65 years of Mother India, and the larger-than-life self-sacrificing women of Hindi cinema

Nargis was 27 when 'Mother India' released on February 14, 1957. (Images via Wikimedia Commons)

A woman so beautiful, Dilip Kumar refused a role in the movie where he would have to call her ‘mother’. A role so powerful that the 27-year-old actor, who plays a bride, a daughter-in-law, a mother as well as a grandmother in the nearly 3-hour film, is forever known by the title role she played. An actor so outspoken she accused Satyajit Ray of selling India’s poverty to the world. And yet, in a movie that showcased the unspeakable atrocities brought down upon the illiterate masses (indirectly their poverty), Nargis, shone as the eponymous Mother India.

A bride who realises that her wedding has put her mother-in-law in debt to the local moneylender Sukhilala (Kanhaiya Lal), Radha (Nargis) begins to work even before the mehndi on her hands has faded. Aah! What a good daughter-in-law she turns out to be, telling her husband to sell her jewellery to reduce the family debt… But she has bigger tests to take. And her enemy is the cruellest of fates: her husband is incapacitated and abandons the family, the kids are a handful, especially her Birju (Sajid, then Sunil Dutt) and the original debt keeps compounding.

Radha channels Birju’s anger with the help of her calmer (and meeker) son Ramu (Rajendra Kumar). But Birju seethes and you understand why he is going to turn into a rebel. Why shouldn’t Birju kill Sukhi lala? Why should Radha continue to submit quietly to the horrid hand that fates have dealt her? When she accepts that challenge, ‘Main beta de saktee hoon lekin laaj nahi’ (I can give up my son but not my honour) who knew that she would inspire cinematic mothers for years…

Years later when Sharmila Tagore played the role of a lover as well as mother to Rajesh Khanna in Aradhana, she said that she was inspired by Nargis’s performance in Mother India.

Pardon the historical jump, but when an argument is made for the omnipresent question in cinema where a woman has to choose sides in a conflict between her husband and her son, no one comes close to Durga Khote as Jodhabai in Mughal-e-Azam.

When Akbar is ready to go to war over his principles to contain a rebel prince - his son Salim who is hopelessly in love with Anarkali, a courtesan in Akbar’s court - Jodha refuses to partake in the ceremony where she hands the sword to her husband. She has tried persuasion before, requesting that the Shahenshah show his largesse and gift Anarkali to her son. Akbar has refused saying that Jodha was thinking like a mother, and only a mother. Jodha has used anger too, replying, ‘Aur aap shahenshah hain, sirf shahenshah.’ (And you are an emperor, only an emperor)

But when Akbar insists that she perform the ceremony to send him to war by handing him the sword and wishing her husband victory, Jodha dissolves in angry tears, ‘Ek taraf suhaag hai, aur ek taraf aulaad…’

Fates have yet again asked Mother India to make a Hobson’s choice. How can she hand over a sword to her all-powerful husband when he’s sure to defeat and decapitate her only son?

While Durga Khote created history by being one of the first women from a respectable family to enter the movie business, she went on to essay roles of strong women hapless at the demands of love for her children (and grandchildren) in the movies, she also made a case for Lady Macbeth on stage. Not exactly the ‘abala nari’ Maithilisharan Gupt wrote about. But women in the movies were expected to do nothing more than ‘aanchal mein hai doodh, aur aankhon mein pani’. Her kindly grandmother roles in Bobby and much later as a mother in Karz (the twice-remade film based on The Reincarnation of Peter Proud and yes, Madhumati) demanded she show unconditional love to her son.

But her Mother India aka ‘all sacrificing’ film will always be the 1974 Jitendra, Leena Chandavarkar film Bidaai. Durga Khote has shed a thousand tears for her ungrateful son in the Marathi film Molkarin (Maidservant - where she works in her son’s home as one). The pamphlets advertising the film claimed ‘Bayka oksabokshi radtaat’ (women will cry uncontrollably), but when mothers across India watched the Hindi film Bidaai, it was time for tea and headache pills (the said state induced by the tears shed at the movie) .

Sulochana also contributed to the Mother India trope, the long suffering, tearful mother of actors from Manoj Kumar to Dharmendra and Jeetendra. Who can forget the untiring mother stitching clothes for the women in the neighbourhood to feed her family, epitomised by Leela Chitnis? If Dilip Kumar was to hold his cinematic mother’s calloused hands and shed a tear of gratitude, that would be the fragile yet strong Leela Chitnis. She played the mother in Shaheed (The Martyr) in 1948, way before Mother India showed up on the big screen.

It is not common knowledge that Mother India, the movie, was made as a collective raspberry to a book by the same name written by an American Nationalist Katherine Mayo. Mayo received much flak not just from Indian intellectuals but pro-India activists and in the American literary circles as well. Her portrayal of India and her treatment of the untouchables, animals and women was so scurrilous, even the gentle Rabindranath Tagore was irritated by its hypocrisy. Gandhi called the book ‘a report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon’ and went on to remind the Western world of their own shortcomings.

Mother India begins with shots of rural progress: a dam, a bridge and a canal being built, and the camera rests on an old woman who picks up a clump of Earth and puts it to her forehead in reverence. And suddenly, behind her, tractors till the land. Radha is now Mother to the whole village. She inaugurates the canal with diffidence and the film unravels as she reluctantly accepts a garland of roses and is reminded of the past that put the wrinkles on her face…

We may laugh at seeing Cindy Crawford’s photograph garlanded by a blue ribbon by her son Dev Anand in the forgettable film Awwal Number. But even there, Dev Anand talks about ‘our mother’s sacrifice’... Years of watching mothers on screen prepped us for the ‘Mere paas maa hai' scene from Deewar, ‘Mera Kallu aisa nahi hai’ from Kaalia and yes, we clapped hard when Amitabh Bachchan said, ‘Jisne pachees saal se apni maa ko thoda thoda marte dekha hai, use maut ka kya dar’. Did we baulk at the over the top motherly instincts that make Jaya Bhaduri walk to the door, aarti in hand, even before her son has entered? (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham)... Logic says she heard the deafening noise from the helicopter that was scheduled to bring her son home, but no. It is that generational cinematic coding that makes us believe in every distilled version of Mother India.