Mother India - Movie Review
Published: August 31, 2011
Starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar, Raaj Kumar
Pick a superlative and it probably applies to Mother India, the mother of all Hindi classics.
It's a simple story, one of horrific hardship. A young woman, Radha (Nargis), is married to a young man, Shamu (Raaj Kumar), and the two are delighted with one another. Radha soon learns that her mother-in-law mortgaged the family farm to pay for the wedding, so Radha starts working excessively hard to ensure the success of the household. But the moneylender takes three-quarters of the crop as interest and the family can't produce enough to make ends meet, much less put a dent in the loan principle. Radha has three sons. Shamu loses his arms in a farming accident and abandons the family out of shame over his helplessness. The mother-in-law dies. A storm wipes out the harvest. Radha's baby dies. But Radha is indomitable, and because of her, the village survives. Her two sons, Birju (Sunil Dutt) and Ramu (Rajendra Kumar), grow up, and that's when the real trouble begins.
Radha is a paragon of Hindu womanhood—a wife and mother who represents both the divine female and the country of India. Interestingly, the actress who played Radha, as well as the director of the film, were Muslim, which many have said makes the movie's nationalism all the more powerful, given India's multi-religious makeup.
The religious symbolism begins with the main character's name. In Hindu mythology, Radha is the lover of Krishna, who leaves her, and she longs for his return. The Radha of the film, likewise, spends the rest of her life devoted to her absent husband. The Radha of the film is not all life-giving, as one would expect of a mother; she is also a destroyer—a role which is also personified by Hindu goddesses—and she kills her own son because she feels she morally must.
Mother India was released a decade after India's independence, and its message is that the village is the core unit upon which the country is built, that India's strength lies in its adherence to rural culture and moral values, and that women are the keepers of tradition. Radha's independence and ability to persevere despite incredible challenges mirrors that of the nation's.
Marxist themes also abound: the glorification of the worker, individual sacrifice for the good of the collective (the village), and the struggle of the common person against the evils of capitalism (symbolized by the moneylender). Radha repeatedly poses holding a sickle or other farm implement over her shoulder, her sweaty face held high, while she looks off into the sunset over the fields where she labors.
Radha is an archetype, but she's also rife with ambiguity and all too human in her complexity. She risks the starvation of her two surviving sons rather than have sex with the moneylender, who promises to take care of her and her family if she submits. Her honor, her sense of herself as a woman, is more important to her than the lives of her children. She is a woman first and a mother second. Which is exactly what she says to Birju before she kills him. An interesting concluding statement in a film that ostensibly romanticizes motherhood.
She has endured unbearable suffering raising her kids alone, and when Birju becomes a man and won't obey her, she sees it as ingratitude. When he goes so far as to threaten to take the honor of another woman, she shoots him to protect the reputation of their village—she says—but also to protect her own reputation as his mother and to maintain her power and control over him. It's not exactly a selfless sacrifice on her part—she's the heroine of her family and the village and she wants to keep it that way.
The role of Radha was redemptive for the actress who played her, adding a dimension to the film that crossed over into reality. Nargis was the daughter of a courtesan and the mistress of the married film star Raj Kapoor. Public perception of her transformed as she came to be identified with the idealized woman she portrayed in Mother India. Nargis largely retired from acting after the movie came out—a dramatic exit from the industry at the zenith of her career that preserved her favorable new image forever.
During the shooting of the film, Nargis became trapped by flames during a fire scene, and her co-star Sunil Dutt, who played her son Birju, saved her life. The two fell in love on the set and married a year later. Their son is actor Sanjay Dutt.
Mother India was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film—the first of only three Hindi films ever be nominated for an Oscar.
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