The Indian National Anthem, Jana Gana Mana, names seven regions: Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkal, Banga. It does not name Rajasthan, Kashmir or the Northeast. The explanation has been that when Tagore wrote it in 1911, the listed provinces fell under British rule. What later became Rajasthan was a set of Rajputana states; Kashmir was a princely state, and the Northeast was a set of diverse tribes.
The explanation, however, does not account for Sindh’s inclusion alongside the provinces. In 1911, Sindh was not a province itself but part of the Bombay Presidency. It became a separate province on 1st April, 1936. Similarly, Gujarat, Maratha and Dravida were not administrative units but regions of language and memory, while Assam, which was under the British administration, appears nowhere. This suggests that the listed names did not reflect the provinces under the Raj.
The map was also shifting in 1911. On 12th December, 1911, at the Delhi Durbar, King George V announced the annulment of the partition of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa’s formation of a new province, and Assam’s reversion to the Chief Commissioner’s rule. Two weeks later, on 27th December, 1911, the anthem was sung for the first time at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress.
The anthem, however, was amenable to alteration. Dr Rajendra Prasad’s statement that day made the anthem subject to alterations authorised by the Government. There was room for change.
In 2005, advocate Sanjeev Bhatnagar asked the Supreme Court to delete Sindh and put Kashmir in its place. He argued that the word infringed Pakistan’s sovereignty and hurt the feelings of a hundred crore Indians. The Court dismissed the petition with costs of Rs. 10,000. It stated that an anthem is “not a chronicle which defines the territory of the nation”. Besides, Sindh also refers to the river and to a people (who are settled in India). It refers to a culture as much as to a geographical location.
In 2011, Shrikant Malushte, a retired professor, told the Bombay High Court that while the government had substituted Sindhu, the river, for Sindh, the anthem continued to be sung as Sindhu. He stated that the anthem was being sung incorrectly. In an affidavit, the Centre replied that both were correct. Sindhu was being sung, and Sindh was in the printed text. In this instance, the state declined to choose one reading of the anthem over the other.
In 2016 and in 2018, again, Congress MP Ripun Bora proposed replacing Sindh with the Northeast.
The refusal to edit stems from the fact that deleting Sindh for being out of date would lay the precedent for the removal of Utkala, Dravida, Banga and Maratha. None of these names is a present-day state. As part of its reasoning in Sanjeev Bhatnagar vs. Union of India, the Court asked if the national anthem must be enlarged to include Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh, and Jharkhand. Its answer was no. However, consistency alone does not explain the resistance to deleting Sindh.
Uttara Shahani, who researches Sindh refugees, called the partition one without territory. Around 1 million non-Muslim refugees, not all of them Sindhi-speaking, dispersed across India and abroad with no state to return to or claim. Sindhis campaigned for two decades to have their language placed in the Eighth Schedule, less for material support than for symbolic recognition. When Ram Jethmalani led the Sindhi intervenors in the Supreme Court, he argued that Sindh is not merely a piece of territory but a civilisation. He asked whether the petitioner meant to take away their pride in being called out in the National Anthem.
Benedict Anderson observed that national anthems achieve something unusual: strangers who will never meet utter the same words to the same tune at the same moment, and that unity binds them without acquaintance. In Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), he has argued that the map, alongside the census and the museum, was how the colonial state imagined its domain, and that the nationalisms which rose against it inherited its grammar. While a physical map binds people politically, the anthem incites a sense of belonging.
This also explains why the absence of Northeast from the anthem feels harsh and stings. Unlike Rajasthan, which did not exist in 1911, Assam did, and yet it was not listed. The very recognition that the Sindhis derive from the anthem retaining Sindh is the very recognition that the Northeast feels denied. However, Bora’s remedy swaps one community’s recognition for another.
This is the larger question the anthem raises. Are the names symbolic or poetry? If they are symbolic, then exclusions need to be explained or corrected. If it is poetry, then the pride referred to by Jethmalani was misplaced. The answers to these questions would not only offer explanations but also determine how the anthem is perceived. Is it symbolic of recognition or a unifying song that references an old world? In my personal opinion, neither is wrong.
References:
- Supreme Court of India - Sanjeev Bhatnagar v. Union of India
- The Leaflet – Uttara Shahani
‘Sindh is not a piece of territory’: Sindhi belonging in India - DNA India
Both ‘Sindh’ and ‘Sindhu’ in national anthem alright: Govt - Banglapedia
Delhi Coronation Durbar - Provincial Assembly of Sindh
About the Sindh Assembly - Rajasthan High Court
History of the Rajasthan High Court: A Bird’s Eye View - Anderson, Benedict – Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism