– Mita Mukherjee

Singing of state anthem “Banglar Mati Banglar Jol” has been made mandatory for all schools in Bengal affiliated with the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education from Friday.

The West Bengal Board of Secondary Education that conducts the Madhyamik (Class X board) exams, on Thursday issued an order to all aided and sponsored schools under the board asking the heads to include singing of the state anthem mandatorily in the morning assembly for Classes IV to X.

The order states: “The undersigned… is directed to inform you to take necessary action for regularly singing the state song ‘Banglar Mati Banglar Jol’ in the morning assembly mandatorily”.

The song was composed by Rabindranath Tagore in 1905 to protest against the partition of the then-undivided Bengal by Lord Curzon which also became an anthem for the anti-partition movement.

The inclusion of singing of the song in the school assembly is significant as the decision comes at a time when chief minister Mamata Banerjee had been trying to vehemently oppose remarks made by the BJP about Bengali-speaking people, branding them Bangladeshis. Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress has been strongly against the rollout of Special Intensive Revision (SIR) as it contends that it is just a means to disenfranchise their supporters.  

The state song will have to be sung across schools irrespective of their medium, board officials said.

Education minister Bratya Basu posted on X on Thursday evening that the decision was taken following the approval of the chief minister. “We firmly believe this will be an alert and active catalyst for the social and communal unity in our state,” he wrote.

On September 7, 2023, the Bengal Assembly passed a resolution declaring Poila Baisakh as Bangla Diwas (Bengal Day) and Banglar Mati Banglar Jol as the state anthem.

Heads of several schools said the order came into effect from Friday itself and students were asked to sing the song in today’s morning assembly. But some schools had problems because students did not know the lyrics.

“Since the order comes into effect from today we had to include the song in today’s morning assembly. Most of our students said they didn’t know the words of the song. So we played the song through a microphone. We asked students to learn the words by heart,” said Soumen Pal, headmaster of Udaypur Haradayal Nag Adarsha Vidyalaya, a state-aided school in North 24 Parganas.

Schools said students also sang “Vande Mataram” on Friday to mark the 150th anniversary of the patriotic song.

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