Decode Politics: ‘Bharat Mata’, ‘Mother India’, ‘Vande Mataram’: As another row erupts, what lies beneath

Arlekar, who recently took over as Governor after a long period of fractious relationship between the LDF government and Raj Bhavan, hit back, saying, “Whatever be the pressure from whichever quarters, there will be no compromise whatsoever on Bharat Mata.” State BJP leader N Hari also attacked the LDF, claiming “they are afraid to say Bharat Mata… due to vote bank politics”.

While the symbolic icon of Bharat Mata, or Mother India, has often been depicted in art, there is no official version of the portrayal. The image used at the Kerala Raj Bhavan, for instance, depicted Bharat Mata holding a saffron flag in front of a relief map of India. The Left objected to this. Another image, used by the CPI for a local party event in the middle of the row incidentally, showed Bharat Mata carrying the Tricolour. As the BJP celebrated the Left’s use of the image, the party hastily withdrew the same.

How has Bharat Mata been depicted?

In the history of modern Indian art, Bharat Mata has adorned the canvas of only two artists of repute. The first was the product of the Bengal Renaissance, Abanindranath Tagore, who first visualised the Indian nation as the Mother. The second was the modernist M F Husain, whose painting of Bharat Mata was banned and trashed – and he was forced to spend his last years outside his country.

The imagery first appeared in the works of artists and writers in Bengal, much before it was used elsewhere in the context of India’s national movement for Independence.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1882 novel Anand Math contained the hymn to the motherland Vande Mataram, which became the mantra of the freedom movement, and the official song of India after Independence. The novel depicts the three faces of Bharat Mata as Goddesses Jagaddhatri, Kali and Durga.

Two decades later, in 1905, after partition of Bengal under Lord Curzon, Abanindranath painted his iconic Bharat Mata, a woman in saffron robes, with a serene face and halo around her head, beads and scriptures in her hands. The revolutionary Aurobindo Ghose wrote in a letter to his wife Mrinalini Devi in August that same year: “I look upon my country as the Mother. I adore her, I worship Her as the Mother. What would a son do if a demon sat on his mother’s breast and started sucking her blood?”

Mother India retained her symbolic force through the national movement, even though the metaphor often changed with the speaker who employed it. In The Discovery of India, written by him in jail in the 1940s, Jawaharlal Nehru recounted his experience when people greeted him with slogans of “Bharat Mata ki Jai”. “Who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted?… Mother India was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people,” he wrote.

The first major enunciation of the Mother India concept came in the writings of Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya. “The foundation of our nationalism is Bharat Mata,” he wrote. “Remove Mata, Bharat will be reduced to just a piece of land.” However, this was merely a paraphrasing of what Bankim had written nearly a century ago, when he elaborated on the notion of Mother India as a woman having the characteristics of Sujala, Suphala (overflowing with water and laden with fruits) and Dashapraharana Dharini Durga (Goddess Durga with her 10 weapons), Lakshmi and Saraswati.

The imagery was also used in popular media and Hindi cinema – the iconic frame of actress Nargis, with a yoke and two babies, was an unforgettable cultural intervention, in 1957’s film Mother India.

What were the early criticisms around Bharat Mata?

Several historians have pointed out that the Bharat Mata visualised by its pioneers was more a “Banga Mata”, or Mother Bengal, with the deities they invoked being Kali and Durga, often their family deities. In Vande Mataram, Bankim called upon only the “sapt koti” or seven crore people of Bengal.

The first critics of the metaphor too came from among its inventors. Fifteen years after the Partition of Bengal, in August 1920, Aurobindo underlined the limits of the slogan and sought a greater mantra: “We used the Mantra Bande Mataram with all our heart and soul… (but) the cry of the Mantra began to sink and as it rang feebly, the strength began to fade out of the country… A greater Mantra than Bande Mataram has to come.”

The first two paragraphs of Bankim’s Vande Mataram were adopted as the national song after Independence. The government did not retain the verses that mentioned either “sapt koti”, or the eulogies to the Goddesses Durga and Lakshmi. The obvious reference to Bengali nationhood was removed.

Almost up to Independence, few underlined the religious overtones of the slogan, and it remained an essential mantra of an occupied country, a rallying call for its people. It found little resistance from other communities until 1947, when during the Partition riots, “Bharat Mata ki Jai” was perceived as a communal slogan, the same as “Allah-o-Akbar”.

But, barring some isolated voices against Vande Matram, Mother India remained a largely benign concept that did not attract controversy.

During the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the late 1980s, however, “Bharat Mata ki Jai” was used for communal mobilisation. Now Bharat Mata was an aggressive image, carrying swords and other weapons, and sometimes riding a tiger.

How has Bharat Mata imagery been used recently?

The Anna Hazare movement of 2011, one of the biggest mass mobilisations of recent decades, which shook the Central government and paved the way for the emergence ultimately of Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, used the image of Bharat Mata as the rallying point for an anti-corruption crusade.

More recently, in February 2023, the Indian Council for Historical Research, an autonomous body under the Ministry of Education, faced “objections” over a photo of Bharat Mata in its office, alongside pictures of President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The recent controversies over ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ slogan

In early 2016, after allegedly anti-India slogans were raised at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, leading to a sedition case against its then students’ union president Kanhaiya Kumar, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said that youth should be taught to chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai”.

AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi shot back, saying he would not chant “Bharat Mata ki Jai” even if a knife were put to his throat, prompting the Shiv Sena to tell Owaisi to “go to Pakistan”. RSS general secretary Dattatreya Hosabale then referred to Owaisi as “anti-national” and a “traitor”.

Later, in March 2016, AIMIM MLA Waris Pathan was suspended from the Maharashtra Assembly for refusing to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai”, even as he said he was willing to chant “Jai Hind”. At the time, the BJP, Congress, Shiv Sena and NCP together backed a resolution to suspend Pathan for the remainder of the Budget Session.

However, weeks after the controversy, BJP veteran L K Advani called the row over the slogan “meaningless”, while Bhagwat said nobody should be “forced” to say “Bharat Mata ki Jai”.

In 2020, in the aftermath of the Delhi riots, former PM Manmohan Singh said the slogan was “being misused to construct a militant and purely emotional idea of India that excludes millions of residents and citizens” while speaking at the launch of a book titled ‘Who is Bharat Mata’.