India, in sync with the world, recently saw a spectacular rise of the far-right, characterised by a militant nationalism with religious fundamentalist overtones. In this climate, the ideational configuration of the Indian nation-state has tended to go back to pre-Independence formulations of the nation-as-mother.
Although there are crucial differences between today’s politically polarising ‘Bharat Mata’ and the one in whose name leaders galvanised the country during the freedom struggle, the time is ripe now to focus on Mother India . I speak, of course, of the eponymous Hindi movie which, upon its release in 1957, attained an iconic status.
To this day, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India remains one of the most commercially successful Indian films. It lost the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film by just one vote and is counted among the finest productions of world cinema.
Its significance as a national cultural icon was recognised immediately: before its countrywide release, it was shown to the then President of India at a special screening, and it was awarded the All India Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film in 1958. Indeed, the film was a conscious rebuttal by Khan to Katherine Mayo’s 1927 book of the same name that criticised Indian culture and vilified Indian people.
Khan attempted to represent the essence of India positively, hinging that representation upon the concept of the quintessential Indian woman, the virtuous ‘Bharatiya Naari’ who, by definition, was also a mother.
Nation as mother
The director works up a brilliant dynamics of personal courage, womanly ‘honour’, and steadfast adherence to the right and the just in the protagonist Radha.
Madhuri Dixit in ‘Gulaab Gang’.
The result is the larger-than-life figure of the Mother, intended as a metonymic representation of the nascent Indian nation. In the process, Mother India makes an authentic presentation of rustic Indian community life in the ‘heartland’ State of Uttar Pradesh. The exploitation of poor peasants by the unscrupulous business class in Indian villages is brought out with harrowing accuracy and great dramatic power.
The tale of class oppression, as we know, is a story of gender oppression as well. Radha not only struggles against a bad loan to which she ultimately loses her husband, she also has to fend off Sukhi Lala’s attempts to possess her physically.
During a devastating famine, Radha is offered help by Sukhi Lala at the price of her honesty as a woman. She resists that offer at great costs to herself and her two sons, one of whom later becomes a rebel and a bandit. Mother India is thus a testament to the way caste, class and gender hierarchies often work in tandem in rural India, and illustrates how social inequality in our country is never unidimensional.
In presenting Radha as a resisting woman, Khan creates a prototype of the woman hero in Indian cinema.
Essentially, the ‘heroes’ in contemporary films like Gulaab Gang and Queen have carried forward a lineage that germinated with Radha, namely, that of the female protagonist fighting and living on her terms in the face of oppression or opposition.
True, Radha’s victimhood and empowerment, alike, are tied closely to the sexist notion of female bodily chastity and to the ideology of motherhood. Yet, in emerging as a valiant guide to the village community, Radha sets an example of the woman-as-leader—a rarity in Indian literature and cinema, alike.
Women for women
Moreover, Radha’s heroism is made very special when she shoots her bandit son Birju to protect the honour of another woman, the daughter of her oppressor Sukhi Lala. This dramatic conclusion makes the point that if a woman aligns herself with others of her own sex, irrespective of caste, class or age, she effectively disrupts the masculinist social order that uses women against themselves.
It is because women often have no group identity as women that patriarchy is able to co-opt them and utilise them for their disempowerment. In opposing Birju’s attempt to wreak vengeance on the Lala by ‘ruining’ his daughter Rupa, Radha refuses to partake of the fight between two men sparring over the ‘honour’ of their respective women. By going to extremes to save Rupa, Radha bows to an oppositional group identity that hits out at familial-communal gender politics.
Mother India thus holds out a salutary and always relevant model of women’s group identification—across class and against class hierarchies—that has the potential to unsettle patriarchal power at the community level and across far wider reaches. It is a thousand pities that such models of sisterhood are still very rare in Indian cinema. The only film in recent memory that represented something of the kind would perhaps be Raj Kumar Santoshi’s Damini . The ‘Mother’, at 60, is a senior citizen: it’s time for her granddaughters to go forth and prosper.
The author, an English professor, has written a book on gender.
