ABSTRACT
Slogans and appropriations were now the order of the day. The National Herald’s last editorial of August 15, 1942, before its self-imposed silence, had been headlined ‘Bande Mataram’ – the title of a prayer to the nationas-mother by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay that had become something of a national hymn for the Congress and its sympathisers from the days of the Bengal swadeshi movement. The only problem was, the novel of proxy nationalism from which the song was drawn cast Muslims as the alien outsiders resisted by Hindu nationalists. The song had become something of a political battleground, leading to its overtly anti-Muslim verses being culled, but many Muslims felt that the whole song was offensive, and that the Congress should abandon it. With regard to slogans, ‘Jai Hind’ was infinitely crisper, and solved the problem of sectarian tendencies: in simple Hindustani, it declared ‘Victory to Hind’, a term that still preserved the geographical rather than the sectarian meanings of the word.
