Mother India- the film
Heralded as India’s Gone with the Wind, Mother India is indeed a Bollywood blockbuster of epic proportions on a kin with David O’Selznick’s 1939 classic. Considered by many as the cornerstone of Indian commercial cinema and described by Salman Rushdie as ’’all-conquering’’, this remarkable film became the first Indian Film to be nominated for an Academy Award and it is easy to see why it has remained in continuous distribution ever since its original release in 1957.
A passionate colour remake of director Mehboob Khan’s less successful 1940 film Aurat, Mother India traces the bitter sweet lives of an Indian peasant family as it struggles to survive in a rural community coming to terms with a country newly freed of British colonial rule.
Above all a story about honour, Mother India opens with a close up of ’village mother’ Radha (Nargis). Her weather-beaten features setting the tone for much of what is to come, she is immediately recognisable as a woman forged by suffering and it soon becomes clear that it is her story that Khan intends to relay.
Flashback to the days of Radha’s youth…. Happily married, Radha and her husband (Raaj Kumar) toil the earth in an effort to produce enough crop to feed their family and pay back the money they owe to an unscrupulous moneylender (Kanhaiyalal). Times prove hard, but the family prevail. Soon they have enough to raise a small family and buy enough oxen to plough the land. But tragedy soon strikes when early rains destroy the villager’s harvest and force the family to sell what little valuables they own to the moneylender.
The family proves strong and Radha encourages her husband to try twice as hard to make a comeback. But when a second tragedy strikes, leaving her husband horribly maimed and unable to work, Radha is left to raise her children alone, under the continual threat of starvation and the fear of sexual advances from the slimy moneylender.
Years go by and we find that whilst one of her sons has become a hard working, respected farmer, another has become the village idiot, bitter with rage and committed to vengeance. Radha, caught between her rebel son and the survival of a community she has been instrumental in building, is faced with a decision that forces her to choose honour over blood.
Raised in a small village himself, Khan is more than qualified to recreate Indian rural life, its customs and traditions and does so with immense skill and technical expertise. Peppered with more than a few references to Italian neo-realism, his command of the action throughout is assured, and is equalled only by Naushad Ali’s magical and evocative score.
Moreover, for a forty-five year old Indian film the entire cast is surprising compelling. In particular though, it is fifties Bollywood starlet Nargis who gives the most powerful performance as the tragic central figure of Radha. The inner strength she is able to project is something to be admired and one is never in doubt as to whether her trauma-ridden character will forfeit her honour for anything as base as an easier life. Indeed, Mother India represented the pinnacle of Nargis’s career, winning her the prestigious Karlovy Vary Festival’s Best Actress Award. Other strong performances in the film come from Nargis’s future husband Sunil Dutt as the nonconformist son Birju, child actor Master Sajid playing Birju as a boy and Kanhaiyalal as the immorally malicious moneylender.
Thirty minutes into the film it becomes obvious that Bollywood owes a great debt to Mother India. The spectacular Hindi dance sequences with punctuate some of the more gruelling parts of the narrative work well and offer the kind of irresistible escapism that once permeated the lavish Hollywood musicals of yesteryear and have recently become fashionable once more in western films such as Moulin Rogue and Bend it Like Beckham.
With a running time of just over three hours many may find Mother India a little too demanding, but if you can stay the course you’ll be treated to what must be one of the best Indian films ever made. And, though admittedly a touch melodramatic at times, the powerful story it tells is as rich and vivid as the Indian scenery and song that frame it.
Paralleling the suffering of an Indian peasant family with that of a postcolonial country in rapid transition, Mother India is indeed Mehboob Khan’s magnum opus. Making this epic saga of love, family, tradition and honour essential viewing for anyone who has even the slightest interest in South Asian cinema.