India's national anthem, Jana Gana Mana, has a word in it that has long since continued to live on in both political and cultural circles: “Sindh.” While today Sindh is a province of Pakistan, the word appears in India's national anthem - a fact that was the subject of a Supreme Court case in 2004-2005 in which petitioner Sanjeev Bhatnagar requested that the court direct the government to delete “Sindh” from the anthem. The petition was based on the idea that since Sindh had been part of Pakistan since the Partition in 1947, it made no sense for it to appear in the anthem of the Republic of India. The Supreme Court dismissed the petition and decided that the anthem was not a geographical directory that needed to be updated every time political borders changed.
The controversy surrounding the word becomes more apparent when we take a look at the original lyrics. Jana Gana Mana was first publicly sung during the Indian National Congress' session in Calcutta on December 27, 1911, and the first stanza, which has since become India's national anthem, names Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala and Banga before referring to the Vindhyas, Himalayas, Yamuna and Ganga. The version published today by India's Ministry of Home Affairs still has the line “Panjaba-Sindhu-Gujarata Maratha Dravida-Utkala-Banga.” The Ministry's official instructions identify the first stanza of Tagore's composition as the National Anthem of India and prescribe both its full and short versions.
One possible explanation for the use of regional names is that Tagore was referring to the main geographical and cultural regions of India as they appeared during the British era and in the wider cultural imagination of the country. This explains why modern political units such as Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir and numerous northeastern states do not appear in the anthem. Rajasthan, for example, did not exist as the unified state it is now recognised as in 1911; rather, the area consisted of numerous princely states and territories generally associated with the Rajputana region. In a similar way, Jammu and Kashmir was a princely state rather than a British-administered province. The absence of these places, however, should not be reduced to a simple list of modern states that Tagore supposedly missed.
There is one important complication here: Sindh itself was not a separate British province in 1911. It was then part of the Bombay Presidency and became a separate province only in 1936. Gujarat and the area associated with Maratha were not represented as today's states either in the anthem. This implies that the names appearing in Jana Gana Mana cannot be simply understood as a list of the exact administrative provinces there were in 1911. They also carried geographical, cultural and historical meanings. This distinction became crucial in the reasoning of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court case was brought by Sanjeev Bhatnagar, who went to court in 2004, seeking deletion of “Sindh” and its replacement with “Kashmir.” His argument was based on the fact that Sindh had become part of Pakistan after Partition, so its appearance in India's national anthem was inappropriate. The first petition was not entertained, but the court gave him leave to approach the government. After he made a representation, he returned to the Supreme Court with essentially the same request. The government opposed the proposed change, arguing that adjusting the anthem would distort Tagore's composition and would cause unnecessary controversy.
On May 13, 2005, the Supreme Court gave its judgment in Sanjeev Bhatnagar v. Union of India and dismissed the petition while imposing costs of ₹10,000. The court's main reasoning was that a national anthem is not a historical or constitutional directory of the territories belonging to a country. Rather, it described the anthem as a patriotic expression and a symbol of national honour and heritage. Therefore, the fact that political borders had changed since Tagore wrote the poem was not an obligation to rewrite it.
The court also dismissed the argument that the retention of “Sindh” necessarily implied a claim to present-day Sindh as Indian territory. In its judgment, the court stated that “Sindh” could be interpreted to signify more than just a geographical territory. It could refer to the people and culture associated with Sindh, as well as the Indus or Sindhu and the civilisation connected with that region. The judges therefore treated the word as part of India's historical and cultural inheritance rather than as simply referring to a present-day state boundary.
This reasoning was significant because removing a historical name would have raised an even more significant question: if “Sindh” needed to be removed because it was not part of India, what would be the effect of deleting “Utkala,” “Banga,” “Dravida” or “Maratha,” which also do not appear to correspond exactly to India's present state boundaries? Similarly, if new states or reorganised territories needed to be added to the anthem, the text could theoretically require repeated changes every time India's internal political map changed. The Supreme Court therefore treated the anthem as a historical and symbolic composition rather than a document that required periodic updating.
The Indian government had already expressed its position in Parliament. In a Rajya Sabha question in March 2005, the government was specifically asked whether it had decided to delete “Sindh” from Jana Gana Mana and whether it understood that such a change would harm the sentiments of Sindhis in India. The Minister of State for Home Affairs, Manikrao Gavit, answered simply: “No, Sir.” The government's answer therefore confirmed that there was no decision to remove the word.
But the legal controversy was not entirely put to rest by the 2005 Supreme Court judgment. In 2011, retired professor Shrikant Malushte raised a separate challenge before the Bombay High Court. His argument was different from Bhatnagar's in that he was not simply saying that Sindh was now part of Pakistan, but that instead the word in the anthem should be “Sindhu,” referring to the Indus River, and claimed that the government had changed the word in January 1950, but that the wrong version continued to be sung and printed. Contemporary reports suggested that the Bombay High Court questioned why the government would deliberately retain “Sindh” and described its continued use as possibly a mistake.
That later dispute eventually came back to the same basic legal position established by the Supreme Court. In November 2016, the Bombay High Court disposed of another petition by Shrikant Gopinath Malushte concerning the words “Sindh” and “ashisha” in the national anthem. The court noted that the issue had already been decided by the Supreme Court in Sanjeev Bhatnagar v. Union of India and disposed of the petition in accordance with that judgment.
There is therefore an important factual distinction between saying that the anthem officially says “Sindhu” and saying that some people have argued that it should say “Sindhu.” The current instructions issued by India's Ministry of Home Affairs give the text as “Panjaba Sindhu-Gujarata-Maratha,” while the Supreme Court's 2005 judgment reproduces the commonly used Hindi transliteration as “Punjab-Sindh-Gujarat-Maratha.” The historical debate around the exact linguistic form has therefore existed, but it did not lead to an official judicial order replacing the word in the anthem.
For Sindhis in India, the issue has a significance beyond grammar or geography. Partition created a particularly difficult historical experience for the Sindhi community because Sindh itself became part of Pakistan, whereas Sindhi Hindus who migrated to India did not receive a new Indian state corresponding to their former homeland. Sindhi communities consequently developed across different parts of India rather than being concentrated in a single post-Partition state. Scholars and community representatives have described the continued presence of “Sindh” in India's national anthem as carrying a sense of historical and cultural belonging. That interpretation is a view of parts of the Sindhi community, rather than a legal finding of the Supreme Court.
The story of “Sindh” in Jana Gana Mana reveals something unusual about national symbols. Maps change, governments change, and provinces become countries or states, but a poem written more than a century ago can preserve an older geographical and cultural memory. The Supreme Court did not decide that modern-day Sindh was part of India. It decided that the presence of the word in the national anthem was not a claim about India's current territorial boundaries.
That is ultimately why the word has survived every major challenge to its inclusion. In 2005, the Supreme Court refused to order its removal. Parliament recorded the government's decision not to delete it. A later Bombay High Court controversy around “Sindh” versus “Sindhu” was ultimately disposed of by using the earlier decision of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Home Affairs continues to publish the anthem with the same wording.
More than a century after Tagore wrote Jana Gana Mana, “Sindh” therefore remains in India's national anthem because the anthem was treated as a historical and cultural composition rather than a constantly updated political map. For some Sindhis, that single word holds the memory of a homeland that disappeared from India's political territory in 1947. For the Indian state and the Supreme Court, it represents something more: a part of India's historical heritage that does not necessarily need to disappear simply because the map has changed.
References:
- Supreme Court of India — Sanjeev Bhatnagar v. Union of India & Ors.13 May 2005 — the main case concerning the demand to remove “Sindh” from the National Anthem. Supreme Court judgment — Sanjeev Bhatnagar v. Union of India
- Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India — National Flag, Emblem & Anthem — official government page containing documents and orders concerning India's National Anthem. Ministry of Home Affairs — National Flag, Emblem & Anthem
- Ministry of Home Affairs — Orders relating to the National Anthem — official government documents concerning the singing and playing of the National Anthem. MHA — National Anthem Orders
- Supreme Court judgment — official text and reasoning on “Sindh” — particularly useful for the court's explanation that “Sindh” was not simply being used as a current territorial boundary and that the anthem was not a geographical list requiring updates. Full judgment text — “Sindh” reasoning