ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for understanding the patriotic lyric as a global and performative genre that not only teaches its auditors and readers about space and belonging but also, owing to its performative nature, enacts the idea of spatial belonging. It outlines features of the patriotic lyric through an examination of metropolitan patriotic lyrics such as James Thomson’s “Rule! Britannia” (composed in 1740) before examining two patriotic lyrics from colonial India: Bankim Chandra Chatterji’s Vandemataram (first published as a poem in the journal Bongodorshon, in 1875; subsequently published as a part of Anandamath, in 1882) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana (first published in 1911). The lyrics, whose truncated versions are the National Song and National Anthem of the postcolonial Indian state, both structure their spatial imagination through landscapes to imagine India as a postcolony. Despite the formal similarities, however, the lyrics articulate two distinct, and divergent, conceptions of Indian space. Chatterji’s lyric presents Indian landscape in a pastoral vein that re-imagines the contemporaneous lived space of famine and death in a utopian vein but nevertheless evacuates all traces of labour from it. This re-imagination re-enchants the landscape by deifying it as a mother goddess of Hindu religious traditions and posits Bengal (and India) as a Hindu majoritarian space. While Tagore also deploys the landscape form in Jana Gana Mana, the vision, however, is plural. He presents Indian space as distinct from divinity, and a palimpsest of its physical, political, and ethnic units, and as an inclusive civilizational space for all communities. I also delineate Jana Gana Mana as a counter-pastoral that makes visible the role, and labour, of India’s ethnic and religious communities in shaping and producing that space besides attempting to find a plural and common idiom for narrating Indian space and its communities.
