"A most telling instance in point is the one relating to Vande Mataram. That celebrated song first appeared in the historical novel Ananda Math of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. It was a hymn of love of motherland sublimated into an ecstatic devotion to the Divine Mother-Bharat. In that exalted vision was manifest the trinity of Saraswati (the goddess of knowledge and cuiture), Lakshmi (the goddess of wealth and beauty) and Durga (the goddess of strength and energy). When Bengal was partitioned in 1905, Vande Mataram became the battlesong of the entire nation. Congress too, thereafter, adopted it as the national anthem and it was Rabindranath Tagore who sang it for the first time in the Congress session. To the British imperialist the very utterance of that simple expression Vande Mataram became the proverbial red rag to the bull. The Lt. Governor of East Bengal had ordained that no one should utter that word ; it was a ‘crime’. Thousands of young men had mocked that order and braved the British lathis and boots in the streets of Barisal by their thunderous roar of Vande Mataram. They had shed their blood and sanctfied that word into a potent and holy Rashtra-Mantra. It soon became the joyful and inspiring chant playing on the lips of the literate as well as the illiterate, the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, the old and the young—in fact of one and all-men, women and children. Hundreds of revolutionary heroes ascended the gallows with that final obeisance to the Mother. Gandhiji would often extol the grandeur of that song. At Comilla, in 1927, he said that the song held up before one’s mind the picture of the whole of Bharat-one and indivisible. Those two simple words had, indeed, wrought a miracle which even thousands of speeches and articles could not have achieved. It had become the cry of the awakened and resurgent national soul."