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For other uses, see Mother India (disambiguation).
Mother India
Film poster
Directed byMehboob Khan
Written byMehboob Khan
Wajahat Mirza
S. Ali Raza
Produced byMehboob Khan
StarringNargis
Sunil Dutt
Rajendra Kumar
Raaj Kumar
CinematographyFaredoon A. Irani
Edited byShamsudin Kadri
Music byNaushad
Production
company
Mehboob Productions
Release date
  • 25 October 1957 (1957-10-25)
Running time
172 minutes
CountryIndia
LanguageHindi

Mother India (Hindi: मदर इंडिया, Urdu: مدر انڈیا) is a 1957 Hindi film epic, written and directed by Mehboob Khan and starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar and Raaj Kumar. The film, a melodrama, is a remake of Mehboob Khan's earlier film, Aurat (1940). It is the story of a poverty-stricken village woman named Radha who, amid many other trials and tribulations, struggles to raise her sons and survive against an evil money-lender. Despite her hardship, she sets a goddess-like moral example of what it means to be an Indian woman, yet kills her own criminal son at the end for the greater moral good. She represents India as a nation in the aftermath of independence.

The film ranks among the all-time Indian box office hits and has been described as "an all-time Indian blockbuster" and "perhaps India's most revered film". The film won the National Film Award for Third Best Feature Film in 1958. Mother India belongs to a small collection of films, including Kismet (1943), Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Sholay (1975) which continue to be watched daily throughout India and are considered to be definitive Hindi cultural film classics. The film was India's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958 and was chosen as one of the five nominations for the category.

Plot

The film begins with construction completion of a water canal to the village, set in the present. Radha (Nargis), as the 'mother' of the village, is asked to open the canal and remembers back to her past when she was newly married.

The wedding between Radha and Shamu (Raaj Kumar) was paid for by Radha's mother-in-law who raised a loan from the moneylender, Sukhilala. This event starts the spiral of poverty and hardship which Radha endures. The conditions of the loan are disputed, but the village elders decide in favour of the moneylender, after which Shamu and Radha are forced to pay three quarters of their crop as interest on the loan of 500 rupees. Whilst trying to bring more of their land into use to alleviate their poverty, Shamu's arms are crushed by a boulder. He is ashamed of his helplessness and is humiliated by others in the village; deciding that he is no use to his family, he leaves and does not return. Soon after, Radha's mother-in-law dies. Radha continues to work in the fields with her two sons and gives birth again. Sukhilala offers to help alleviate her poverty in return for Radha marrying him, but she refuses to "sell herself". A storm and a resultant flood sweeps through the village, destroys the harvest, and kills Radha's youngest child. Though at first the villagers begin to migrate, they decide to stay and rebuild on the urging of Radha.

The film then skips forward several years to when Radha's two surviving children, Birju (Dutt) and Ramu (Rajendra Kumar), are young men. Birju, embittered by the exactions of Sukhilala since he was a child, takes out his frustrations by pestering the village girls, especially Sukhilala's daughter. Ramu, by contrast, has a calmer temper and is married soon after. Though he becomes a father, his wife is soon absorbed into the cycle of poverty in the family. Birju's anger finally becomes dangerous and, after being provoked, attacks Sukhilala and his daughter, lashing out at his family. He is chased out of the village and becomes a bandit. On the day of the wedding of Sukhilala's daughter, Birju returns to take his revenge. He kills Sukhilala and takes his daughter. Radha, who had promised that Birju would not do harm, shoots Birju, who dies in her arms. The film ends in the present day with her opening of the canal and reddish water flowing into the fields.

Cast

  • Nargis as Radha, the heroine and archetypal Indian woman
  • Sunil Dutt as Birju, Radha's younger rebellious son, who turns into a dacoit.
  • Rajendra Kumar as Ramu, Radha's elder son, who paths his mother's path of virtuousness
  • Raaj Kumar as Shamu, Radha's husband
  • Kanhaiyalal as Sukhilala "Lala", the evil and cunning evil-lender
  • Jilloo Maa
  • Kumkum as Champa
  • Sheela Naik as Kamla
  • Mukri as Shambu
  • Azra as Chandra
  • Master Sajid Khan as a young Birju
  • Master Surendra as a young Ramu

Production

Origin and inspiration

A photograph used in Katherine Mayo's controversial book Mother India. The caption was "Hindu mother and child. She feeds it opium when it cries."

The title of the film is taken from American author Katherine Mayo's 1927 polemical book Mother India, in which she attacked Indian society, religion and culture. The book created a sensation on three continents.[1] Written against the demands for self-rule and Indian independence, Mayo pointed to the treatment of India's women, the untouchables, the animals, the dirt, and the character of its nationalistic politicians. Mayo singled out the "rampant" and fatally weakening sexuality of its males to be at the core of all problems, leading to masturbation, rape, homosexuality, prostitution, venereal diseases, and, most importantly, too early sexual intercourse and premature maternity. Mayo created an outrage across India, and her book was burned along with an effigy of its author.[2] It was criticised by Mahatma Gandhi as a "report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon".[3] The book prompted over fifty angry books and pamphlets to be published in response to Mother India to highlight Mayo's errors and false perception of Indian society which had become one of the most powerful influences on the American people's view of India in history.[4]

Khan had the idea for the film and the title as early as 1952; in October that year, he approached the import authorities on a matter related to producing the film.[5] In 1955, the Indian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting learned of the title of the forthcoming film and demanded that director Mehboob Khan send them the script for review, suspicious that the film was based on the book and a possible threat to national interest.[6] The film team dispatched the script along with a two-page letter on 17 September 1955 saying:[7]

There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding in regard to our film producing Mother India and Mayo's book. Not only are the two incompatible but totally different and indeed opposite. 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.

Khan drew upon inspiration from another American author, Pearl S. Buck and her books The Good Earth (1931) and The Mother (1934), which were made into feature films by Sidney Franklin in 1937 and 1940 respectively.[7] Khan originally drew upon these influences in making his 1940 film Aurat, the original version of Mother India,[8]. Some of the stylistic elements to the 1957 film show similarities with the 1926 Vsevolod Pudovkin Soviet silent movie Mother (based on a novel by Maxim Gorky) and Our Daily Bread (1934), directed by King Vidor.[9] An unrelated Indian film had been directed under the name of Mother India in 1938.[7]

Script

The story of Aurat, Mehboob Khan's 1940 film on which Mother India was based, was developed by Babubhai Mehta who drew inspiration from Pearl S. Buck's novel The Mother.[10] The book chronicled the life of a Chinese woman, her married life as well as her lonely struggle when she was abandoned by her husband. Moneylenders, toiling on land, rearing children through hardship were part of the story. The script for Aurat was developed by Wajahat Mirza. The old script by Mirza had to be reworked to create the new script of Mother India.[11] S. Ali Raza, a young screenwriter at that time, was appointed alongside the veteran Mirza for the effort. Apart from Mehboob Khan, Mirza and Raza, prominent screenwriters Aghajani Kashmeri, Zia Sarhadi, Akhtar Mirza, music director Naushad, assistant director of the film, and many others were consulted to formulate the script.[12] The dialogues of the film was completely reworked by Mirza and Raza.[12] The script was intentionally written in a way which promoted the empowerment of women in Indian society, the power to resist the sexual advances of men, and the maintenance of a sense of moral dignity and purpose as individuals, contrary to what Katherine Mayo had claimed in her book Mother India. Alongside the similarity with its precursor Aurat in portraying women empowerment and morality, the script of Mother India weaved in strong sense nationalism and nation-building, utlizing characters personifying abstract qualities such as "...beauty and goodness, wealth and power, poverty and exploitation, community spirit..."[11]

Casting

Nargis was the directors' first choice for the role,[13] and despite only being aged 26 at the time, she plays the role of the new wife, young single mother and an aged mother of two young sons.[14] Khan had wanted to cast Sabu, a major Hollywood star of Indian origin at the time, as Birju.[13] Dilip Kumar had originally expressed a very keen interest in playing Birju, something advocated by Khan. In fact, he also agreed to play the husband too.[13] However, Nargis objected that the public will not accept their casting as mother-son as she has done several romantic films as heroine with him. The role finally ended up with Sunil Dutt.[15][13] Master Sajid, the actor who portrayed the young Birju, was an unknown at the the tine, and was reportedly selected from a lorry packed with poor children.[13] Mehboob Khan reportedly took just three minutes to cast Raaj Kumar as Nargis' husband.[13]

Filming

Mehboob Studios

The shooting of Mother India started in 1955 with a budget of 20-25 lakh rupees.[16][13] However, the budget increased to 35-40 lakh by the end of the filming because of the outdoor sessions and salaries to the contributors. The record budget of Mother India was surpassed by Mughal-e-Azam three years later.[13] Rajendra Kumar and Raaj Kumar were paid a salary of 5000 and 6000 rupees per amount for ten months.[17] Playback singer Lata Mangeshkar reportedly donated her earnings of over one hundred rupees from the film to charitable causes she was involved with at the time, and on 5 October 1957 the production team, Indra Films, donated 300 rupees to a religious person in Delhi.[18] Music director Naushad was paid a salary of 20000 rupees per month.[19]

Several of the internal scenes for the film were shot at Mehboob Studios in Bandra, Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1956, although Mehboob Khan and cinematographer Faredoon A. Irani attempted to shoot as often as possible on location to try to make the film as realistic as possible, with a touch of splendour.[20] Other scenes were shot in various cities in the states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Uttar Pradesh.[21] Mehboob insisted that the film be shot in 35mm by cinematographer Irani.[20] Contemporary cinematographer Anil Mehta has noted the mastery of Irani's cinematic techniques in shooting the film, including his "intricate tracks and pans, the detailed mise en scène patterns Irani conceived, even for brief shots – in the studios as well as on location".[20] The film took about three years to make from early organisation, planning, and scripting to filming completion.[22] In a November 1956 interview, after production for the film had wound down, Nargis described the film shoot and character portrayal as the most demanding of her career.[23]

In the flood scene in the film, a farmer agreed to flood 500 acres of his land free of cost, however he was paid later.[24] In the exodus scene following the flood, 300 bullock carts, 200 farmers, horses and tracters were used.[25] Nargis actually worked in the muddy flood waters, which caused her skin allergies.[26]

The fire scene was shot in March 1957 in Umra, Gujarat by burning hay bales. Nargis and Dutt performed the fire scene without duplicates. During filming, an accident occurred during the fire scene when the wind direction changed and the fire grew out of control, trapping Nargis. She was saved by co-star Sunil Dutt who quickly grabbed a blanket, plunged inside, and rescued her.[27][28] Shooting halted temporarily as both sustained injuries.[13] Dutt was hospitalized for the burns and Nargis helped nurse him.[29] Nargis - a poplar actress at the time - fell in love with Dutt, who was in early stages of his film career and plays her son in the film, and they were married within a year.[27][30] Nargis wished to marry soon after the film, however Khan protested that real-life marriage of the reel-life mother-son would be disastrous for the film.[13] Due to the relationship, Nargis also felt it difficult to perform a scene where she had beat Dutt with a lathi.[31]

Themes

The term "Mother India" has been defined as "a common icon for the emergent Indian nation in the early 20th century in both colonialist and nationalist discourse".[32] The film, an archetypal nationalistic picture, was symbolic in that it demonstrated the euphoria of "Mother India" in a nation which had only been independent for 10 years, and it had a long-lasting cultural impact upon the Indian people.[33] It also represented the agrarian poverty and hardship of the people at the time.[34] Film scholar Saibal Chatterjee feels that Mother India was a "mirror of independent India", highlighting problems of a nascent independent India like rural exploitation of farmers by money-lenders, in a dramatic fashion understandable to the common man.[35] Film scholar Gayatri Chatterjee interprets the film as an allegory. The red water flowing from the canal irritating the green fields at the end of the film is seen as the blood of Indians struggling for independence and those nourishing a new free India.[36] It had major significance in terms of the patriotism and the changing situation in the nation at the time, and how the country was functioning without British authority.[37] Rosie Thomas highlighted the themes of "female chastity, modern nationalism and morality" as being central to the film, identifying the discourses around female sexuality, modern nationalism, and their political implications as they intersect.[38][39] Lonely Planet described the film as "perhaps the most compelling film about the role of women in rural India, a moving tale about love, loss and the maternal bond".[40] The Hindustan Times identifies the "film's pungent social references [which] are now lost in cinema's graveyard," images which are "too harsh to be sold at a profit today. But this heartrending tale filled Indians with hope and pride then."[41]

The film draws upon Hindu mythology, with the deity-couple Krishna and his lover Radha, and the Hindu epic characters like Sita, Savitri, and Draupadi.[42][33] Nargis's Mother India is a metonymic representation of a Hindu woman, reflecting high Hindu values, with high moral values and the concept of what it means to be a mother to society through self-sacrifice.[33] Mother India can also be seen as a metaphor of the trinity of mother, God, and a dynamic nation.[43][44] In the wider context, her character is allegorical of what it means to be a mother in general.[45][46]

The Mother India figure is an icon in several respects, being associated with a goddess, her function as a wife, as a lover, and even compromising her femininity at the end of the film by playing the role of Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer, masculine gods.[47] However, while aspiring to traditional Hindu values, it is important to note that the character of Mother India also represents the changing role of the mother in Indian films and an Indian society in that the mother is not always subservient or dependent on her husband, refining the relationship to the male gender or patriarchal social structures.[48] There is considerable ambiguity in the film in which the mother figure acts as a provider, sacrificing aspects of her own life while also as a destroyer, annihilating her own son, something extremely rare in Hindi cinema.[49]

Part of the major success of the film may be attributed to the importance of Indian womanhood with Indian cultural values and that the character of Mother India represents an ideological figure to the people, with her strong values and moral guidance, despite suffering from poverty and hardship, which is relevant to many.[49] In his book, Terrorism, media, liberation, John David Slocum argues that like Satyajit Ray's classic masterpiece Pather Panchali (1955), Khan's Mother India has vied for alternative definitions of Indianness. However, he emphasises that the film is an overt mythologising and feminising of the nation in which Indian audiences around the globe have used their pure imagination to define it in the nationalistic context, given that in reality the storyline is about a poverty-stricken peasant from northern India, not than a true ideal of a modernising, powerful nation.[50] Jonathan Romney of The Independent describes the earth-mother Radha as "India's answer to Anna Magnani" and the film as a "musical melodrama [which] is not just a populist romance but an all- out exercise in ideological myth-making."[51] The New Internationalist says of Radha, "This is not the act of a wholly powerless woman. Indeed Radha's subtle transformation from more-or-less mute, submissive wife to an independently powerful mother, reflects the way the film discreetly disrupts female stereotypes. Traditionally, wives are seen as eternally self-sacrificing, and although mothers are given a greater degree of expressive autonomy, they are frequently models of piety. Radha is far from being a straightforward paragon of religious virtue. She evolves in the film's second half into a complex older woman, by turns sprightly, by turns truculent, her devotion to her two grown-up sons taking on almost incestuous overtones. Indeed, psychoanalytic underpinnings also surface with the characterization of the second son Birju, who as a little boy is all mischief and irrepressibility, but who as an adult becomes wayward, his energy transforming into aggression." [52]

Jyotika Virdi has argued that in her chastity, Mother India channels her sexual desires into maternal love for her sons who effectively become "substitute erotic subjects".[49] Parallels are drawn with Gandhi's personification of the Indian woman as a goddess, acquiring certain masculine traits as they gain power as the goddesses did in Hindu mythology, but it is a power which is made more subtle by their virtue and acquiescence.[53] For instance, in a pamphlet published with the intention to introduce the film in the social context to western audiences, it described Indian women as being "an altar in India", that Indians "measure the virtue of their race by the chastity of their women", and that the "Indian mothers are the nucleus around which revolves the tradition and culture of ages."[54]

While the nationalistic representation of Hindu values may seem unusual in that the "Mother India" figure was portrayed by a Muslim actress and directed by a Muslim director,[33][55] people such as Salman Rushdie stated that Bombay cinema is "highly syncretic", and its "hyphenated Hindu-Muslim nature is present in not only its discourses and production practices but indeed its very ideology".[56] Rushdie describes Nargis's portrayal of Mother India as follows:

"In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant women is idealised as bride, mother, and producers of sons, as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother's love, she becomes, as one critic mentioned, 'that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mothers who haunts the fantasy of Indian males."[56]

Mother India's actions at the end of the film in shooting her own son Birju have been said to "rupture the traditional mother-son relationship in order to balance the moral universe".[57] The shooting stance of Nargis at the end of the film is one of the all time iconic images of Hindi cinema. Parama Roy describes Nargis's identification with her role in the film as being "as much about Nargis dead as it is about Nargis alive" and highlights on-screen and off-screen real-life events in her own life which embodied her character of Radha.[38] Roy and Das Guptar have seen Nargis's portrayal of a Hindu woman, being a Muslim, as an allegory of the increasing symbiosis of religions in a multicultural and multi-ethnic society. Mother India was warmly received by countries in the Arab world, and in Algeria the film was still packing cinema houses ten years after its release.[57][58]

Reception

Release

The production team had planned the film release for the tenth Indian Independence Day on 15 August, but the film was released over two months later.[59] The film premiered at the Liberty Cinema in Bombay during Diwali week on 25 October 1957, where it ran continuously for more than a year.[60][27][61] It also released in Calcutta the same day [59] and in Delhi on 1 November 1957.[5] It reached all distribution zones in India by the end of November. Ministers and government officials were invited in the premiers. A special screening was held in Rashtrapati Bhavan (presidential quarter) in New Delhi on 23 October 1957; the event was attended by the President of India Rajendra Prasad, the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi.[62] Chief Minister of West Bengal, Bidhan Chandra Roy and Governor Padmaja Naidu attended screening in Calcutta. Impressed with the nationalistic message of the film, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Morarji Desai granted it exemption from entertainment tax in the state.[62]

The film netted a reported Rs. 1,06,35,95,000 (inflation-adjusted as of 2004), making it the highest grossing Bollywood film ever at the time.[63][64][65] The film did exceptionally good business in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka and Maharashtra.[62] The success of the film led to Khan naming his next film Son of India. Released in 1962, it was not well received.[6][66] There was a renewed interest in the film in 1970s, with ticket sale showing an upsurge.[62] Mother India holds the record for being the Indian movie continuously running in the theatres. It ran for about 40 years up to mid-1990s.[67] The record of continuous distribution and viewing came to end with the advent of satellite television in India and change in film viewing pattern pattern.[68]

Greece and communist countries such as Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia were the initial buyers of the film in Europe. Mother India was dubbed in several European languages including Spanish, French and Russian, and did substantial business in Greece, Spain and Russia.[69] Technicolor arranged one screening of the film in Paris on 30 June 1958, under the name Les Bracelets d'or.[69] The film did minimal business in Paris, but fared better in French colonies. The film was successful in Latin American countries of Peru, Bolivia and Equador.[69] Mother India gained even more popularity in African countries. In some African countries the film ran successfully even after a decade of its release.[69] The film was released in US on 9 July 1959 to lukewarm response, and UK release was also a commercial failure.[69] The initial international version of the film was shortened by 40 minutes from the Indian release version.[69]

Critical reviews

Baburao Patel of Filmindia described Mother India after its release as "the greatest picture produced in India during forty and odd years of film-making" and later added that no other actress would have been able to perform the role as Nargis did.[70] In a 2002 review in The New York Times, film critic Dave Kehr said that the film "...is often said to have helped set the pattern for the nearly 50 years of Indian film that has followed it."[71] He compared the film with Stella Dallas (1937) for the thematic similarity of series of sacrifices made by the female lead, and with Gone with the Wind (1939) as an epic mirroring social upheavals.[71] In an article in The Village Voice, film critic J. Hoberman described the film as "...an outrageous masala of apparently discordant elements."[72] He further characterized the film as a mixture of "...indigenous versions of Soviet-style tractor-opera, Italian neo-realism, Hollywood kiddie-cuteness, a dozen Technicolor musical numbers, and, most significantly, a metaphoric overlay of pop Hinduism."[72] and criticized it stating "...performances are broad; the comedy is mainly slapstick. The politics are nationalist and vaguely left-wing."[72] The New Internationalist said, "It owed its success in no small part to the powerful sense of audience identification with the suffering of the mother figure at its centre. Played with exemplary skill by Nargis, who occupies a hallowed position in the Indian film pantheon, her performance suggested the very essence of noble self-sacrifice, womanly devotion, and adherence to the social and moral order. But the film's conservative values, profound though they were, were also deceptive, since it exhibited a clever interplay-artistically and politically-between the traditional and the radical."[52] Women's Feature Service described Mother India as "one of the most outstanding films of the post-Independence era."[73]

Awards

The film, Nargis, and Khan received numerous awards and nominations, and Nargis won the Filmfare Best Actress Award and became the first Indian to receive the Best Actress award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.[74] The film won the Filmfare Best Movie Award[63] and scooped several other awards including Filmfare Best Director Award for Khan,[75] Filmfare Best Cinematographer Award for Faredoon Irani,[76] and Filmfare Best Sound Award for R. Kaushik.[23] The film was India's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958 and was chosen as one of the five nominations for the category.[77] However, the submitted entry was dramatically different from the original version released in India. The version sent to the Academy was edited down to 120 minutes, cutting at least 40 minutes from the film for the benefit of a foreign audience.[78] Even the logo of Mehboob Productions, which featured the Communist Hammer and sickle was dropped to appease the Americans.[79] The 120-minute version was later distributed in the US and UK by Columbia Pictures.[80] The film came close to winning the Academy Award but lost to Federico Fellini's Nights of Cabiria by a single vote.[81]

Music

Untitled

The score and soundtrack for the movie was composed by Naushad. Mehboob Khan had worked on 8 films with Naushad before and developed rapport with him. Khan would explain the scene for the song to Naushad, who would record it in Khan's absence and send it over for Khan to shot it.[83] The lyrics were penned by Shakeel Badayuni. It made the list of "100 Greatest Bollywood Soundtracks Ever", as compiled by Planet Bollywood, although was not particularly well received upon release, with critics believing it didn't match the high pitch and quality of the film.[23][84] The soundtrack consists of 12 songs, and features vocals by Mohammed Rafi, Shamshad Begum, Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, etc. Planet Bollywood gave the album 7.5 of 10 stars.[85]

Mother India is the earliest example of a Hindi film containing Hollywood-style classical music in a film. An example is during the scene in which Birju runs away from his mother and rejects her motherly care and goodness.[86] It features a powerful symphonic orchestra with strings, woodwinds and trumpets.[86] This orchestral music contains extensive chromaticism, diminished seventh, and augmented scales which are played loudly.[86] It also features violin tremolos. The piece is unmelodic and effectively creates tension over such a negative moment in the film.[86] This use of a western-style orchestra in Indian cinema influenced many later films such as Mughal-e-Azam (1960), which features similar discordal orchestral music to create atmosphere at tense moments in the film.[86] The song "Holi Aayi Re Kanhai", sung by Shamshad Begum, has been cited as a typical Hindi film song which is written for and sung by a female singer, with an emotional charge which appeals to a mass audience.[87]

No.TitleSinger(s)Length
1."Chundariya Katati Jaye"Manna Dey3:15
2."Nagari Nagari Dware Dware"Lata Mangeshkar7:29
3."Duniya Men Hum Aaye Hain"Lata Mangeshkar, Meena Mangeshkar, Usha Mangeshkar3:36
4."O Gaadiwale"Shamshad Begum, Mohammed Rafi2:59
5."Matwala Jiya Dole Piya"Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi3:34
6."Dukh Bhare Din Beete Re Bhaiya"Shamshad Begum, Mohammed Rafi, Manna Dey, Asha Bhosle3:09
7."Holi Aayi Re Kanhai"Shamshad Begum2:51
8."Pi Ke Ghar Aaj Pyari Dulhaniya Chali"Shamshad Begum3:19
9."Ghunghat Nahin Kholoongi Saiyan"Lata Mangeshkar3:10
10."O Mere Lal Aaja"Lata Mangeshkar3:11
11."O Janewalo Jao Na"Lata Mangeshkar2:33
12."Na Main Bhagwan Hoon"Mohammed Rafi3:24
Total length:42:30

Influence and legacy

Rajeev Masand of CNN IBN notes that Mother India "didn't just put India on the world map, it also defined Hindi cinema for decades that followed."[88] The film has since been described as "perhaps India's most revered film", a "cinematic epic", a "flag-bearer of Hindi cinema and a legend in its own right".[42][22][89] It is regarded as Mehboob Khan's magnum opus. It has been described as an "all-time blockbuster", which ranks highly amongst India's most successful films.[90] A 1983 Channel 4 documentary into Bombay cinema described the film as setting a benchmark in Indian cinema for subsequent films to aspire to.[91] Mother India belongs to only a small collection of films, including Kismet (1943), Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Sholay (1975) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (1994), which continue to be heavily watched daily throughout India and are viewed as definitive Hindi films with cultural significance.[91][86] It was also acclaimed across the Arab world, in the Middle East, parts of Southeast Asia and North Africa and continued to be shown in countries such as Algeria at least ten years after its release.[58][91] John Abraham said of Nargis's performance and the film, "I would rate it as the best performance by any actress. The depth of the role was so intense that today it will be difficult to find something like that. It is an epic film and everyone can watch it even today."[13] The Hindustan Times stated that Nargis symbolised mothers in "which all the mothers [in later films] had the same clichéd roles to play. Representing both motherhood and Mother Earth, who also nurtures and occasionally punishes, Nargis immortalised the Indian mother on celluloid."[92]

Mother India is ranked #80 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[93] In 2005, Indiatimes Movies ranked the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films.[94] It was also listed among the only two Hindi films in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list (the other being Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge).[95] It was ranked third in the British Film Institute's poll of "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time.[96] The film provided an inspiration for many later films, including Yash Chopra's Deewar, a breakthrough film for Amitabh Bachchan and would later be remade by the Telugu film industry as Bangaru Talli (1971) and in Tamil as Punniya Boomi (1978).[9]

See also

References

  1. ^ Sinha 1998, Introduction.
  2. ^ "Short bio (by Katherine Frick)". Pabook.libraries.psu.edu. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
  3. ^ "Teaching Journal: Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927)". Lehigh.edu. 7 February 2006. Retrieved 15 June 2011.
  4. ^ Jayawardena, Kumari (1995). The white woman's other burden: Western women and South Asia during British colonial rule. Routledge. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-415-91104-7. Retrieved 23 February 2011.
  5. ^ a b Chatterjee 2002, p. 10.
  6. ^ a b Chatterjee 2002, p. 20.
  7. ^ a b c Sinha 2006, p. 248.
  8. ^ Rangoonwala 2003, p. 55.
  9. ^ a b Pauwels 2007, p. 178. sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFPauwels2007 (help)
  10. ^ Chatterjee 2002, p. 12.
  11. ^ a b Chatterjee 2002, p. 31.
  12. ^ a b Chatterjee 2002, p. 32.
  13. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Hindustan Times 2007.
  14. ^ Bollywood Blockbusters Part 2 2009, 1:27-1:41.
  15. ^ Bollywood Blockbusters Part 2 2009, 2:45-3:09.
  16. ^ Bollywood Blockbusters Part 3 2009, 0:26-0:33.
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Bibliography

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