India, Jan. 24 -- Republic Day is upon us. But when we hear Jana Gana Mana play, we would do well to remember that there was a time when people questioned whether India would ever have its own national anthem. This doubt arose shortly after Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877. Hereupon it became increasingly common for public events to feature God Save the Queen. Since few Indians felt confident singing in English, compositions in regional languages emerged to help Indians better express their "affection" for the Crown. Perhaps the most well-known offering was the Poona Gayan Samaj's Devi Shri Victoria, which the Marathi press deprecated as "meaningless rigmarole". What made this composition especially unpopular was that it went on for nearly ten minutes - few Indians or Britons were loyal enough to stand that long. Consequently, there emerged in London the "felicitous thought" that more needed to be done to popularise God Save the Queen as a national anthem for India. As the English press reminded its readers, "the power of music in which the masses can freely join has been shown in all ages". The task eventually devolved upon Frederick Harford, a minor clergyman at Westminster Abbey, who had a characteristically Victorian interest in the "spiritual and emotional power" of hymns. With the help of the National Indian Association, Harford recruited Mirza Bakir Khan, a Persian linguist who had studied in Calcutta, to produce a Hindustani translation. But when this piece was performed in London in May 1882, by an all-British troupe no less, it was panned by "old India hands" who warned that not only the words but the melody too should be "Oriental". Stung by the criticism, Harford appealed to Sourindro Mohun Tagore, the renowned "practical musician" of the era, for help. Tagore rapidly produced a Bengali edition which he set a dozen different ways. Yet, even before his version was performed in London in November 1882, Tagore had discerned a problem: The "musical proclivities" of the Indian people were "too diverse to fix a melody". The ragas he had selected suited Bengali tastes but not those of Bombay or Madras. Nonetheless, there was cause for hope, he reasoned, as other musicians were attempting metrical renderings of God Save the Queen in other languages. The Jewish philanthropist, David Sassoon, had commissioned a Hebrew edition; Kaikhosro Kabraji, the editor of Rast Goftar, had produced one in Gujarati; the Maharaja of Travancore had likewise prepared one in Malayalam; and even Max Muller, the famed Orientalist, had drafted a Sanskrit version. Still, it was an uphill battle. With critics demanding that the anthem be set in 20 "Oriental languages", Harford was compelled to establish a National Anthem for India Fund to support the enterprise. Seeking donations, he went about lecturing on the good that would result from transplanting God Save the Queen. A national anthem, he argued, helped "to form and preserve national character". But as Indians had "no common bond between them", a national anthem could "never be evolved by India from her own resources". Hence, "if she is to have one at all", Harford concluded, "it must be proposed to her by England". Thousands of pounds poured into the Anthem Fund. But little went as planned. The original translation into Hindustani, it turned out upon closer inspection, implied that Indians wished for the widowed Victoria to remarry. It was hurriedly abandoned in favor of Muller's Sanskrit edition, which was then savaged by the pandits of Benares (who then fell out over which of their own versions was better, leading the British authorities to voice exasperation at "how fond native scholars are of criticizing one another"). Meanwhile, the Punjabi "adaptation" sent in by Ram Das Chibber caused an uproar in Victorian circles when it turned out to be based on the jaunty local melody, Haar Phulan Di. At one level, the problem was technical. Since India and England were "one united Empire", grandees in London insisted that it was "absolutely necessary that the music should be the same in India and in England". But how to translate the words of God Save the Queen into India's many languages while retaining the "stirring" tune and the "rhyme and rhythm" of the English original? The challenge was "insurmountable", as Tagore had warned Harford at the outset. There was a political challenge too. There quickly emerged an "anti-anthem" party, composed of both Britons and Indians, that mocked Harford for leading a "singularly ridiculous movement" that sought to instill "second-hand loyalty". "National songs are like flowers", the Daily Telegraph observed, "they may be planted anywhere but in order to bloom the soil and seed must suit". Or as Richard Carnac Temple put it when Harford ignored his valiant attempt to promote Chibber's idiomatic Punjabi version, "so long as the Englishman will not fall in with the Indian's music, the hope that they will ever sing together is an idle dream". Little wonder, then, that by the end of the decade, Harford's "chimerical project" had vanished from public view. It nonetheless deserves to be recalled because, as the musicologist Charles Capwell has noticed, at the very moment the British were convinced that Indians, being made up of "countless races, tribes, and creeds" lacked the "spirit of unanimity" required to produce a national anthem, Bankim Chandra Chatterji was finishing his novel Anandamath, which contained the glorious Vande Mataram. Within a decade, this song was being sung, by a very different Tagore, before the Indian National Congress, and in two decades, it had become the watchword of the revolutionary societies that were spouting up around the country. Bankim succeeded where Harford failed because he divined our great truth. Our hearts could learn to love the heroic Shivaji of Maharashtra and the brave Ranjit Singh of Punjab, and our tongues could learn to recite a Bengali song - if it were equally rousing. It is not easy, schoolchildren know, to memorise the exalted language of Vande Mataram - and of Jana Gana Mana, the hymn that eventually became our national anthem. But ensconced in this happy childhood struggle is the story of how India, which so often appears to be losing its footing, surprises history. The genius of our civilisation is that we are ever willing to adapt, slowly but assuredly. And thus it was that when bombs and bandhs were launched in 1905, they were accompanied by cries of Vande Mataram. To the horror of Victorians, Indians had learnt to sing together....