Meaning of Vande Matram

Vande Mātaram means I bow to you, Mother or Hail to the Mother (land).

Vande = I salute/ I bow

Mataram = to (my ) mother

It is a poem in the 1882 novel Anandamatha by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. It is written in a mixture of Bengali and Sanskrit.

Tagore's Jana Gana Mana was chosen as the National Anthem of the 1947 Republic of India. Vande Mataram was rejected on the grounds that Muslims, Christians, Parsis, Sikhs, Arya Samajis and others who opposed idol worship felt offended by its depiction of the nation as "Mother Durga", a Hindu goddess. Muslims also felt that its origin as part of Anandamatha, a novel they felt had an anti-Muslim message.

It was pointed out then that though the first two stanzas began with an unexceptionable evocation of the beauty of the motherland, in later stanzas there are references where the motherland is likened to the Hindu goddess Durga. Therefore, INC recomended to adopt only the first two stanzas as the national song.