India, Dec. 17 -- The 150th anniversary of Vande Mataram - India's National Song penned by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee - is being celebrated with much fanfare. While the song is being extolled for its patriotic and cultural virtues, the narrative being forwarded about its truncation in 1937 - which is silent about Rabindranath Tagore's role in this - is flawed. It was indeed Tagore who set the first stanza of Vande Mataram to tune while Chatterjee was still alive. Tagore mentioned in a letter in October 1937 to Jawaharlal Nehru about singing it in the presence of the latter. He added that he was also the "first person" to sing Vande Mataram "before a gathering of the Calcutta Congress," most likely in 1896. While this has found mention in the many pieces that have been published in the past few weeks, Tagore's critical role in truncating the song has either been ignored or glossed over. Tagore's intervention occurred against the backdrop of the growing antipathy of the Muslim League towards Vande Mataram in the 1930s. In 1938, at the Calcutta session of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, declared in his presidential speech that the Congress, then in government in several provinces, was trying to "impose the Vande Mataram song in the legislatures" causing "bitterness and opposition." The same year, at Karachi, Jinnah asserted that Vande Mataram was "not only idolatrous but also its origin and conception a hymn of hatred to Muslims." The Congress was aware of these sentiments with Rajendra Prasad writing to Vallabhbhai Patel in September 1937, noting that many Muslims object to Vande Mataram on the ground that it was an "invocation to a Hindu Goddess " and akin to "idol worship." The public controversy over Vande Mataram made Nehru and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose - both members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) - turn in 1937 to the only person who they felt had the authority to decide the controversy, namely Tagore. Bose had also got in touch with Ramananda Chatterjee, the editor of Modern Review. Ramananda Chatterjee published a strong editorial in the journal in support of Vande Mataram in light of what he called its impending "trial" by the Congress. Tagore was well aware of not only the Muslim sentiments against Vande Mataram but also the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Anandamath, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel, of which the song was a part. Tagore came up with a nuanced solution when he wrote to Nehru distinguishing the first section of the song from the rest, saying the "spirit of tenderness and devotion expressed in its first portion, the emphasis it gave to beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland," could be disassociated "from the rest of the poem and from those portions of the book of which it is a part." Tagore added that the second part of the poem and the novel also contradicted his and his family's "monotheistic ideals." In effect, he disassociated the first portion of Vande Mataram from both its remainder, but also from the novel by conceding that the entire poem "read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem susceptibilities." He concluded by offering a compromise where he suggested a truncated version where a "national song though derived from it, which has spontaneously come to consist only of the first two stanzas of the original poem, need not remind us every time of the whole of it, much less the story with which it was accidentally associated." This, he felt, had "nothing to offend any sect or community." Tagore's letter, which was published in Calcutta's popular dailies, triggered outrage among some people in Bengal. The Ananda Bazar Patrika, in an editorial published the same day Tagore's letter was published, noted that the Congress had "succumbed to communalism and communal elements." The next day it ran another editorial asking why the truncated version of the song was not accepted by the Congress as the National Song. Some of those disgruntled by the Congress's decision took to the streets, singing Vande Mataram even as the Congress's senior leaders like Nehru, Bose and Mahatma Gandhi were still in the city. The November issue of a popular Bengali journal carried a strong editorial against the Congress and was critical of Tagore too. It quoted Tagore's letter to Nehru and said that Bengalis as well as other Indians who loved Vande Mataram were dissatisfied with the poet's views. It contended that Muslims too had sung Vande Mataram with enthusiasm and noted that the mere mention of gods and goddesses in a poem or song did not amount to idolatry. It also argued that all members of the CWC, with the exception of Bose, were 'non-Bengalis' and unlikely to have any sympathy for Vande Mataram. It ended with a ringing endorsement of Vande Mataram, exhorting Bengalis to sing the song at all functions. The editorial ended with the words "Vande Mataram". Tagore's solution was, however, readily accepted by the CWC, which met in Calcutta in end-October, and passed a resolution declaring that the "first two stanzas" of the song are "a living and inseparable part of our national movement," adding that the other stanzas "contain certain allusions and a religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India." Nehru himself noted that Vande Mataram had become "a slogan of power," but felt it was "never sung as a challenge to any group or community." A little less than a century after Tagore's intervention, it's his compromise solution that is at the centre of a controversy with the ruling dispensation likening it to a division of the country. However, the truncation of the song is being blamed solely on the Congress under whose watch this had happened. The complex history behind the shortening of the song and Tagore's reasoning behind it are entirely missing from this narrative....