Mother India

Mother India

Mother India is a very powerful epic that arose from the depictions of Mayo’s book of the same name. First thing I wanted to blog on is the ethnocentric ideals that Mayo think she understands. She depicts a time and place and rashly generalized ad belittles a nation without fully understanding its strife and how it came through. I respect this movie for not only calling her out by naming it the same as her book, but tackling issues in the book and a realistic and fair way. To directly quote Dr. Ghosh’s blog  "We have intentionally called our film Mother India, as a challenge to this book, in an attempt to evict from the minds of the people the scurrilous work that is Miss Mayo's book" (Sinha, 2006: p.248) and the quote by Ghandi are excellent rebuttals to Mayo’s claims.

Normative Transgressive Femininity

The Normative Transgressive Femininity that arose throughout Mother India shows the growth of the mother of the village Radha. All the hardships she faces through the movie are so bad it would drive a person to very bad places. Seeing her children die, husband become virtually useless and then leave, her own child betrays her, plus starvation for her and her family. All these hardships are just too ridiculous for any person to cope. This is Radha we are talking about though. Throughout the movie she develops herself through her strong morals and tough mentality.

As Mayo claimed in her book that woman are mistreated and while in this movie Radha is taken advantage of by the money man Sukilula she opposes his evil as a strong female. The scene that really shows her character would the one where she is battling with herself in Sukilula’s house. She almost resembles Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction, as she debates and talks about her options. A woman who is broke, starving, and in need of help for her family she becomes the typical damsel in distress, but she becomes more then that instead.

She arises in this scene as she comes to her moral senses and fights off the easiness that would have been to sleep with lula for money. She then fends off his pleading and even fights him off when he tries to take control of her. This scene shows that she is very much her own independent woman and will find a way to provide for herself, family, and village. This scene is truly magnetic as the music continues to play frightful music, but the positions are quickly switched. Ragda quickly gains the upper hand, and still resembling Kali, beats the crap out of that pathetic excuse for a man. The icing on the cake for this scene is how Lula ends up looking like a chicken when he falls into the pillow showing how he went from the power position to nothing to Ragda just like that.

In the scene Ragda undergoes a very dramatic change of character. She goes from begging and hopeless woman (a woman that Maya believes Indian culture at the time would be present as such) to a total independent and motivated woman that kicks butt. Slowly, but surely this movie implants the idea that woman are strong individuals that when called upon will defend herself and her morals.