Vande Mataram - National song of India

Vande Mataram (Bengali script: বন্দে মাতরম্‌; Devanagari: वन्दे मातरम्; Vande Mātaram"I bow to thee, Mother") is a poem in the 1882 novel Anandamatha by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. It is written in a mixture of Bengali and Sanskrit.It is a hymn to the goddessDurga, identified as the national personification of India. It came to be considered the "National Song of India",and it played a part in the Indian independence movement, first sung in a political context by Rabindranath Tagore at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress.In 1950, its first two verses were given the official status of "national song" of the Republic of India, distinct from the national anthem of India Jana Gana Mana. Many Muslim organizations in India have declared fatwas against singing Vande Mataram, due to the song giving a notion of worshipping Mother India, which they consider to be shirk (idolatry).

A commonly cited English language translation of the poem, Mother, I bow to thee!, is due to Sri Aurobindo (1909). The poem has been set to a large number of tunes. The oldest surviving audio recordings date to 1907, and there have been more than a hundred different versions recorded throughout the 20th century. In 2002, BBC World Service conducted an international poll to choose ten most famous songs of all time. Around 7000 songs were selected from all over the world. Vande Mataram, in a version by A. R. Rahman, was ranked second