Surinder

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Sharmila Tagore says the complete Vande Mataram is difficult for a some to sing - because of religious reasons.

There is a rather extraordinary irony here for someone carrying the Tagore name.

Go back to 1896.

Rabindranath Tagore himself sang Vande Mataram at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress, giving the song one of its earliest great national platforms.

Who presided over that Congress session?

Rahimtulla M. Sayani, a Muslim.

Sayani used that very presidential address to urge Muslims to join the national movement and spoke of welding India’s communities into “one nationality.”

Then came Lord Curzon’s Partition of Bengal in 1905.

On 7 August 1905, thousands of students from all communities marched towards Calcutta Town Hall crying Vande Mataram. The Government of India’s own historical account records this explicitly.

When the partition took effect on 16 October 1905, Rabindranath Tagore turned Raksha Bandhan into a public act of Bengali unity. Hindus and Muslims tied rakhis to one another while Tagore’s songs and Vande Mataram filled the anti-partition movement. Contemporary scholarship records Muslim Swadeshi figures including Nawab Abdur Sobhan Chaudhuri, Khwaja Atikulla, Khan Bahadur Mohammed Yusuf, Chaudhuri Ghulam Ali Moula and Syed Motahar Husain participating in the movement in different capacities.

And then comes the evidence that should end the claim that Muslims were somehow historically incapable of raising Vande Mataram.

Barisal, 20 May 1906.

The Bengalee, dated 23 May 1906, reported:

“An unprecedented procession of Hindus and Muslims singing national songs and crying Bande Mataram and Allah-o-Akbar…”

It further recorded that both Hindus and Muslims carried Bande Mataram flags.

Read that again.

Muslims were marching with Vande Mataram flags and shouting Vande Mataram and Allah-o-Akbar together.

They apparently understood something in 1906 that their descendants today struggle to understand. Love for the motherland did not require them to stop believing in Allah. Vande Mataram had become the cry of resistance to British rule.

The politics hardened later.

By 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru himself acknowledged that much of the agitation against Vande Mataram was being “manufactured…by the communalists”. Congress restricted its national use to the first two stanzas.

By 1 March 1938, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was publicly declaring that Muslims rejected even an “expurgated edition” of Vande Mataram. Two years later came the Lahore Resolution of 23 March 1940, the decisive political milestone on the road to Pakistan.

That chronology matters.

1896: A Muslim Congress president sits on the stage as Tagore sings Vande Mataram.

1905: Students of all communities raise Vande Mataram against Curzon.

1906: Hindus and Muslims march through Barisal carrying Vande Mataram flags together.

1938: Jinnah rejects even the shortened national version.

1940: The Muslim League adopts the Lahore Resolution.

History does not allow us to lazily project the communal politics of the late 1930s backwards and pretend that Vande Mataram had always been unacceptable to Muslims.

It hadn’t.

And perhaps that is the deepest irony of hearing this argument today from within the extended Tagore family.

Rabindranath Tagore’s generation tried to build a Bengal where religious identity did not come in conflict with national belonging. Curzon wanted Bengal divided. Tagore answered him by tying people together.

More than a century later, person from same family who had to convert to get married. reducing the same national inheritance once again to “Can my religion permit me to say this?” should make us examine where that road led the last time.

History has already supplied the data.

We should have the wisdom to understand the pattern, apply it to today and project where it is leading.

[Surinder @Surindermohango]

@gargiuvacha Very Good attempt by a young boy

[Surinder @Surindermohango]

.@PMOIndia

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

1/

A Class 12 boy from Patiala, Punjab has just won Gold for Bharat at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2026.

Before that, he had already won medals for India in some of the toughest international coding competitions in the world.

His name is Samik Goyal.
Just 18 years old.

Why are we not talking about him? 🇮🇳

🧵

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

1/

A Class 12 boy from Patiala, Punjab has just won Gold for Bharat at the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence 2026.

Before that, he had already won medals for India in some of the toughest international coding competitions in the world.

His name is Samik Goyal.
Just 18 years old.

Why are we not talking about him? 🇮🇳

🧵

[Surinder @Surindermohango]

@EllipsoidCore @gargiuvacha 😂

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Happy Nagapanchami! 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

A Tale of Two Walks

Over the last few weeks, we have seen two very different groups of young Indians walking with a sankalpa.

Thousands walked from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament. Around the same time, lakhs of Kanwariyas were walking towards Shiva, and some were even running the Dak Kanwar, carrying Gangā jal for Jalabhishek. Around this season, we also see the Wari, where lakhs of Warkaris walk towards Pandharpur chanting the name of Vitthal.

All these journeys inconvenience the body. They affect traffic and disrupt normal life around them. More importantly, all of them show us the enormous power of young people coming together around a shared purpose.

The real difference is not that one group walked in protest while another walked in devotion. The real difference is what their collective energy was ultimately being used to create.

The march towards Parliament began with a genuine issue. Students wanted justice over examination irregularities, and they had every right to demand answers and accountability. Protest is not wrong. In fact, standing up for someone else’s right to a fair examination can itself come from responsibility towards the people around you.

The problem was what the movement eventually became.

Somewhere along the way, the students for whom this supposedly began seemed to get lost. Other political and ideological forces joined the mobilisation. We saw abusive language, attacks on Hindu Gods, attacks on Bharat, anger and aggression becoming increasingly central to the movement. What began as a demand for justice increasingly looked like an attempt to create unrest and force a democratically elected government into surrender.

This becomes even more difficult to understand because the Education Minister had already acknowledged the problems and several corrective measures had been initiated much before the march to Parliament. Yet the demand for his resignation became non-negotiable.

If the sankalpa was really justice for students, then students suffering because of examination and recruitment failures elsewhere, including Jharkhand, should have generated the same sustained mobilisation. Justice cannot become important only when a particular government can be targeted through it.

This is where the comparison with the Kanwariya becomes interesting.

He too has a sankalpa. He too leaves home and puts his body through discomfort. He walks for kilometres, sometimes barefoot, and in the Dak Kanwar he may even run while his group carries the Gangā jal continuously towards its destination.

But he is not walking to make someone else surrender. He is walking to learn something of surrender himself.

You do not merely say that something is sacred to you. You undertake something with your body for it.

The Gangā jal that finally reaches the Shiva linga has cost the pilgrim time, comfort, effort and discipline. That cost is precisely what turns the water into his or her offering.

This is the deeper purpose of pilgrimage. A pilgrimage is not meant to be a conquest. You do not undertake it to prove that you are greater than someone else. You deliberately accept difficulty so that something within you can become smaller. Your comfort becomes less important. Your compulsions become less important. For a little while, something that you consider sacred becomes more important than you.

That is why the contrast between the two sankalpas is worth thinking about.

One kind of collective energy can become increasingly focused on making somebody else surrender. The other is consciously directed towards surrendering something within oneself.

One can fill public discourse with anger, abuse and Vāk-viṣa. The other attempts to bring some sweetness of devotion into one’s life.

The consequences of both extend far beyond the walk itself because what we repeatedly think, speak and do eventually shapes the kind of human beings we become.

[Aparna 🇮🇳 @apparrnnaa]

@gargivach Brilliant Gargi!!
Please tag @AudreyTruschke. Coz am blocked

[Surinder @Surindermohango]

@GymBr_o In

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

A people who forget the past, loses the sense of who we are today.
That is a sure shot recipe to ruin our future.

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Buildings burning, bridges collapsing, trains crashing.

It’s horrible. So many lives lost.

What’s wrong with Indian Infrastructure?

Ohh wait…

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Food tastes even better when cooked in the right vessel.

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Brilliant!!!

Same logic can be applied for our culture.

It got distorted, yes, but devote time to clean it and call out ones who are dirtying it, instead of uprooting the entire system.
Don’t throw the baby with the dirty bath water!

[Anand #IndianfromSouth @Bharatiyan108]

I don't know who this is! But she explains with compelling facts, why we should vote for Rahul Gandhi!

Don't miss this guys! It will open your eyes 🙏
#RahulGandhi

[Surinder @Surindermohango]

@Bharatiyan108 😂

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

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These observances may seem mythic or ritualistic, yet every symbol — from the oil bath to the lighting of torches — mirrors a deep Yogic and Dharmic truth.

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

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[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

Glyphosate has so many health and environmental risks!
Why are we still allowing it to sell India?

We need to speak up - save our soil and our children from this evil!

[Gargi #Decolonization 🇮🇳 @gargiuvacha]

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