Digital District Repository Detail

Vande Mataram Bhawan (House of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay)

The Vande Mataram Bhawan is the birthplace of the National Song of India. The house concerned is situated in the town of Chinsurah, on a bank of the river Hooghly. Chinsurah is on the opposite bank of the town of Naihati where the novelist Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, who penned ‘Vande Mataram’, was born and brought up. He lived in this house in Chinsurah for five years while working as a deputy collector in the district.

Historical evidence says Bankim Chandra moved to this place in 1876. By that time, he had already penned the first two stanzas of ‘Vande Mataram’, which is treated as India’s national song. The first two stanzas appeared separately in Banga Darshan journal, which Bankim himself edited.

Bankim joined as a deputy magistrate and deputy collector in Hooghly district in March 1876 and relocated to this residence in Chinsurah after a few months. This residence has found references in several memoirs of Bankim’s contemporary intellectuals, such as Haraprasad Shastri and Chandra Nath Basu. According to Bankim’s biography by Shrish Chandra Chattopadhyay, the former in a July 1880 letter to Nabin Chandra Sen had written that it was while residing at this Chinsurah home that he wrote the novel Ananda Math, of which the whole five-stanza song became part. Ananda Math was published as a book in 1882, a year after Bankim left the Chinsurah house.