Essay On Mother India

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PROLOGUE The creation and dissemination of the ‘Bharat Mata’ image has a continuous history from the late 19th century onwards. The modern notion of worshipping the nation as a Mother Goddess arose in Bengal, and with Bankimchandra Chattopadhya’s Anandmath. This served a political purpose as he transformed Bharat Mata into a Hindu Goddess who is struggling under dire conditions and her indifferent children need to awaken and act. Thus, the book contributed to the development of a proto-form of Hindu cultural nationalism. During the Swadeshi movement and agitation to annul the partition of Bengal in 1905, the idea of India and Bengal as a mother goddess was widely used in the popular realm. Bande Mataram (Praise the Mother) became the popular …show more content…

‘Mother India’ implies that she is the mother of Indian society (Natarajan 1994). According to film scholar Jyotika Virdi (1975), Mother India can also be seen as a metaphor of the trinity of mother, God and a dynamic nation. The poster reflects an element of Hindu-Muslim syncretism. The Hindu protagonist is played by a Muslim actor (Nargis). The male actors are Hindu men. The film and music direction are by Muslim artists. This alludes to the presence of "highly syncretic hyphenated Hindu–Muslim nature" of Bollywood in the film (Roy 1998). According to Parama Roy (1998), Nargis's legendary status as the titular Mother India is due to the Hinduisation of the character and her real-life marriage with a Hindu. Thus, she is scripted as a renouncer of Muslim separatism in the film. IMAGE #3 M.F. Hussain’s painting of what is allegedly a pictorial representation of Bharat Mata is abstract in nature. It is relatively difficult to determine the codes which it draws upon. Unlike the previous two images, it does not reflect upon a bulk of popular stock of imagery and cultural

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