One Man, Two Anthems, Two Countries

Rabindranath Tagore: poet of two nations

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited his collection “Gitanjali” and his “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse.” But Tagore’s literary legacy extends far beyond poetry collections. He is the only person in history to have written the national anthems of two sovereign states.

India’s “Jana Gana Mana” (“Thou Art the Ruler of the Minds of All People”) was composed by Tagore in Bengali script and first performed on December 27, 1911, at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. It was formally adopted as India’s national anthem on January 24, 1950, two days before the republic was officially inaugurated. The anthem runs five stanzas, though only the first stanza (52 seconds when sung at the prescribed tempo) serves as the official anthem.

Bangladesh’s “Amar Shonar Bangla” (“My Golden Bengal”) was written earlier, in 1905, during the first partition of Bengal by the British colonial government. Lord Curzon’s decision to split Bengal along religious lines (a Muslim-majority east and a Hindu-majority west) provoked massive protests. Tagore composed “Amar Shonar Bangla” as a song of Bengali identity and resistance. Sixty-six years later, in 1971, when East Pakistan fought a war of independence to become Bangladesh, the new nation adopted Tagore’s song as its anthem.

One man. Two anthems. Two countries with a combined population, as of 2025, exceeding 1.58 billion people.

The partition that created two anthems from one pen

To understand how a single poet’s work became the soundtrack of two nations, you need to understand Bengal. Before the colonial and post-colonial partitions carved it into pieces, Bengal was one of the most culturally productive regions in South Asia. Its language, Bengali (or Bangla), is the seventh most spoken language in the world, with roughly 230 million native speakers. Tagore wrote in Bengali. He thought in Bengali. His identity was rooted in a Bengal that, during his lifetime, had not yet been permanently divided.

The 1905 partition was reversed in 1911, but the damage was done. Bengali nationalism had been activated. When the British left the subcontinent in 1947, the second partition split Bengal again: West Bengal went to India, East Bengal went to Pakistan (as East Pakistan). This time, the division stuck.

East Pakistan and West Pakistan shared a religion (Islam) but almost nothing else. West Pakistan’s ruling elite spoke Urdu and Punjabi. East Pakistan’s population spoke Bengali. The language movement of 1952, in which Pakistani police killed student protesters demanding Bengali as an official language, became a foundational trauma for Bangladeshi nationalism. February 21, the anniversary of the killings, is now observed globally as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO.

When Bangladesh declared independence on March 26, 1971, and won its liberation war by December of that year, the new state needed symbols that expressed a specifically Bengali (not Pakistani, not Indian) identity. Tagore’s “Amar Shonar Bangla” was the obvious choice. It celebrated the land, the rivers, and the people of Bengal without reference to any particular religion or political ideology.

The Sri Lanka connection

Tagore’s influence extends to a third national anthem, though less directly. Sri Lanka’s “Sri Lanka Matha” (“Mother Sri Lanka”) was written by Ananda Samarakoon, a student of Tagore at the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan. Samarakoon studied music under Tagore’s direct supervision in the 1930s. While Tagore did not write the lyrics or compose the melody of the Sri Lankan anthem, his musical and philosophical influence on Samarakoon is well documented. Some musicologists have identified melodic parallels between “Sri Lanka Matha” and Tagore’s compositional style, though the claim remains debated.

Still, the fact that one man’s creative orbit touched three national anthems across South Asia is extraordinary. No other individual in modern history has had a comparable impact on the official musical identities of sovereign states.

Joseph Haydn: from Emperor’s hymn to two republics

On February 12, 1797, the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn premiered “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (“God Save Emperor Francis”) at the Burgtheater in Vienna. It was his birthday; he was 65 years old. The piece was commissioned as a patriotic anthem for the Habsburg Empire, modeled on the British “God Save the King,” which Haydn had heard and admired during his visits to London in the 1790s.

The melody was a masterpiece of simplicity. Four phrases, stepwise motion, a range of just over an octave. It was singable by anyone, memorable after a single hearing, and dignified enough for state occasions. Haydn himself was so fond of it that he used the melody as the basis for the second movement of his String Quartet in C major, Op. 76 No. 3, now universally known as the “Emperor Quartet.”

For the Habsburg Empire, the hymn served as an unofficial anthem from 1797 until the empire’s collapse in 1918. But the melody’s journey was just beginning.

Germany claims the tune

In 1841, the German poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote new lyrics to Haydn’s melody while vacationing on the island of Heligoland. His poem, “Das Lied der Deutschen” (“The Song of the Germans”), began with the famous (and later infamous) line “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles” (“Germany, Germany above all”). Hoffmann intended the phrase as a call for German national unity over regional loyalties, not as a declaration of supremacy. But history had other plans.

When the Weimar Republic was established in 1919 after World War I, President Friedrich Ebert adopted Hoffmann’s lyrics, set to Haydn’s melody, as Germany’s official national anthem. The melody that Haydn had composed for the Austrian emperor now belonged to the German republic.

The Nazis embraced the anthem with enthusiasm, pairing the first stanza (“Deutschland uber alles”) with the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” the Nazi Party’s own anthem. After 1945, the first stanza was tainted beyond recovery. West Germany initially had no official anthem at all. In 1952, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and President Theodor Heuss agreed that the third stanza of Hoffmann’s text (“Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit,” or “Unity and Justice and Freedom”) would serve as the national anthem, still set to Haydn’s melody. Reunified Germany confirmed this arrangement in 1991.

Austria, meanwhile, had abandoned Haydn’s melody after World War II, adopting a new anthem attributed (controversially) to Mozart. So the melody that Haydn wrote for an Austrian emperor in 1797 now belongs exclusively to Germany. The irony is thick: Haydn was Austrian, the melody was composed in Vienna for a Habsburg monarch, and the only country that uses it today is Germany.

The British export: God Save the King

No discussion of shared anthem melodies is complete without the most borrowed tune in history. “God Save the King” (or “God Save the Queen,” depending on the reigning monarch) has served as the basis for national and royal anthems in over 20 countries at various points.

The melody’s origins are disputed. Some scholars attribute it to Henry Carey (circa 1740), others to John Bull (circa 1619), and still others argue it evolved from various sources. What is certain is that by the mid-18th century, it was firmly established as the British royal anthem, and its influence spread rapidly through the British Empire and beyond.

Liechtenstein’s “Oben am jungen Rhein” (“High Above the Young Rhine”) uses the exact same melody with different German lyrics. It has done so since 1850, making it one of the longest-running cases of a shared anthem tune between two sovereign states. At joint events, the potential for confusion is real. During a 2004 friendly football match between Liechtenstein and England, the crowd reportedly cheered at the start of Liechtenstein’s anthem, thinking it was “God Save the Queen.”

The melody also served, at various times, as the anthem or royal hymn of Prussia, the German Empire, the Russian Empire (from 1816 to 1833, as “Molitva russkikh”), Switzerland (until 1981), Hawaii (under King Kamehameha III), and multiple other states. The United States used it for “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” written by Samuel Francis Smith in 1831, which served as a de facto anthem until “The Star-Spangled Banner” was officially adopted in 1931.

A universal tune

Why did one melody conquer so many nations? Partly because the British Empire was the largest in history, and its cultural exports traveled with its flag. But partly because the melody itself is well suited to national anthems: it is stately, it sits comfortably in most vocal ranges, and its harmonic structure is simple enough to be harmonized by any military band or church organ. It is, in a sense, the default anthem melody, the musical equivalent of a blank government form waiting to be filled in with local details.

Colonial echoes

The phenomenon of shared or borrowed anthem melodies points to a deeper pattern in the history of national music: many of the world’s anthems were not originally “national” at all. They were imposed, borrowed, or adapted from colonial and imperial sources.

Several African nations that gained independence in the 1950s and 1960s initially used anthems composed by Europeans. South Africa’s pre-1994 anthem, “Die Stem van Suid-Afrika” (“The Call of South Africa”), was written in Afrikaans by C.J. Langenhoven with music by the Reverend M.L. de Villiers, both of European descent. After apartheid ended, the new South Africa merged “Die Stem” with “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” (“God Bless Africa”), a Xhosa hymn composed by Enoch Sontonga in 1897, creating one of the world’s few bilingual, multi-melody anthems.

Tanzania’s anthem was composed by Enoch Sontonga as well: the same “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika” melody, with Swahili lyrics. Zambia used the tune from 1964 to 1973 before adopting a new anthem. The hymn’s melody has served, in whole or in part, as the anthem of five different African states at various points in history.

India’s post-independence anthem selection is instructive. The Indian Constituent Assembly debated whether to use “Jana Gana Mana” (Tagore) or “Vande Mataram” (by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, from the 1882 novel “Anandamath”). “Vande Mataram” had deep roots in the independence movement but contained Hindu religious imagery that made it controversial for India’s Muslim minority. The committee chose Tagore’s more inclusive text. “Vande Mataram” was designated the “national song,” a secondary honor.

The process of choosing an anthem, in each of these cases, was a process of deciding what kind of nation the country wanted to be. Whose language? Whose religion? Whose history? The answers were never obvious, and the debates often lasted decades.

When one song serves many flags

The stories of Tagore, Haydn, and “God Save the King” reveal a pattern that complicates the popular understanding of national anthems. We tend to think of anthems as unique expressions of a unique national identity: one country, one song, one people. The reality is messier.

Melodies migrate. Lyrics get swapped. Composers write for empires that dissolve into successor states. A Bengali poet writes for a Bengal that does not yet exist as two separate countries. An Austrian composer writes for a Habsburg emperor whose empire will collapse 121 years later, and the melody ends up belonging to Germany.

There are at least 30 documented cases of two or more countries sharing an anthem melody at the same time, and dozens more cases of sequential borrowing (one country abandoning a melody that another then adopts). The Estonian and Finnish anthems share the same melody, composed by the Finnish-German musician Fredrik Pacius in 1848. The melody of the Greek anthem, “Hymn to Liberty” by Nikolaos Mantzaros, also serves as the anthem of Cyprus.

Originality is the exception, not the rule

The very concept of an “original” national anthem is relatively modern. Before the 19th century, most states used existing hymns, marches, or folk songs as their ceremonial music. The idea that a nation needed a unique, purpose-written anthem emerged alongside Romantic nationalism in the 1800s, and even then, the borrowing continued.

What makes an anthem “belong” to a country is not its melodic originality. It is the accumulated weight of association: the ceremonies where it was played, the wars it accompanied, the athletes who stood for it, the citizens who hummed it. A melody becomes national not because it was born national, but because a nation adopted it and refused to let go.

Tagore did not write “Jana Gana Mana” knowing it would become the anthem of a republic that did not yet exist. Haydn did not compose his “Emperor’s Hymn” imagining it would one day represent a unified Germany. These melodies acquired their national meaning through history, through accident, through the slow accretion of collective memory.

That is, perhaps, the most important lesson of the shared anthem: national identity is not found. It is made. And sometimes, it is made from the same raw materials that another nation is using for the very same purpose.