The secular cleansing that wasn’t: “Vande Mataram” and the expurgated story of Indian nationalism

This article shows the religious iconography of Indian nationalism by observing the manner in which the defining text of the Hindu Right came to legitimize an unapologetically majoritarian nationalism. It revisits the history of the Indian independence movement through its architects' handling of the song "Vande Mataram" and its idolization of the nation as a Hindu goddess. Tracing its relevance to the hegemony of Hindutva in India today, the article then reads Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay's 1881-82 novel Anandamath to study the connection between the song and its parent text, and to thereby understand the politics of secular cleansing which strives for the secular by purging from the communal that which is unambiguously sectarian. Consequently, the article argues that the story of "Vande Mataram" becomes an unparalleled example in Indian history of how the secular is structured on the ideological foundations of the communal and is therefore conceptually intertwined with it.