Rajput styles, influenced by Okakura Kakuzo and Yokoyama Taikan [4].
• Later prints of Bharat Mata added the trishul, lion and elephant.
• Natesa Sastri — four-volume The Folklore of Southern India; said "folklore is national literature".
• Swadeshi tricolour flag: eight lotuses = eight provinces; crescent moon = Hindus and Muslims.
• Gandhi's Swaraj flag (by 1921): tricolour (red, green, white) with a spinning wheel = self-help.
• Tarinicharan Chattopadhyay, Bharatbarsher Itihas (1858) — early nationalist history of a glorious ancient past.

Mains Points

• Nationalism is built, not found. Songs, paintings, flags and history books turned an abstract idea of "India" into something people could see, sing and carry. Cultural work and political agitation were two arms of one movement, not separate tracks.
• Symbols unite and divide at the same time. Bharat Mata and the "glorious Hindu past" gave mass emotional power to the movement, but pushed Muslims, Sikhs, Dalits and others to the margins of the national imagination. This links directly to communal politics after 1937 and to the Partition of 1947 — a GS-I answer can use this section as the cultural root of later political division.
• Print capitalism and mass reach. Cheap prints, folk collections and vernacular history writing carried nationalist ideas beyond the English-educated elite. This explains how the Gandhian era achieved mass mobilisation where earlier Moderate politics did not.
• Colonial insult → nationalist reply. Colonial history writing called Indians backward; nationalists answered with a golden-age narrative. Both are selective. A good answer notes that nationalist history was also a political tool, not neutral scholarship.