ARTICLE
Jana Gana Mana is a song not a document
Kapila Vatsyayan, T.M. Krishna, and the Politics of Sanskritization
- Dr Avanthi Meduri
e-mail: avanthi@hotmail.com
September 23, 2026
Abstract:
This essay responds to T. M. Krishna's 4th Kapila Vatsyayan Memorial
Lecture, "I Sing, Therefore I Am," by examining his radical proposal to
rethink Rabindranath Tagore's Jana Gana Mana through the lens of
language, caste, and regional identity. It argues that reducing the
national anthem to a problem of caste hegemony, power and Sanskritized
language politics misses the distinction between written text and
embodied cultural performance central to Vatsyayan's thought. Drawing on
notions of rasa, unisonance, nationalism, Sanskritization, and
collective singing, the essay contends that an anthem is not merely a
linguistic artifact but a performed, socio-cultural form through which
the individual "I" is gathered into a shared national "we."
Dr. Kapila Vatsyayan
T. M. Krishna's (TMK) title naturally intrigued me. I wanted to see how
he would invoke Descartes to think through Vatsyayan's
legacy - specifically her lifelong affirmation of the sovereign voice and
subjectivity of the musician, actor, and dancer. But I came away
dismayed.
My disagreement is not with TMK's Cartesian point of departure. Every
artist may begin from the sovereign assertion: I sing, therefore I am.
My concern is with the pivot from this artistic "I" to the collective
"we." What begins as a personal reflection on Carnatic music, caste
hegemony, exclusion, and Islamophobia turns, by the end, into a
far-reaching political proposal to reconfigure Rabindranath Tagore's
Jana Gana Mana. Composed by Tagore in 1911 and officially adopted as
India's national anthem on 24 January 1950, the anthem becomes the focal
point of TMK's project. I was confused by this shift but stayed with
TMK to understand the logic of his proposal.
TMK's position on the national anthem is unambiguous: he proposes
replacing the text of Jana Gana Mana because it is written in a
Sanskritized Bengali register, which he treats as distant from the
everyday speech and aspirations of the people. To democratize the
anthem, TMK would retain Tagore's tune but allow every state, community,
and individual to sing it in their own regional language.
Yet the tune of Jana Gana Mana cannot be separated so easily from its
linguistic life, nor from its caste, class and gender associations.
While the anthem draws on Rabindra Sangeet, it also carries deep
affinities with the elitist patriarchal worlds of Hindustani and
Carnatic music - specifically through the Hindustani Raga Alhaiya Bilawal,
which resonates with the Carnatic scale of Shankarabharanam. These
classical affinities were made widely audible in A. R. Rahman's
Bharatbala Productions Jana Gana Mana project of the late 1990s, which
brought together leading Carnatic and Hindustani musicians to render
classical elaborations on the national anthem. This grand musical
spectacle included Bhimsen Joshi, D. K. Pattammal, M. Balamuralikrishna,
Pandit Jasraj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Amjad Ali Khan, Shivkumar Sharma,
Rashid Khan, Parween Sultana, Ajoy Chakrabarty, Sudha Ragunathan, and P.
Unnikrishnan, among others.
By viewing India's national anthem primarily through the prism of caste,
power, and linguistic identity, TMK misses what Vatsyayan understood so
deeply: the distinction between a written text and an embodied cultural
performance. A song is not a document; a poem is not a manifesto.
In collective singing, words do not disappear, but neither do they stand
alone. Raga, breath, tala, memory, and bodily movement carry them
beyond their printed form into lived immediacy. What emerges is not
merely semantic meaning, but rasa - a shared affective experience through
which the solitary "I" is temporarily gathered into the national "we."
This flowing, processual movement is central to the rasa-oriented
national ontology that Vatsyayan bequeathed to Indian art history.
The ultimate irony is that TMK himself identifies the precise musical
moment in the national anthem when the individual "I" merges into the
collective "we." This occurs in the anthem's resolution, which ends on
the fourth note - the shuddha madhyama - rather than settling on the fifth
(panchama). In that unresolved cadence, India's unity in diversity is
heard differently: not as a triumphalist national song, but as a gentle
invitation to experience its geography and deep cultural plurality in
another unifying register of moral truth, civilizational memory, and
shared belonging.
TMK's critique of nationalism begins to unravel
To advance his proposal to dismantle what he sees as the restrictive
language of India's national anthem, TMK implicitly relies on Benedict
Anderson's famous theory of Imagined Communities. Anderson defined the
nation as an "imagined political community" - one that is conceived as
inherently limited and sovereign, drawing boundaries around who belongs
and who does not.
To explain how these vast, diverse populations actually feel a sense of
belonging, Anderson coined the brilliant term "unisonance." Unisonance
describes the profound physical and emotional experience of people
singing the exact same words to the exact same tune at the exact same
time. When millions of strangers across a nation-space sing a national
anthem, the shared vibration of that abstract sound temporarily erases
the massive divides of class, region, religion, and language. It is
through this real-time, shared vocalization that an imagined solidarity
is forged.
However, the Indian context operates on an even deeper level. In the
1980s, the renowned historian Partha Chatterjee critiqued Anderson's
political theory by demonstrating that in the anti-colonial
world - especially in India - national songs are not merely the
administrative tools of modern politics. Instead, they are deeply
inscribed in the spiritual memory and cultural unconscious of the
nation. For Chatterjee, these aesthetic forms belong to an "inner
domain," an autonomous space where cultural and spiritual identity
remains fiercely independent of the state.
This is where TMK's critique begins to unravel. In his eagerness to
frame Indian nationalism as an elitist, Sanskritized structure, TMK
unwittingly dismantles the anti-colonial frameworks forged by both
Chatterjee and Kapila Vatsyayan.
TMK proposes a radical shift: he suggests that regional communities
should sing their own translated words over Tagore's original tune. Yet,
by doing so, he destroys the very essence of unisonance. When people
are no longer sharing the exact same words and syllables, the vital
mechanisms of flow, simultaneity, and collective cultural memory
fracture all at once. A shared tune with divided words does not
democratize the anthem; it simply breaks the spell that gathers the
individual into the national "we."
TMK and the misapplication of Sanskritization
TMK's second analytical reduction follows directly from his first. Once
the national anthem is framed solely as an artifact of linguistic
hegemony and caste politics, its Sanskritized register is treated as an
ideological defect that must be corrected through replacement.
This framing allows TMK to import M. N. Srinivas's concept of
Sanskritization - wrenching it from its empirical, fieldwork-based origins
in sociological caste mobility and deploying it instead as a sweeping
critique of public culture. Under this expanded usage, any Sanskritic or
Sanskritized form is immediately condemned as inherently exclusionary.
In the process, a precise sociological concept is flattened into a blunt
ideological tool.
TMK's reliance on this framework in a Kapila Vatsyayan memorial lecture
is deeply ironic. Kapilaji spent her career resisting the reductive
application of sociology to cultural history and artistic practice. I
experienced her resistance firsthand when she served as my external
doctoral advisor in the 1990s; she repeatedly insisted that sociological
inquiry must remain grounded in deep textual, aesthetic, and
performance analysis.
Vatsyayan's legacy - and her institutional work at the Indira Gandhi
National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) - stands as testimony to a vision of
Indian culture that is fundamentally plural, multilingual, and
palimpsestic. She saw Indian art not as a rigid linguistic hierarchy
moving inexorably toward Brahminical hegemony, but as a dynamic
ecosystem. For Vatsyayan, "unity in diversity" was not a rhetorical
slogan; it was the living ontology of Indian performing arts, captured
in her aphorism of the "One in the Many" (ekam anekam).
TMK's lecture is troubling because it displaces Vatsyayan's plural,
embodied vision with an ill-fitted theory of nationalism,
Sanskritization, and regionalism. Kapilaji would not merely have
contested TMK's region-versus-nation premise; she would have asked him
to attend more carefully to what happens when any text is actually sung:
how word dissolves into sound, sound into rhythm, rhythm into emotion
(bhava), and feeling into collectivity.
To sing is not merely to assert the sovereign self; it is to enter the
felt life of the other within the "I," and to discover, however briefly,
the national "we."
References and Further Reading
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. Revised edition. London: Verso, 2006.
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Srinivas, M. N. Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
India International Centre. "4th Kapila Vatsyayan Memorial Lecture 2026: I Sing, Therefore I Am."
Dr Avanthi Meduri is Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, and
Former Convener, South Asian Dance Studies, University of Roehampton,
London; Art and Education Consultant, Bangalore.
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