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

Legend of the suffering mother in Bollywood movies, played by stellar actors from Durga Khote in 'Mughal-e-Azam' to Nargis in 'Mother India' and beyond.

November 06, 2022 / 18:18 IST
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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.

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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.