Episode 155 - The Story Of Our National Anthem - One Man, One Night, One Song That Outlived an Empire

Every single school morning, millions of kids across India stand up and sing the same fifty-two seconds of music without ever really asking where it came from. Today on Kidacity, I'm going all the way back to a winter night in Calcutta in December 1911, when a poet named Rabindranath Tagore first heard his own song performed in public — and into the controversy that followed almost immediately, when people accused him of writing it for a king instead of for his country. I found his own written defense of the song, word for word, and I'm reading it to you. Then I'm fast-forwarding almost forty years, to the actual Constituent Assembly vote that made this song India's official national anthem, and asking why we still don't talk about the fact that it was written in a language built to be understood everywhere, on purpose. Counting down to Independence Day, August 15th, on Kidacity — where kids learn, share, and grow together.Instagram: @samarthchittaTwitter: @samarthchittaEmail: [email protected]