Margaret Cousins Margaret Cousins Margaret Elizabeth Cousins, "née" Gillespie, also known as Gretta Cousins (7 October 1878 – 11 March 1954) was an Irish-Indian educationist, suffragist and Theosophist, who established All India Women's Conference (AIWC) in 1927. She was the wife of poet and literary critic James Cousins, with whom she moved to India in 1915. She is credited with composing the tune for the Indian National Anthem "Jana Gana Mana" in February 1919, during Rabindranath Tagore's visit to the Madanapalle College. Margaret Gillespie, from an Irish Protestant family, was born at Boyle, County Roscommon, and educated locally and in Derry. She
Music of Bengal — to protest the 1905 Partition of Bengal along communal lines: cutting off the Muslim-majority East Bengal from Hindu-dominated West Bengal was to avert a regional bloodbath. Tagore saw the partition as a cunning plan to stop the independence movement, and he aimed to rekindle Bengali unity and tar communalism. "Jana Gana Mana" was written in "shadhu-bhasha", a Sanskritised form of Bengali, and is the first of five stanzas of the Brahmo hymn "Bharot Bhagyo Bidhata" that Tagore composed. It was first sung in 1911 at a Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress and was adopted in 1950 by