Their inefficiency was not surprising (The Sunday Times once ascribed the authorship of Bande Mataram to Tagore and described Jana Gana Mana as a Hindi song!) On this occasion the Anglo-Indian press - led by The Englishman - almost uniformly reported that a Tagore song had been sung to commemorate George V's visit to India. The confusion about the song was stirred up by the ineptness of the pro-British Anglo-Indian press. Still, the details are worth pursuing, and the virtue of Datta's article is that he has access to the original coverage of the event in the English-language press of the day: But I suppose it's also possible to say that the song, written to celebrate the visit of the English king, loses some autonomy through that history. Tagore was famously ambivalent about the commission, and wrote the song as he did as an act - he thought - of subversion. The Hindu right has been casting aspersions on it recently (Datta cites Sadhvi Rithambara's "hate cassette" as well as websites like The reason: it was composed by Tagore on the occasion of King George V's visit to the Indian National Congress in 1911. The current anthem is Rabindranath Tagore's "Jana Gana Mana." (See the entry at Wikipedia for the text and translation of the song) A really informative piece by Pradip Kumar Datta has just been posted on SACW, on the history of India's national anthem.
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