Mother India

New Internationalist, Sept, 1999

... being the film at the pinnacle of Indian popular cinema history.

WHEN it was released in 1957, Mother India (Bharat Mata) was hailed as an instant classic, India's Gone with the Wind. The concept of the mother as the guardian of the soil and soul of the nation contained in the Hindi term `Bharat Mata', was already profoundly significant to the Indian popular consciousness. Even so, the film's critical and popular reception exceeded all expectations.

It owed its success in no small part to the powerful sense of audience identification with the suffering of the mother figure at its centre. Played with exemplary skill by Nargis, who occupies a hallowed position in the Indian film pantheon, her performance suggested the very essence of noble self-sacrifice, womanly devotion, and adherence to the social and moral order. But the film's conservative values, profound though they were, were also deceptive, since it exhibited a clever interplay-artistically and politically-between the traditional and the radical.

Produced in the early years of Nehru's socialist experiment and a decade after independence, it was a remake of director Mehboob Khan's own 1940 black-and-white classic Aurat. This, filmed in a village in rural Bengal not far from where Khan grew up, told the tale of a shy young bride, Radha, arriving to live with her husband and mother-in-law only to discover the extent of the family's indebtedness to the village moneylender.

The opening sequence of Mother India shows tractors and cranes churning a landscape as parched as the now elderly Radha's complexion, while in the foreground she is urged by local dignitaries to inaugurate an irrigation canal. Clearly a survivor, she is revered by the villagers. But looking back over her life of tragedy she is made to symbolize both the country's traditional moral values and its drive towards progress and development-a new ideological twist in the post-independence era remake.

Although Mehboob Khan cited Cecil B De Mille as his Hollywood idol, stylistically his film draws from several different traditions. Certainly Mother India belongs first and foremost to the popular Indian cinema-there are even muted song-and-dance sequences and the storyline is straightforward melodrama-but it successfully amalgamates this with both Soviet social-realist techniques and an epic Hollywood sweep. The film's most enduring image is of Radha-her ox having died from overwork-captured in profile, carrying a plough along her back. This is an image of iconic heroism straight out of Soviet poster art.

The pivotal moment in the plot comes when Radha's husband suffers an agricultural accident, losing both arms in the process. Unable to bear being a burden to his family, he slips out of their lives. When the mother-in-law promptly dies and Radha's two babies are killed in a flood, she must act to save her surviving children's lives. Her face and body caked in mud from the flood, she presents herself at the moneylender Sukhilala's door, prepared to submit to his repeated requests for sexual favours in return for food. But before she makes her sacrifice, she receives what she interprets as a sign that her husband is still alive, and she roundly beats her persecutor instead.

This is not the act of a wholly powerless woman. Indeed Radha's subtle transformation from more-or-less mute, submissive wife to an independently powerful mother, reflects the way the film discreetly disrupts female stereotypes. Traditionally, wives are seen as eternally self-sacrificing, and although mothers are given a greater degree of expressive autonomy, they are frequently models of piety. Radha is far from being a straightforward paragon of religious virtue. She evolves in the film's second half into a complex older woman, by turns sprightly, by turns truculent, her devotion to her two grown-up sons taking on almost incestuous overtones. Indeed, psychoanalytic underpinnings also surface with the characterization of the second son Birju, who as a little boy is all mischief and irrepressibility, but who as an adult becomes wayward, his energy transforming into aggression. Eventually banished from the village, he becomes an outlaw, his main redeeming feature being his unwavering adoration of his mother. Returning to the village to abduct the moneylender's daughter on her wedding day, Birju is confronted by his own mother who threatens to shoot him if he doesn't release the girl. Fatally wounded, Birju embraces his mother, then expires.

Radha's final overwhelming act of sacrifice can be seen as a revolutionary gesture on behalf of women's solidarity. More frequently, however, audiences see the killing of the bad son as a way of restoring the natural order. Whichever view comes out on top, there's no denying the film's enormous emotional resonance. Mother India remains at the very pinnacle of Indian popular film history and it's hard to deny, despite its occasional faults, that it deserves its position.

by Esi Eshun

Mother India (Bharat Mata), directed by Mehboob Khan, was released in 1957.