What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. (File)
When the celebrated Hindi writing duo Salim-Javed wrote “Mere paas Maa hai”, they were clearly on to something. That brief line of movie dialogue has survived five decades in public memory as a pithy reminder of the emotional, moral and ideological power invested in motherhood in our collective imagination. However, one reason it remains deeply resonant is that, aside from death and taxes, if there’s one other thing we can be sure of, it is our mothers. If we exist, someone birthed us, and regardless of how present or absent our individual mothers might be, mothering marks us in life as well as in the realm of imagination.
Julia Kristeva has written of consecrated motherhood as a fantasy of lost territory that is nurtured by all adults. In the religious sphere, we see it in the form of a Mother Goddess or as Mother Mary, while in culture, we see it as the ordinary-seeming Ma who holds her son’s heart in her fist. In politics too, it emerges as the motherland, although politicians also tap into the power of consecrated motherhood when they bring their flesh-and-blood mothers into political discourse. We saw this most recently when Kamala Harris described her mother as an immigrant in the US – “a brown woman with an accent” who was tough, courageous, and yet, never lost her cool.
What Harris doesn’t quite say is that her mother, being human, is fallible. Instead, she sticks with the fantasy Ma – an unfailing, temperate presence who compensates for other lacking, including an absent or distant father. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the docu-series Angry Young Men, recently out on Amazon Prime, where we see screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar reflecting on the loss of their mothers in childhood. Like childhood itself, everyone experiences mothering as a gradual loss and writers often tap into this, capturing our longing to return to a maternal lap where we are eternally safe and welcome. It is in this lap that Birju (Sunil Dutt) dies, shot by the righteous Radha (Nargis) in Mother India (1957) and it is towards this lap that Vijay runs in Deewar (1975), despite having been rejected by his Ma (Nirupa Roy).
Interestingly, the Hindi screen Ma looms larger if she is widowed, divorced or has been abandoned by the father. In this form, she is nearer to the primal Mother – the unrivalled creator and provider whose primacy cannot be challenged. In this way, she becomes an article of faith rather than a flesh and blood woman. The tricky part, of course, is that articles of faith never have any longings of their own. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich writes that it is only as mothers that women’s bodies are seen as “beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing”. In order to be deemed worthy, a woman must be seen as maternal, or at least potentially maternal, and these ideas still play out in public discourse.
Hindi cinema especially favours mothers who are simultaneously all-forgiving and a force of moral rectitude. A few recent films such as Kapoor and Sons (2016) and Badhaai Ho (2018) have offered us more complex mothers but even here, the mother is neither sexually assertive nor ambitious beyond the domestic realm. Perhaps because in our real-world cultures too, we find it difficult to accept mothers cast in any role other than nourishing, the schism between good and bad mothers is maintained on-screen. Good mothers are givers (self-sacrificing, asexual, unambitious) and the bad ones are takers (self-seeking). Besides, bad mothers in Hindi cinema are often pictured as step-mothers or aunts (thus, not “real” mothers) – and the plot occasionally revolves around getting them to fall in line. In films like Beta (1992) where Laxmi (Aruna Irani) is a manipulative, even murderous step-mom, but Raju (Anil Kapoor) is willing to drink poison rather than confront the possibility that his mother would hurt his interests. Absolute devotion to an idealised Ma thus transforms even a bad mother into a good one.
Like popular cinema, politics too must appeal to a mass base and is similarly hampered by a lack of nuance. The American Vice-Presidential hopeful J D Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies” is a fine illustration of the anxieties surrounding women’s bodies should they refuse to be herded into the category of mother. In marked contrast, as Rich had pointed out half a century ago, fatherlessness or non-father is not seen a problem to be fixed, much less a negative category or a slur. It is hardly surprising then, that politics has little room for female leaders who assert themselves as sexual beings but who are not mothers. We need them to be maternal so that they nourish us and, if they’re smart politicians, they put to good use the full emotional, moral and ideological power invested in motherhood. But as for changing the way things are for women in general, it might take more than motherhood to pull that off.
Zaidi is a writer and filmmaker
