Language and the Making of Modern India

"In the National Anthem, India is portrayed as a collection of images, some geographical and some linguistic. Written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1911, this poem staked out linguistic regions long before they were officially formed. By juxtaposing language based regions like Punjab, Gujarat, Maratha, Utkala and Banga with geographical features of the Indian landscape such as the mountains of Vindhyas and Himalayas, the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and the Indian Ocean, the anthem endows these linguistic regions with a naturalness that can be belied by an attention to the history of how these regions came to be formed in modern India. Just as mountains, rivers and oceans were seen as primeval features of the national landscape, so too were the territorial domains of these languages"--