By Shilpa Suresh

Oh fathomless lake!

Stay wherever you are.

Amidst the city shores, 

Overgrown with rushes

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by Kanak Astha

The epic melodrama from the canon of Indian Cinema, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India ( 1957 ) came as the precursor of contemporary Bollywood cinema where valorization of self-sacrifice in the service of the nation was imagined as a woman. Coming from the location with powerful histories of colonialism, Mother India suggests that the gender of the nation is usually ‘spoken’ in multiple and complex ways. Basically, this movie came out a decade after the India got its independence. In the decade preceding the film, many political and social upheaval had taken place. The new constitution was drafted, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated and the country was stepping into drastic modernization under the leadership of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The film purposely commemorates the idea of freedom and the unchained spirit.

The very initial scene of Mother India introduces us to its ambivalent archetypal heroine. In a close up we see the deeply wrinkled face of a woman, Radha as ” Mother India”. She lifts a lump of clay soil from her field, takes it close to her face and lets the earth slowly crumble in her hands, which bears the scars for a lifetime’s hard manual work. And as the camera zooms out, there is a hopeful note in the air: modern technologies are being introduced by the government to increase agricultural productivity and lessen the peasant’s burden. The villagers revere Radha for all she’s done, and invite her to inaugurate the new irrigation canal. Water the colour of blood flows through the canal, a reminder of Radha’s sacrifices.

In some ways, Mother India is quite conventional. Its intended messages about women are regressive from a feminist point of view. The movie conveys that the ideal woman is nurturing, self-sacrificing and hardworking. It ignores the reality that women did all of this for very little reward. For all their sacrifices, did woman have a say even in basic decisions like how many children to have? Not much. In the 1950s, when the movie was released, women’s legal rights were severely restricted; for example, the progressive legislations introduced by stalwarts like B. R. Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru, for Hindu women’s inheritance and marriage rights, had been stonewalled and diluted in Parliament.

Mother India highlights the plight of the farmer, but glosses over or erases the specific difficulties faced by women farmers specifically: lack of access to resources, invisibilization of their labour, and their self-deprivation in times of scarcity. In times of food insecurity, adult women often deprive themselves and girl children of adequate food. It is not necessarily forced upon them; more often it’s a choice (made in the context of patriarchal society).

Mother India treats Radha’s abnegating nature as a positive. Throughout the movie Radha suffers for her husband and sons without any apparent complaint ever. In real life, such glorification of women’s suffering enables an exploitative system of economic growth on the backs of underpaid, overworked women. They get nothing except lip service, sometimes not even that.

Lastly, a central theme of the movie is honor/modesty. Radha values honor – her own and other women’s – over and above everything else. Maintaining honor is the prime duty of a woman. Her honor is not just her own, but the family’s, the village’s, and by extension the nation’s. But the problem with honor is that to maintain it, women’s mobility, freedom and sexuality must be tightly controlled. ( as perpetuated by society ).

Having said all that, there are some ways in which the character of Radha is a triumph for women’s representation in Indian cinema. She is a formidable, determined woman. She is uneducated (she can’t read the moneylender’s accounts), but she is tough and practical. She has the skills, knowledge, and the will to protect and raise her children. She never dithers or acts silly. She commands respect from her sons, from the villagers, and from the audience. She has to make tough choices in bleak circumstances. She breaks two negative stereotypes: that women are not intelligent, capable decision-makers, and that women don’t do arduous labour. In Mother India, it is the woman who builds the nation with her sweat and toil.

“How can a mother sacrifice her children?” wails Radha, at one point driven almost to insanity through poverty and humiliation, and almost forced to sell herself to feed them . And yet she will do it, she will kill her son, whose murderous frenzy obliges her at the end of the movie to choose social order over maternal love. The intensity and tragedy inherent to Mother India is contained in this contradiction. The Mother who has fought like only Life itself could struggle to survive and provide for its very existence, this mother will be the agent of Death, death of her own life, death of her own child. This Arch-Mother will become the mother Land, the Mother of Society, the mother of Culture. She will not flinch when her own blood, her own Nature has become corrupted by hate and craziness: she will choose order, the community, and the honor of the village. And out of her sacrifice a new Life will flow (the red tincture of the irrigation waters which she inaugurates at the end), a better life, a life where her children by the thousands can live in peace and prosperity.