Smart Governance
Finishing Touch
UNDERSTANDING
JANA, GANA, MANA
Author
AJ Phillp This is an extract from a detailed write up titled National Anthem: The Supreme Folly by Senior Journalist Mr AJ Philip and was originally published in Indian Currents
In my childhood, we stayed close to a cinema theatre. Whenever we had a young guest, it was an occasion for all of us to go to the theatre. Those days the national anthem would be played when the film was over. Few people would stand and wait till the song was over. What I thought was that the insistence on playing Tagore ' s famous poetic rendering after every show was tantamount to ridiculing the anthem. The practice continued till I grew into adulthood.
I do not know how or when realisation dawned on the government that playing the anthem in cinema halls did not foster patriotism. The practice was done away with.
For once the film-goers could return from the theatre without any feeling of guilt. The mindset of a person who goes to a film theatre is not the same as that of a school student, who knows that when the anthem is sung at the end of the classes, he / she should stand in attention.
I was under the impression that the national anthem was no longer played in theatres until I read about an incident where a physically challenged person was kicked and slapped by some patriotic youths when he could not stand up while the anthem was played.
What a cruelty, I thought!
Patriots are not thinkers. They are known to act before they think. On November 30, the Supreme Court issued an order which made it mandatory for every film theatre in the country to play Jan Gana Mana before the screening of the film. Justice Dipak Mishra who wrote the judgement was thoughtful. He did not want the ugly spectacle of people entering the hall while the anthem was being played.
In his judgement, he has clearly stipulated that all the doors of the theatre should be closed and no one should be allowed to get inside the hall once the anthem began. The order also says clearly that the people should stand for the whole duration of the song. By the way, Justice Mishra will, sooner than later, become the Chief Justice of India.
I have absolutely no idea which law the Supreme Court wants to enforce when it orders compulsory playing of the national anthem. By the way, Jana Gana Mana is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful anthems of the world, though vast swathes of India like the Northeast are not mentioned in the song. It also has the dubious distinction of being the most ill-understood anthems.
At least 99 per cent of the people in India do not know the meaning of Jana Gana Mana, though a large number of them would be able to recite it correctly. The Netherlands had faced such a problem. It had an anthem which the people could not understand as it was written in the old English. So what they did was to change it into a simpler anthem which everybody understood.
Since we believe in chanting mantras without understanding their meaning, it is perfectly okay for Indians to recite Jana Gana Mana without understanding what it was all about. That Tagore had written it to praise the British Crown is an inconvenient part of history which we would like to forget rather than remember.
There is no law which makes it mandatory for the citizen to sing the anthem. Singing Jana Gana Mana is not a sign of patriotism. If the court is convinced about the justifiability of its order, it should make it applicable to all places where people converge, be they a bar or a dancing arena or a drama theatre or a gambling den.
Marriages are held in churches or temples or in courts but they are always consummated in the bedroom. As the story goes, a patriotic youth had a doubt whether the national anthem should be sung before the sacred act in the bedroom or after it. The story I heard left that question to the imagination of the listeners.
Courtesy: Indian Currents
November 2016 50 www. smartgovernance. in