Mother India is a female-centered epic that depicts the
burden of the community placed on one women, often seen as the mother of the
community and later extrapolated to be represented as the country’s mother and
overseer. The struggles that the woman, named Radha, endures is unimaginable
and the hardships are seemingly unable to be overcome. The reactions and shifts
in perspective after the progression of tragic events navigates the entirety of
the film, with complexities in plotlines and characters added along the way.
The names carry an immense significance in the underlying motif in the second
half of the narrative. The subdued meanings of the names provide insights into
the relationships between characters, more specifically Radha and Birju, the mother
and son.
The
background behind Radha’s name is founded in the Hindu tales with relation to
Krishna. Radha is one of Krishna’s many ‘gopis’, more literally translated to
‘cow-herd girl’. Krishna’s young romances with ‘gopis’ are interpreted as
symbolic loving interplay between God and the human soul. Radha’s love for
Krishna is often seen as the quest for union with the divine. This kind of love
is of the highest form of devotion in Vaishnavism. Radha’s love, sometimes seen
as a form of obsession, characterizes her overwhelming concern in the film with
her younger son Birju.
Birju
is the trouble-maker who does not fear punishments and does whatever he sees as
the fit in the situation. He has a lack of empathy for others but sees the
troubles that his mother faces. He tries, in an aggressive and brute way, to
rectify the situation by hurting and blaming others. As a young child, in more
than one instance, he had stolen the turban of the moneylender, named
Sukhilala, and refused to return it, but eventually always unwillingly does
listening to the guiding words of either his mother or grandmother. Through
this manner, he was punishing Sukhilala for taking advantage of the illiteracy
of his family and keeping them in perpetual servitude.
Birju
is a moniker used by God Krishna. Parallels can be drawn between Krishna and
Birju in both their attitudes and actions. Krishna, at a young age, was also
considered to be a noisy troublemaker. With excitement in his eyes, he opened
fences to free the cows in order to let them roam. He also took pots of food
from his family and fed the monkeys. But other stories tell the tale of the
large blessing that Krishna’s seemingly irritating pranks provided. These
antics resonate similarly to the actions of Birju as a child.
The
stark similarities provide a concerning realization of behalf of the audience.
If Radha is reminiscent of one of Krishna’s ‘gopis’, acknowledging the sensual
love that they shared was romantic, and Birju is representative of Krishna, the
film brings in an entirely new facet of the Oedipus complex. Birju is obviously
the child of his father, seen outwardly through his devious and somewhat
aggressive nature, similar to that possessed by Shamu. As the article The Texts of “Mother India” states, “it
is clear that in making the younger son Birju more like his rebellious father,
the film connects sexual potency with rebellion against the Mother even while
it plays, unconsciously, with the much more frightening narrative of the
Oedipal triangle” (Prasad 79). The narrative is not completed in
carrying out the final act of incest because Radha kills Birju before the cycle
is concluded.
As
Radha is taken as a symbol of India, killing her son is when a part of her
breaks away. A family member that she worked so hard to protect and raise had
been killed in her own hands. The map of India “is not a map, but the portrait
of Bharat-mata [Mother India]…All her
children are her nerves, large and small…Concentrate on Bharat [India] as a
living mother” (Ramaswamy 97). The partition of India can be represented as
taking “‘a sharpened axe to slice "Mother" into two'” (Bose and Jalal 184). In a way, Radha
killing her son is able to be a representation of the partition of India, an
event after much hardship but essentially necessary at that point.
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