Vande Mataram in Arabic: Indian expat gives UAE twist to India's 150-year-old national song

Dubai: As India marks 150 years of Vande Mataram, UAE-based Indian expat singer Suchetha Satish has given the national song a distinctly cross-border spin, taking the composition through seven Indian languages before closing with a verse in Arabic.

The Guinness World Record holder for most languages sung in a concert, Suchetha, says the project, "Vande Mataram Beyond Borders", grew out of an invitation from the Indian People Forum.

The community group of Indian expats in the UAE asked her to create a special rendition of the song for the song's 150th anniversary.

The release came even before a fresh political row in India last week reignited a decades-old debate over the song's later verses and their religious imagery, even as the government leads a year-long commemoration of its 150th anniversary, with the full version sung at official flag-hoisting ceremonies marking India's 80th Independence Day, including at Indian missions in the UAE on August 15.

However, Suchetha, a Dubai-based university student hailing from the south Indian state of Kerala, says she wanted to do something that reflected both the diversity of India's languages and the idea that music doesn't really recognise borders while paying tribute to the patriotic song.

"That thinking is what pushed me to look beyond Indian languages altogether and bring in Arabic, the mother tongue of our second home, for the first time," she told Gulf News.

For the Arabic verse, Suchetha turned to veteran Emirati poet Dr Shihab Ghanem, whose contribution ended up giving the project its title.

"Once Dr Ghanem's verse came in, the whole idea of 'beyond borders' felt real rather than just a title," she says.

Suchetha's collaboration with Dr Shihab Ghanem goes back several years and has centred on bringing Indian music and Arabic language together.

Their association began in 2019, when Suchetha joined composer Monty Sharma on "Fifty Glorious Years", an Arabic tribute to His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr Ghanem translated one of Suchetha's awareness songs into Arabic.

In 2022, he translated three Rabindranath Tagore songs into Arabic for Suchetha's "Tagore Beyond Horizon" project, with Suchetha providing the Arabic vocals.

The collaboration has since extended to other India-UAE musical projects, including the ones for the UAE National Day.

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, a 19th-century Bengali novelist regarded as a pioneer of modern Indian literature, composed Vande Mataram in 1875 and later wove it into his novel "Anandamath", where it grew into one of the freedom movement's most enduring anthems.

Speaking about the project that translated the iconic song, Suchetha said: "Translating Vande Mataram was never just about swapping words from one language to another. You have to hold on to the meaning, the emotion, the patriotic pulse of the original, and still make it sit naturally inside the melody."

While she had the option to use artificial intelligence, Suchetha decided to rope in a small team of lyricists for the language shifts, retaining the original Bengali and Sanskrit verses by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee.

Devinder Kaur and Simran Sabharwal wrote the Punjabi lines, Vilas Bakshi handled Gujarati, Kriss Venugopal wrote the Tamil portion and Amrit Dey took on Assamese.

Suchetha's mother, Sumitha Ayilliath, coordinated the whole production and wrote the Malayalam lyrics herself.

The visuals were shot in Kochi Kerala by Kavya Film Company, with Nelson Peter handling music, mixing and mastering from the UAE.

The song was formally released in Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh by Anand Prakash Chouksey, founder and chairman of Macro Vision Academy.

Suchetha followed it up with an Independence Day concert at the academy that drew around 3,300 people, most of them students.

"Seeing that many people in one place for a song like this, it stays with you," she says.

Internationally recognised for her extraordinary ability to sing in more than 155 languages, Suchetha has consistently sought to connect people from different countries, languages and cultures through her music.

Along with the release of Vande Mataram, Suchetha has had an eventful and musically exciting few weeks.

She has also released "Mitsey", a song in the Bhutanese language that she says "sits with the happiness and the struggles of life, and the idea that you have to accept both."

She also sang Bollywood track "Hayati", produced under the DOS Music banner, alongside Sikandar Maan. That song has already crossed 25 million views in about a month.

Suchetha has since travelled to Ladakh, where she performed at the "Voices Against Drugs" charity concert on August 20, an event built around using music to raise awareness of drug abuse among young people.

"Whether it's a 150-year-old song or a concert against drug abuse, the thread is the same for me: using music to say something that actually matters to people," she says.