Listen carefully the next time Jana Gana Mana is sung.
Punjab. Sindhu. Gujarat. Maratha. Dravida. Utkala. Banga.
They come one after another, almost like places being called out on an old map. But there is something strange about that map.
Some of the names are still familiar. Some are no longer names of states. One refers to a region that is now across an international border. And some parts of today's India are not named at all.
That is because Jana Gana Mana was born in a very different India.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote the song in 1911, decades before Independence and the creation of India's present states. The first stanza became India's National Anthem in 1950. The India named in those lines was therefore not the India of today's political map. It was an India of regions, historical identities and political territories that would change dramatically over the next few decades.
And that makes one absence particularly interesting: Rajasthan.
Not because Rajasthan did not exist as a region.
It did.
What did not exist in 1911 was Rajasthan as the unified state we know today.
The area was then known broadly as Rajputana and was made up of numerous princely states and chiefships. The British exercised paramountcy over these states, but they were not organised as one British-administered province called Rajasthan. After Independence, those states were gradually merged into unions, eventually forming Greater Rajasthan in 1949. The final shape of the present state came in 1956 after further reorganisation.
So when we ask why Rajasthan is missing from the anthem, there is a temptation to imagine that Tagore simply forgot it.
History suggests something more complicated.
The anthem was never designed as a list of every territory that would one day become an Indian state.
In fact, some of the names that are present do not correspond neatly to today's states either.
“Maratha” is not Maharashtra.
“Dravida” is not one present-day state.
“Utkala” is an older cultural-geographical name associated with Odisha.
“Banga” points towards Bengal.
And “Sindhu” has generated perhaps the most persistent argument of all.
Because Sindh is no longer part of India.
It became part of Pakistan in 1947.
Yet the word has remained in India's National Anthem.
For decades, people have asked a very simple question: why?
In 2011, retired professor Shreekanth Malushte approached the Bombay High Court, arguing that “Sindh” should be replaced with “Sindhu”, referring to the river. His argument was that Sindh had become part of Pakistan while the Sindhu remained geographically connected to India. The petition also raised the claim that the word had been altered by the government in 1950 but that the supposedly incorrect version continued to be sung.
The court did not produce a new anthem.
The word stayed.
And that decision leaves us with an unusual problem: what exactly does “Sindhu” or “Sindh” mean in the anthem?
It is not as straightforward as pointing to a present-day political boundary.
Tagore's own English rendering used “Sindh” in his translation, while the official text today uses “Sindhu.” The word has consequently been interpreted in different ways—as a reference to the Sindh region, the Indus/Sindhu river, or a broader historical and cultural geography. The Government of India's prescribed text has remained unchanged.
That ambiguity has perhaps helped the word survive.
But there is another reason the argument is difficult.
If the anthem were rewritten every time a political map changed, what exactly would happen to the historical identity contained in it?
Utkala is not the official name of a present-day state.
Banga is not the name of a present-day state.
Dravida does not correspond to a single state.
Maratha does not appear on the modern political map either.
Yet nobody hears those words and assumes that they should simply be deleted because the map has changed.
They have survived because an anthem is not necessarily a map.
It can also be memory.
And nowhere is that more emotionally complicated than with Sindh.
For Sindhis who remained in India after Partition, the word carries a history that cannot be reduced to a border dispute. Partition uprooted a community from the province that had been its homeland. Unlike Punjab and Bengal, Sindh went almost entirely to Pakistan, leaving Sindhi Hindus who migrated to India without the territorial homeland they had known.
In that context, hearing “Sindhu” in the National Anthem can mean something more than geography.
It can sound like a reminder that a community's history did not disappear simply because a boundary moved.
That does not settle the linguistic or historical debate over what Tagore intended. Nor does it prove that the word was deliberately retained for that reason. But it helps explain why changing one word in a 52-second anthem can become much larger than a question of pronunciation. The debate touches memory, Partition, belonging and the strange ability of language to preserve places that political maps have lost.
And then there are the regions that are absent altogether.
Modern Rajasthan is not named. The Northeast does not appear as today's Northeast. Nor does the anthem attempt to mention every region, community or landscape that makes up contemporary India.
That is not necessarily an omission that needs correcting.
It is a reminder of when the song was written.
India has changed its borders, created new states, merged old territories and renamed places many times since 1911. The map has been revised repeatedly. The anthem has not.
Perhaps that is why Jana Gana Mana can feel slightly strange if we read it as geography.
It becomes much more understandable if we read it as history.
The words have outlived the political arrangements that surrounded them.
Rajputana became Rajasthan. British India became independent India. Sindh crossed an international border. Bengal was divided. New states were created. Old geographical identities became cultural ones.
And through all of it, the same seven regional names remained in the song.
There is something quietly powerful about that.
An anthem does not have to show us the India that exists on a map today. Sometimes it shows us the India that existed when the idea was still being imagined.
And perhaps that is why the most interesting question is not “Why isn't Rajasthan in the National Anthem?”
It is this:
How much of a country's past should remain audible after its map has changed?
References:
- Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs. (n.d.). National anthem of India.
National Portal of India. National Portal of India - Rajasthan Legislative Assembly. (n.d.). History of Rajasthan and its integration.
Government of Rajasthan. - Supreme Court of India. (1971). Bijoe Emmanuel & Others v. State of Kerala & Others, 1987 AIR 748.
- The Times of India. (2011, August 12). Sindh in national anthem probably a mistake: HC.