Vande Mataram (IAST: Vande Mātaram, also pronounced Bande Mataram; transl. Mother, I bow to thee) is a poem written in Sanskrit by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1870s, which he included in his 1882 Bengali novel Anandamath. The poem was first sung by Rabindranath Tagore in the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress. The first two verses of the song were adopted as the National Song of India in October 1937 by the Congress Working Committee prior to the end of colonial rule in August 1947.