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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The Indian mother you can’t miss
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The Indian mother you can’t miss

Before we say Bharat mata ki jai, every Indian should know motherhood is a choice, and not divine intervention

Illustration by Jayachandran/MintPremium
Illustration by Jayachandran/Mint

If you are an Indian, there are some mothers you can’t miss, besides your own of course.

Actor Nargis trudging over red earth with a plough tied to her torso (Mother India, 1957).

The cow, ubiquitous and uncared for. Gau mata.

A monstrous installation of a woman rocking a baby on her knees at a Mumbai street junction. It says, “A child gives birth to a mother."

Dialogue immortalized by actor Shashi Kapoor (Deewaar, 1975), then repeated to stirring effect by music composer A.R. Rahman in his acceptance speech at the Oscars in 2009: “Mere paas maa hai." For any retro-Hindi cinema enthusiast, Nirupa Roy, who played this maa, film after film, in the 1970s.

Deities Durga and Kali were created, Hindu myths would suggest, by the combined superpowers of male gods.

The benevolent Mother Mary—I am sure many aspiring mothers would love the fuss-free conception she was blessed with.

Women your mother’s age who declare “I am like your mother" and try hard to be your moral guardians.

A kitschy-looking divinity, a calendar art kind of figure with a golden crown, a trishul in her hands, a lion (and so lionized, literally) and the map of India behind her, derived from Durga-Kali idol art. She is Bharat Mata, now a political invocation and cry for patriotism/nationalism. If you don’t like Bharat Mata, you could be in trouble, as Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis and yoga guru and impresario Baba Ramdev suggested.

An ordinary Indian woman, of course, does not benefit from all this deification, metaphor-making and pop culture mash-up. According to data last collected by the Registrar General’s office, in 2012, the maternal mortality rate nationally is 178 (per 100,000 births); the Maharashtra figure is 87. Annually, an estimated 55,000 women die of preventable pregnancy-related causes in India. Assam has one of the worst maternal mortality rates: 328.

In Maharashtra, considered one of the more advanced states by most standards, the number of obstetricians and gynaecologists required in community health centres (CHCs) is 363—only 180 positions have been filled. Not every pregnant woman in India delivers under the supervision of professional medical staff. Maternal health and child mortality figures are worse in urban slums than rural areas in developing countries, according to a report released last year by the non-profit Save the Children. Many Indian organizations don’t give employees who are adoptive mothers maternity leave.

Yet, if you are not maa or don’t want to be maa, you are some kind of freak. Recently, at a dinner conversation I was part of, a married woman said she did not want a child and was happy caring for her brother’s children whenever she could because being a mother was painful. Another woman asked, “Are you a feminist?" The group went on to have a raucous conversation about feminism, but the mother of two who asked the question did not mean it as a joke. It reminded me of the scene from Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970) in which the character played by Dhritiman Chatterjee says, at a job interview, that the most important event of the 20th century was the war in Vietnam because it showed the courage and resilience of the Vietnamese people. The bespectacled prospective employer, in a faux-British, bhadralok accent, asks him, “Are you a Communist?"

Ask any mother if motherhood entails pain and she will say yes, or at least do the ambiguous Indian right-left nod of the head that usually means yes. Ask any mother if she was happy she became a mother and you will probably get the same nod. But every woman knows there is no divinity in motherhood. Not every Indian woman wants to be a mother, or considers it her reason for existing.

I can’t be punished for refusing to say “Bharat mata ki jai" unless the numbers about maternal health change. Before we say “Bharat mata ki jai", every Indian should know motherhood is a choice, and not divine intervention.

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Published: 15 Apr 2016, 08:44 PM IST
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