Mother’s Day: The Many Mothers In India

Aansoon baha rahi hain, dukhia ho hai gaiya,
Sansar palti hain, Bharat ki hain ye maiya.

(The cows are shedding tears in their sadness. 
They nourish the world, they are the mothers of India.)

Charu Gupta, author and professor of history at University of Delhi, in her article “Icon of Mother in Late Colonial North India” elucidates the extent to which the symbolic —and actual— roles of women mattered in the construction of a Hindu nationalist identity. 

Gupta explains the reworking and re-articulation of the icons of motherhood — motherland, mother tongue, and gau mata (holy cow) in the imagination of a nation built along the lines of gender, caste, and religion. US journalist Katherine Mayo in her infamous 1927 polemic titled “Mother India” attempted to awaken the Indian women by contrasting their treatment with their glorification in the nationalist discourse.

In her book, Mayo discussed the unfortunate state of women in India during the national struggle in a health report because of the “inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, sterility of enthusiasm” of Indian men. She highlighted that women in India were revered as goddesses in the temple but were inhumanely treated in their homes at the same time. She wrote that more than 30,00,000 women die during childbirth in each generation.

It created havoc in the Independence movement. Mahatma Gandhi called the book a “drain inspector’s report”. While Mayo’s book highlights her racism, white supremacy, loyalty to the British Raj, and utter contempt for the people of India, her first-hand reportage on female foeticide, child marriages, status of widows, and plight of Dalits continues to perpetuate till date. Her book invited criticism from male leaders of the nationalist movement, who were horrified with Mayo’s “assumptions” about Indian culture.

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country,” Virginia Woolf writes in “Three Guineas”.

Woolf’s statement raises questions on the intrinsic relationship between gender, nation-states, and the idea of nationalism. Gender metaphors of the female body, femininity, and motherhood have been used as tools of emotional appeal to project the socio-political and economic aspirations in the context of a Hindu nation. Mehboob Khan's 1957 movie “Mother India” is also seen by feminist critics as a cinematic attempt to reinforce the ideals of Indian womanhood visualised on the archetypes of mythical Hindu femininity; chaste, self-sacrificial, devoted and with high moral grounds.

In her article, Gupta through the example of the 20th century Bharat Mata temple, a first of its kind, cites that the nation as mother took on an entity of a detailed physical map. At the temple in Banaras, Bharat Mata is not a distinct personality in her own right but a metaphor for a fixed, bounded space. While the application of Bharat Mata appears to be an Indian affair, the concept rather traces its roots to Western influence. A metonym for colonial modernity, modern and precise maps signified the rational and scientific influence of the West.

Gupta describes that an inter-caste dining feast was organised at the inauguration of the Bharat Mata temple wherein Doms and Chamars (Dalits) were given Sunlight brand of soap to ‘cleanse’ themselves in the nearby well and enter the temple. Along with the conceptualisation of Bharat Mata is also the idea of gau mata that shapes the utopia of nationalism which enjoys inherent patriarchal and Brahmanical impunity. She refers to anthropologist Van Der Veer’s breakdown of love for mother cow and the urge to protect her body in India.

Veer observes that Brahmanical rituals, devotional religion, the usefulness of cow products, and imagery of cow as a nurturing mother goddess have shaped the Hindu sentiments associated with cow. 

Christopher Pinney, Professor, Anthropology Department, and a historian at the University College London, has also explained the role of locally-produced mass visual images in the organisation and ideology of the cow protection agitation. 

“In these, the body of the cow itself was invested with the divine and she herself became a proto-nation. The material body of the mother cow was equated with the Hindu nation, where she was the benevolent mother, whose womb could provide a ‘home’ to all. Like a mother, she could feed her sons with milk, making them stronger,” Gupta writes on Pinney’s remarks. These messages, the author explains, were strengthened by many images depicting a woman milking the cow, who was transformed into Yashoda, the foster mother to Hindu deity Krishna.

Explaining the socio-economic parallels of these metaphors, Gupta observes that just as a woman at home, the cow is also a ‘domestic animal’, and both are reared to become potent mothers. 

“Like the women’s breasts, cows’ udders were a metonym for nourishment and livelihood. Milk flowed from both, and both signified a domestic space where no outside invasion or penetration could be tolerated,” she says. Both, the cow and women, are supposed to be possessed and protected. One could easily kill and die for her, sharpening religious and caste lines.

Gender dynamics act as a driving force in perpetuating the symbolic and cultural ideology of the nation-state. While Muslims were shown as the offender of the ‘gau mata’ depicted through visual productions as cow slaughterers, Gupta writes that the Hindu rules state that no cow was to be sold to a Chamar, nat, or banjara and that a Chamar was not to be employed to look after cows. It must be noted that honour killing remains a form of punishment in India for inter-caste and inter-faith marriages. Furthermore, mob lynchings against Muslims on the allegations of cow theft and cow slaughter have also seen a rise in the country in recent years.

A deeper assessment of the metaphors of mothers deployed in the narrative of nationalism exposes that the divine independent goddess does not have the autonomy but is rather a sacrificial victim — a mother who is guarded by her “brave sons”. The ideal nation-state with women as the icon of mother at its core is founded on the restrictions and exploitations of a mother.