Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Set against the Bengal famine of 1770 and the Sannyasi rebellion, the novel follows Mahendra and his wife Kalyani, separated as they flee starvation in their village. Mahendra is brought to the Anandamath, a forest monastery, where he meets the ascetic Satyananda and the santans — children of the Mother — who have renounced family life to fight the corrupt rule of the Nawab's officials and the East India Company's agents. Kalyani is sheltered there too. Mahendra is initiated, and the santans win a battle against the Company's forces. At the end, however, a mysterious physician tells Satyananda that the rebellion must stop: British rule is necessary for the time being, because the knowledge the country needs will come through the English. The novel contains the song Vande Mataram, sung as a hymn to the motherland.

Anandamath is the founding text of a specifically Hindu nationalist imagination — the nation figured as mother and as goddess, the fighter as renunciate, the country's condition as a fall from which she must be restored — and Vande Mataram, extracted from it, became the anthem of the anti-colonial movement, sung at Congress sessions from 1896 and eventually adopted as India's national song. The novel's ending, endorsing British rule as temporarily necessary, sits in obvious tension with that afterlife, and readings divide over whether it is genuine conviction, a concession to a colonial magistrate's professional position, or irony. The identification of nation with Hindu deity has also made the book central to arguments about the exclusions built into Indian nationalism, since the song's Hindu imagery has long been objected to by Muslim political leaders.