In 1937, he wrote to Congress president Subhash Chandra Bose, a fellow Bengali, protesting against a proposal to declare ‘Vande Mataram’ as India’s national anthem: ‘The core of [V]ande Mataram is a hymn to goddess Durga: this is so plain that there can be no debate about it...no Mussulman can be expected patriotically to worship the ten-handed deity as “Swadesh”…. The novel Ananda Math is a work of literature, and so the song is appropriate in it. But parliament is a place of union for all religious groups, and there the song cannot be appropriate.’233 This was why the Congress took the
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