Like it says, 'Vande Mataram' means tribute to a mother(land). The song is a general tribute and then also about the freedom struggle of India. It has nothing to do with religion.
Mothers (and fathers) are loved and respected (you can also say 'are worshipped') everywhere, and even a child would know that does not eliminate God's position in anyway.
While it could be a tribute to Assam for you, for many others it is a tribute to India (that's including Assam). How do you decide what Assam needs?
Hope you are not dreaming of an Assam ruled by a new Hynkel who would decide for people how and what they should eat, breathe, sing and worship!
From: "Bartta Bistar" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: AssamNet <assam@assamnet.org>
Subject: [Assam] Assam does not need ‘Vande Mataram’, NOR does she need followers of dangerous CULTS in her soil.
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 07:53:27 +0100
Guwahati, Friday, September 1, 2006
Vande Mataram: a tribute to Motherland
http://www.assamtribune.com/
By Sivasish Thakur
GUWAHATI, Aug 31 – Vande Mataram, the national song of the country, continues to be embroiled in a long-drawn controversy that has resurfaced once again even as it is all set to complete its hundredth year on September 7. Written by the celebrated poet of West Bengal, Bankim Chandra Chatttopadhyay, in 1876, Vande Mataram was formally adopted as the national song at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress on September 7, 1906.
The opposition to the song, as put forward by the Muslim clergy, stems from the appeal in the song to worship the motherland (Vande Mataram), which, they say, is against the basic tenets of Islam that strictly prohibit worship of anyone except Allah.
While the controversy continues to hog the limelight, drawing different responses from the public, political parties and the intelligentsia alike, not many would be knowing that a scholar from the State has done an in-depth analysis of the issue, and a book, billed as the first-of-its-kind on the subject, is ready to hit the stands within a month.
The author of Vande Mataram and Islam, Prof Aurobindo Mazumdar, retired Head of the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, Gauhati University, terms his endeavour as a dispassionate analysis of the song as also the history of the country's Freedom Struggle.
"The history of Vande Mataram is the history of the Freedom Struggle itself, and the two cannot be separatedÂ…To forget Vande Mataram is to disregard the history of the Freedom Struggle and vice versa," Prof Mazumdar says.
How does he see the controversy dogging the national song for decades? "I would say that much of the controversy surrounding the song is totally uncalled for that originates from a lack of understanding of its very essence. This is unfortunate politicization and the consequent victimization of a song that deserves to be the national anthem," he says. "Love and affection for the motherland is a most natural thing – something that ought to be placed above the narrow confines of murky politics, and it is regrettable that a noble song should find itself at the center of an unnecessary controversy," he adds.
The book, divided into several chapters, gives a chronological account of Vande Mataram and the Freedom Movement. "I have sought to view it from different perspectives – from the point of view of the Congress, the Muslim League, the British, the common people, during the Freedom Struggle, during Partition, after Independence and so on," Prof Mazumdar says.
There is also a chapter dealing with Vande Mataram and Asom. "The song stirred the souls of the masses with a feeing to sacrifice everything to liberate the motherland from British imperialism. This clarion call to break the shackles of slavery reverberated across the nation, and Assam, too, was greatly moved by the appeal," he says. A number of books, poems, dramas, etc., written in Assamese have references of Vande Mataram, he adds.
According to Prof Mazumdar, who has also authored the much-acclaimed Indian Press Freedom Struggle published by Orient Longman, Vande Mataram and Islam is the first book written on the subject. "The book involves an unbiased observation and detached dissection of every word of Vande Mataram," he says.
A lot of painstaking effort has gone into the book. Prof Mazumdar, who started to work on it in 1998, says that he had to undertake substantial research on the subject, which also entailed a lot of travelling to different parts of the country and interacting with people, particularly veterans associated with the Freedom Struggle.
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