Why removing Sindh alone would gut the entire anthem

The very fact that "Sindh" appears in the national anthem of India presents an apparent conundrum to logic: since Sindh is today a Pakistani province, why should it appear in an anthem formally adopted by India?

Because it is a contradiction to assume that Jana Gana Mana was written as a geographical inventory of the Republic of India. It was not.

In 1911, a year before Tagore wrote the poem which became India's National Anthem, the political geography of independent India had yet to be imagined. While the Constituent Assembly adopted the first stanza as our National Anthem on 24-1-50, it did not rewrite every geographical marker mentioned in the poem as a modern Indian state. Indeed, the geographical names in Tagore's poem retain their older literary and cultural resonance.

This is why 'Sindh' presents such a problem of removal. The first stanza of the National Anthem, after all, sings not only of Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala and Banga, but also of the Vindhyas and Himalayas, the Yamuna and Ganga, and the waves of the Indian sea. The geographical imagination here is therefore broader and older than the present political map.

The common argument that Tagore simply listed the provinces under direct British administration also deserves qualification. Sindh, for instance, was part of the Bombay Presidency in 1911 and became a separate British province only in 1936. Meanwhile, 'Maratha' and 'Dravida' cannot simply be equated with the modern states of Maharashtra and the southern Indian states. Rajasthan is not present because there was no single state called Rajasthan when Tagore wrote the poem. The area was known broadly as Rajputana and consisted of several princely states. The princely states of the region were subsequently integrated into Rajasthan after Independence.

But nobody would reasonably conclude from their absence that those regions fall outside the India imagined by the anthem. That is because the anthem was never meant to be a constitutional schedule of India's territories. Unlike the territories that were subsequently integrated into the Indian Union, Sindh became part of Pakistan in 1947. It became part of Pakistan in 1947. That makes the word particularly conspicuous when Indians sing the anthem today.

The issue came before the Supreme Court in 2005, when advocate Sanjeev Bhatnagar petitioned for 'Sindh' to be deleted from Jana Gana Mana on the ground that Sindh was no longer part of India. The Supreme Court rejected the argument. Its reasoning went beyond the narrow question of whether Sindh currently lies inside India's borders. The Court said a national anthem is not a geographical record to be rewritten whenever territories or administrative boundaries change. It described the references to particular regions as symbolic of India's heritage. The Court also gave the word 'Sindh' a broader meaning. It referred not only to the geographical region but also to Sindhis, Sindhi culture and the Sindhu or Indus river. The Court noted that India's cultural inheritance cannot simply be reduced to its post-1947 borders.

That reasoning matters because deleting 'Sindh' solely because the province is now in Pakistan would establish a very particular rule: that every geographical reference in the anthem must correspond to the territory of the Republic as it exists today.

There is another layer to the controversy that is often missed in the territorial argument.

In 2011, retired professor Shreekanth Malushte brought the issue before the Bombay High Court, arguing that 'Sindhu' was the right word. The controversy added to the complication that different official communications seemed to use the two forms in different contexts. The Centre eventually maintained that both had their place: 'Sindh' was in the textual version while 'Sindhu' was used in the version prescribed for singing and playing. The episode shows how complicated it is to treat a single transliterated word as though it has only one possible historical meaning.

'Sindhu ' is the Sanskrit name associated with the Indus. 'Sindh' is also the name of the historic region and people. The two have been linguistically and historically intertwined for centuries.

The debate therefore cannot be reduced simply to the statement that an Indian anthem accidentally retained the name of a Pakistani province.

In 2005, a Rajya Sabha question asked if the government had decided to delete 'Sindh' from the anthem. The Home Ministry's response was simply that it had not. In 2018, Assam MP Ripun Bora took the opposition to an even greater extent, proposing that 'Sindh' be replaced with 'Northeast India'. His argument was based on the opposite omission: if the anthem contains the name of a region that is now outside India, he argued, why should a vast region that is within India have no explicit mention?

That proposal shows the difficulty with treating the anthem as a modern political map. If 'Sindh' is removed because it is outside India's present borders, should the Northeast be inserted? What about Kashmir? Should Rajasthan be augmented? Should 'Maratha' become 'Maharashtra'? Should 'Utkala' become 'Odisha'? Should 'Dravida' be replaced by the names of several contemporary southern states?

At that point, the question is no longer about one word. It is about whether the poem should be rewritten to reflect a political geography that emerged decades after it was composed. There is also a human dimension to the word that a purely cartographic argument does not see. The Partition of 1947 did not merely redraw borders. It uprooted communities. Sindhi Hindus who left Sindh after Partition did not have an Indian territorial counterpart bearing the name of their homeland. Unlike Punjab and Bengal, whose historic regions were divided between India and Pakistan, Sindh as a province became part of Pakistan. For Sindhis living in India, therefore, 'Sindh' can function as more than a geographical reference. It can evoke an ancestral homeland that lies outside the borders of the country in which many of its displaced descendants eventually settled.

The strongest argument against deleting 'Sindh' is therefore not that the political borders of 1947 somehow do not matter. It is that a national anthem is not necessarily required to forget everything that existed before those borders.

India's national symbols contain layers of history that predate the Republic. Jana Gana Mana was written in colonial India, adopted by a Constituent Assembly creating a new republic, and inherited by a country whose boundaries, states and political institutions had changed dramatically in between. Its regional references survived those transformations precisely because they were not merely administrative labels. Removing Sindh on the narrow ground that the province is now in Pakistan would therefore create a larger problem. It would imply that the anthem's geographical references should be judged primarily by the contemporary political map. But that standard would immediately raise questions about every other name in the verse.

The absence of Rajasthan does not make Rajasthan less Indian. The absence of Assam does not make Assam less Indian. The presence of Sindh does not make Sindh part of the Republic of India. It means that the anthem is doing something different from drawing a political boundary. It is remembering a civilisation, a landscape and a historical imagination that are older than the Republic itself. And that is why removing Sindh alone would not simply change one word. It would change the logic by which the rest of the anthem has been understood.

References:

. . .