Mother India

In the period when I was immensely impressed by films like The Big City, I compiled a list of India films that I should watch, with Mother India on it. It was however nothing like those carefully thought through and directed films. Instead it is a huge disappointment.

This 'Mother India', it seemed, was capable of enduring just any hardship or humiliations landed on her, first by her mother-in-law, who mortaged the land for the sake of a lavish wedding she could never afford for her only son; then by the greedy and heartless loan shark; followed by flooding, which took away her youngest child. Though she had to slave just as hard as her naive husband, she was a typical housewife in the sense she did not just look after the growing household, but also provide daily message to her husband... And for the sake of her sons and the absent husband, she was ready to go to... hell.

All this is fine... because that is women's fate anyway in most part of the world.

What puzzled me increasingly though was the fact that there had never been any space in the film to query what went wrong, and the characters just accepted all the misfortunes, some of which self-inflictd, as a way of life...

But the big challenge is that although throughout the film there was only one villain, the loan shark, and the conflict between him and the Mother India highlighted again and again, the villagers were in fact his ally - they denied, for their own interests, the help she deserved.

The ending of the film was bizarre. Because it was the mother who shot her son who had been trying to get a fair deal on behalf of her and indeed the whole village.

I wonder what messages the director was trying to convene through the film. And the fact that half of the screen time was filled with songs and dancing typical of Bollywood did not help me to warm up to this 3 hours 'epic'.