In India, everything begins—and often ends—with the name. It is not merely an identifier but a marker, almost a serial number. One’s place in life, proximity to power and legitimacy in public discourse can depend on it. A name signals inheritance, ideology and location in the social order. This remains true despite our constitutional promise of equality, liberty, fraternity and justice. In practice, our democracy still resembles a pyramid—steep, hierarchical and acutely sensitive to who stands where and who is permitted to speak.
The modern nation-state ideas we continue to quote now feel tired, like slogans repeated long after belief has faded. The words remain, but the faith that once animated them has thinned. Symbols, too, are being quietly reworked to suit a different political temperament. They are no longer sites of shared meaning, but instruments of management.
Icons, after all, age badly in impatient times. They demand patience, historical memory and moral engagement—qualities increasingly seen as liabilities rather than virtues.
Rabindranath Tagore is a case in point. His poetry is rarely read today, his essays scarcely cited outside academic circles. He survives not as a thinker, but as a silhouette. Yet Jana Gana Mana thrives—not as literature but as ritual. It has become an industry: taught, practised, recorded, regulated. Children learn it before they learn who wrote it. Deviate from the authorised version and cultural alarms go off. Reverence here is procedural, not reflective.
Across the border in Bangladesh, youthful anger has taken a cruder, more violent turn—statues broken, legacies unsettled, history physically attacked. India prefers a gentler, more bureaucratic method. We do not smash. We edit.
Which brings us to the recurring controversy over who cut which stanza and why. A theory has gained ground that Jawaharlal Nehru, aided by Tagore, deliberately edited down Vande Mataram. Jana Gana Mana, too, was later shortened to make it ideologically acceptable to a newly independent, deeply plural nation. And that this first act of accommodation—restricting Vande Mataram to sujalam suphalam alone—emboldened forces that would later demand Partition. History, in this telling, did not fracture through violence, colonial policy or political failure, but through selective omission.
What neither Tagore nor Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay could have foreseen was that their songs would survive only in truncated forms—and that these truncations would one day be treated not as practical compromises of a fraught moment, but as moral failures discovered retrospectively. Decisions taken to hold a fragile nation together are now reread as acts of betrayal.
To soften the charge, a contemporary influencer recently offered a kinder explanation. The edits, he claimed, were for children. Shorter songs are easier to memorise. After all, Nehru was fond of children. Nationalism, when rendered child-friendly, becomes manageable. Patriotism is reduced to something examinable, markable and safe.
Editing, however, has since moved well beyond music.
The Mahatma has now entered the same phase of careful repositioning. A flagship employment scheme that once bore his name has been refurbished. Gandhi recedes, replaced by a clever acronym invoking Ram, rural development and administrative efficiency. It is not removal; it is redesign. Gandhi is not rejected. He is quietly stepped around. Why confront a moral presence when you can domesticate it?
This is not iconoclasm. It is brand management. Icons are not demolished; they are backgrounded—present, but no longer central. Revered, but no longer inconvenient. Their complexity is flattened, their discomfort edited out.
Old icons are troublesome not because they failed the nation, but because they demand too much from it. They complicate neat narratives of power and progress. They refuse to be compressed into slogans or reduced to utility. They insist on ethics in an age that prefers efficiency.
In today’s India, names are policy. Renaming is governance. Editing is ideology. Memory itself is now negotiable, contingent on political comfort and administrative convenience.
Tagore is too lyrical. Bankim too incendiary. Gandhi too morally exacting. None are erased. That would provoke resistance. They are simply edited down—trimmed to size, made safer for the present.
The Republic marches on, carefully abridged and historically redesigned, until one begins to wonder whether what survives is history at all—or merely a version of it that fits comfortably on a hoarding.
Read all columns by Santwana Bhattacharya
Santwana Bhattacharya
Editor
santwana@newindianexpress.com