The Hindutva insistence on Vande Mataram is not simply a dispute over a song. The novel from which the song was taken, and some of the novelist’s own political and social views, too have a striking affinity with the Hindutva perspective.The narrative of Anandamath (1883) is not merely regressive; it often turns into sheer propaganda that wouldn’t survive an elementary fact-check. Anandamath draws on the Sanyasi-Fakir rebellion of the late eighteenth century against the East India Company. Bankim radically rewrites that history.History rewritten: Muslims erased and vilifiedHe not only removes Muslim Fakirs from the composite army that participated in one of early rebellions against the East India Company; he directs the novel’s wrath against the community. The historical erasure is accompanied by a political insertion: Muslims disappear as participants in the rebellion and reappear as its principal enemy.Bankim doesn’t merely fictionalise the rebellion; he deploys fiction to become a vehicle of communal propaganda. The language used against the Muslims is vile and provocative. A monk declares right in the beginning his opposition to “Mussulman rulers” because of whom “our religion is destroyed, our caste defiled, our honour polluted, our family honour shamed.”. The monk asserts: “Unless we drive out these vice-besodden longbeards, Hinduism is doomed.”The Hindu monks make plans to burn down Muslim areas in order to “purify the earth”.The ‘Sanatani army’ plunder the Muslim households and “distribute the plunder among the new initiates of Vishnu”.In 1883, when British rule had consolidated itself, Bankim wrote about Hindus “disgusted at the bad government and anarchy which prevailed under Muslim rule”, and prompting Hindus to “punish the Mussulmans”.The novel vividly describes how the Sanatani army destroys “Mussulman soldiers”, amid “the loud cries of Haribol”. “If at any time the Mussulman soldiers did overcome a band of Santans. immediately another band would fall on them, none knows from where, and cut off the heads of the Mussulmans and go away crying out, “Hari! Hari!”The model of nationalism the monks insist on would later become central to the political imagination of Hindu majoritarianism. Anandamath thus became the precursor of an ideology that the Sangh Parivar would embrace decades later.The British as messiahAnd what role do the British play? They are not the enemy but the power through which the Hindu order is to be restored. Bankim again anticipates the later Hindutva politics for which the real enemy were the Muslims, and not the British.The rebellion gets over after “the Mussulman kingdom is destroyed”. And when a monk wonders that the Hindu kingdom has not yet been established because the “English are strong in Calcutta,” he gets a reply: “The English will rule India now.”The last section of the novel narrates the dilemma of a monk who wants to continue the fight and overthrow the British. But he is asked to abandon the struggle because the rebellion’s sole purpose was “to put the British on the throne.”Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.He is advised to give up fighting because the “British are our ally and friendly power”. And then arrives the clincher: “Unless the English rule this land, there is no chance of the renaissance of the eternal religion.”No wonder Warren Hastings, the Governor-General during the Sanyasi rebellion, is described as “the rising sun of the British community in India”. These were translations by Sri Aurobindo and his brother Barindra Kumar Ghosh that were serialised in his magazine Karmayogin in 1909-1910.One can argue that fiction isn’t the best site to discern a novelist’s actual views. It has also been suggested that the civil servant Bankim couldn’t have antagonised the British. It is a flawed argument. Whatever constraints his position as a civil servant may have imposed on him, they can explain neither the novel’s entrenched hostility towards Muslims nor the explicit political argument that the British are beneficial for Hindus and Hinduism. At the end, Anandamathis a prejudiced and troubling exercise in history rewriting.Unfair portrayal of womenThe questions over Anandamath don’t end here. Besides the warped portrayal of Muslims, the freedom it imagines for the nation has little space for the women. The male protagonists formulate the ideal of Bharat Mata; women are expected to embody it. They are given no choice or voice in the formulation.Bankim’s portrayal of widows in several of his novels is even more problematic. One of his novels, Bish Briksha (The Poison Tree) , takes its title from a young widow protagonist. Its widowed women are viewed through a punitive moral lens, as they become the object of the narrative’s ire.A character’s misogyny, of course, need not be of the author’s own. But strong evidence lies in Bankim’s public stance. While several of his Bengali contemporaries had been advocating for widow remarriage, he was strongly opposed to it. Explaining his stand, Bankim wrote in an issue of Bangdarshan (1870), a journal he edited: “We do not think that the hardships of the widows are intolerable.”In the next sentence he admits that even if “intolerable”, they are “highly beneficial to society”. “If it is a cruelty not to relieve the miseries of a handful of widows, then it must be a barbarous inhumanity that causes mischief to thousands of individuals by inaugurating widow-remarriage.”Anandamath is placed on a high pedestal in the pantheon of nationalist literature. It’s a curious working of history that notwithstanding the contestations over the novel, Vande Mataram traversed a phenomenal distance and acquired a life of its own. Several Congress leaders and revolutionaries who otherwise didn’t share with the novel’s ideology found merit in the song. With or without the truncated version, it became a rallying point for the freedom movement.One need not dismiss the song. Its place in history deserves to be recognised and celebrated. But one can still dissect the novel as a literary text to understand the contradictions and complexities of the past.The Indian national song emerged from a text that distorted history to insult the Muslims and make the Hindus look inferior to the British. The first aspect has seen a fair amount of debate, but the second has remarkably received little attention.Ashutosh Bhardwaj is a writer-journalist.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.