Always the Anthem: A new generation’s symbolic journey into the past
WHAT DOES INDEPENDENCE MEAN to a generation that has never known its absence? As a parent of school-going children, I often wondered what all those hallmark days of the Indian republic we celebrate signified to them.
Our parents understood the hard-won freedom of our nation and Partition because they’d been handed its wounds directly. They had grown up on stories of oppression by the British and later, the rupture of our nation by our grandparents who had lived to tell them. The carnage, the displacement—those who had experienced it were still raw from it. But freedom and the events surrounding it, meant something to them. I sensed it from how their voices changed while talking about the pain of a country divided.
But that wound wasn’t the only thing our parents inherited. Many of them went on to work in institutions that had been built by the British; the ink hadn’t dried on the files, so to speak, yet. The flavour of colonial rule still lingered in them. My father served in an army the British had built, and we lived out our childhoods in colonial bungalows, dining in colonial messes, where the pomp and ceremony that the British had introduced was preserved faithfully. It wasn’t until our understanding grew of how they had subjugated and pillaged us that indignation began to take form in our hearts.
Stories of Partition we heard from our grandparents filled us with horror.
I was barely eleven years old when Beeji, our neighbour’s grandmother, told us how she was locked in a room along with the women of her family while the men outside were shot dead. My own nani spoke of the long journey to Punjab in India from across the border. There were starving children, some of whom died of thirst along the way, others kept alive on their own urine fed to them by their desperate mothers. I heard these stories with disbelief, sadness and a little disgust.
Active participation was mandatory on Independence Day and Republic Day at our schools. We had to show up for flag hoisting in sporty whites and sing patriotic songs for a supposed VIP who later hoisted the flag. I felt an emotion for India while singing the national anthem. I don’t know what to call what I felt singing it at thirteen—not patriotism exactly, I was too young for that word to mean anything—but something stirred, an inherited current I couldn’t yet name.
We read about Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre through the Amar Chitra Kathas, which was our Netflix back then. My father used to read us a chapter from Nehru’s The Discovery of India every weekend when I was in my early teens. “You have to know your country and to truly understand it, you have to know its past,” he would say. For someone so young, those were the dullest hours of my week, but there was no option to unsubscribe and so, passively, I heard about the British and our freedom struggle.
There was also Shyam Benegal’s Bharat Ek Khoj, based on the book, that I watched years later along with Govind Nihalani’s Tamas. The miniseries showed how the wound was inflicted— the manufactured hatred and rioting that tore through Punjab in the weeks before Partition, not the fracture itself. As an adult, it was Manto’s short stories, and in particular ‘Toba Tek Singh’, that made me revisit Partition, this time understanding that the loss had not belonged to one side alone. Piyush Pandey’s ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’ was a wonderful composition that played on Doordarshan celebrating the idea of India through its many languages and cultures.
BUT GEN Z HAS had none of that. What they have read at school is information received dryly as part of the syllabus. August 15 is merely a national holiday to them; their schools didn’t make attendance compulsory after the primary years for the flag-hoisting ceremony. The distance can only grow from that.
And it isn’t just my children. Last year we were in the mountains of Uttarakhand on Independence Day, and my mother, a senior citizen, was asked to hoist the flag at the resort we were staying in. The children at the resort watched it unfurl with little visible emotion and went back to enjoy their breakfast.By contrast, members of my parents’ generation in my family, still make it a point to attend flag hoisting ceremonies at their clubs every Independence Day.
None of this is an indictment of the younger generation. To many teenagers and twenty-somethings I’ve interacted with, Independence Day is simply the commemoration of a historic day they feel little or no connection to. Partition, too, is just history. They attach no sentiment to it.
I made my daughters watch Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi during the Covid pandemic. The scene where a young MK Gandhi is thrown out of the train angered them. The injustices of the British outraged them. I was glad to see this reaction. It told me they felt for their country, that the nation’s old wounds still had the power to move them.
The anthem, however, was a different matter. I still feel that old current sometimes when I hear ‘Jana Gana Mana’ played before a film. I assumed the younger generation did not share my feelings. The thought of jawans defending our country along the LOC, losing their lives in combat, guarding the nation from Siachen, still catches somewhere in my chest.
When you have known freedom from birth, when you have never known what it is like to be enslaved by another race, when Bhagat Singh sounds like a man who threw away his life on an impulse after getting swept along in the struggle for freedom, when you have not grown up hearing the speeches from the Red Fort, nor spent January 26 glued to the TV for the parade of colourful tableaus, then the national anthem is a song you sing at school and a minor inconvenience you have to stand up for before a film in theatres.
But then something happened recently that surprised me. At the recent Jantar Mantar protests, as the police advanced with lathis, many of the young protesters began singing ‘Jana Gana Mana ‘.
My assumption that the anthem had become a largely ceremonial ritual for them was misplaced. Reports suggested the protesters sang it because the police, bound by protocol, were expected to stand at attention while it was being sung. In that extraordinary moment, the anthem became more than a patriotic song. It became a shield and an anthem of unity.
Watching those videos made me realise I had mistaken distance for indifference. From the outside, Gen Z often appears preoccupied with building individual lives and pursuing personal ambitions. I had assumed the national anthem belonged to another era for them, something they stood through politely for and thought little about afterwards. I never imagined they would invoke it in a public arena during a protest, stand at attention, and sing it with such conviction. That surprised me more than the protest itself.
We also saw scenes of communal harmony, people of all faiths coming together to stand for their cause, feeding each other, looking out for one another. It suggested that the idea of one nation, united across cultures and faiths, came naturally to them.
Perhaps every generation inherits the same symbols but gives them new work to do and attaches different meanings to them. My parents heard the anthem as the promise of a new nation. My generation treated it a proud inheritance, still alive with emotions passed down by our parents. This generation has its own relationship with the anthem. I simply hadn’t recognised it until I saw them stand and sing it.