The Many Avatars of Bharat Mata

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Sunday, August 14, 2005: In many ways one knows the image well,

having grown up with it from childhood. Mother India: wearing the

Himalayas as her crown, her feet blessing the waters of the ocean by

their touch, graceful arms stretching out as if to embrace the East

and the West. Patriotic songs sang of her; leaders invoked her in

their orations; young men took solemn oaths in her name. But, in

times gone by, when she was still not free, one also knew that she

was suffering. I remember our mother telling us children of Gandhiji

having heard the clinking of the chains on her feet; in a mushaira

to which I went in my young years I heard a poet speak of her silent

sighs in the night.

 

You could almost see her as a person: Mother India. That is why,

even though it was written much later, I remember being deeply moved

by passages in Phanishwarnath Renu's classic: Maila Anchal. For they

spoke of those times with an honesty, and a passion, that struck an

instant chord. Ramkishan Babu's words were real. Tewariji's

plaintive song – Ganga re Jamunwa ki dhaar neer bahaaye rahi, Bharat

maiya akulaaye rahi re — resonated in one's heart. One knew that

the `anchal' that was soiled was the mother's. One wanted to reach

out and wipe a tear from her eyes, apply some healing salve on the

lacerated skin of her feet.

 

Visuals not having been a prominent part of our young lives, I do

not recall seeing till much later what is almost certainly the most

famous among images of Mother India: Abanindranath Tagore's "Bharat

Mata," c. 1905. (See image at:

http://www.kamat.com/picturehouse/bharat/100j.jpg )

 

He rendered her quite differently: a quietly beautiful young woman,

dressed like a sadhavi in an ochre-coloured sari, standing at the

edge of a lotus pond. But clearly a divine being: celestial nimbus

behind her head; four-armed, each hand carrying an object charged

with symbolism: a sacred manuscript; an akshamala-rosary of beads; a

vastra or length of fabric; a sheaf of green foliage. There is no

suffering that one sees: if anything, calm radiates from her being.

She is there as an idealised goddess, shedding grace, conferring

boons: Saraswati and Lakshmi at the same time.

 

Abani Babu painted this image close to 1905, and it is not difficult

to imagine the influences that shaped it, or the thoughts that must

have been coursing through his head as he went about visualising the

figure. The palpable British presence, the impending Partition of

Bengal, talk of Swadeshi, were all around him. But, above all, must

have been not only the awareness but the reverberations of

Bankimchandra's stirring composition: Vande Mataram.

 

The image of our land as Mother – she who is shasya and shyamala,

she whose touch cools like the wind blowing from the Malayachala

mountains, and she who fills the earth with countless bounties – is

what Bankim Babu had evoked in the song that he had set in the heart

of his celebrated work, Anandmath. It was an ideal that he was

creating, something for everyone to recall and to revere. To be

sure, there was conflict, or impending conflict, in the air, but for

it to endure, the image had to be quiet, almost inwardly turned.

Abanindranath clearly sensed this: polemics in any case was not his

chosen ground.

 

Different things were happening, or were to happen soon afterwards,

however, at the popular level as far as the image of the land as

Mother in pre-Independence India is concerned. And here one gets

into a complex, and somewhat strident, area. One enters the world of

oleographs and posters and calendars; wit, anger, playfulness,

innovation, all with an eye to popular appeal, come into play.

 

Mother India is juxtaposed with popular national figures: sitting

and conversing with Gandhiji as he plies his spinning wheel inside a

jail cell, for instance; lifting everyone – Gandhi, Nehru, Azad,

Lajpat Rai – in her arms as if to take them out of harm's way;

Subhas Chandra Bose cutting his head off and offering it to the

Mother on a platter. In these, art was not the chief concern: the

message was. The visuals are engaging in their own manner, and found

their way into homes on a scale that was undreamt of before. Bharat

Mata or Mother India – to be carefully distinguished from Mehboob's

hugely popular film of the same name – had become a household

expression.

 

This is not the place perhaps to go into what has happened to images

of Mother India after she became free. For politics, in particular

sectarian politics, soon took over, and the words and the image were

quickly hijacked. Aggressive and self-assured now, instead of the

suffering figure that she once was, Mother India continues to peer

at you from posters and calendars everywhere.

 

But, with her form routinely fitted into a cartographic framework,

and with the head of a massive lion peering from behind her, she has

become a different person. For she seems to shed no grace, touches

no real chords. Perhaps she is back in chains again, this time

placed upon her feet by self-serving interests for whom narrow

politics, not nationalism, is the real concern.

 

SOURCE: The Tribute, Chandigarh, India. Spectrum (Sunday). ART AND

SOUL. B.N. Goswamy on the different ways the image of `Mother India'

has been presented by artists.

URL: http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050814/spectrum/art.htm