"You wait a year for a film version of a Booker prize-winning magical realist novel largely concerned with people from the Indian subcontinent and widely considered to be unfilmable. Then suddenly two come along: Life of Pi and Midnight's Children."So says Philip French in his review for The Guardian of Deepa Mehta's film of Midnight's Children with Salman Rushdie, the author of the original novel, adapting the novel for the screenplay, including his spoken narrative within the film.
The novel
The novel is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. He was born with telepathic powers, as well as an enormous and constantly dripping nose with an extremely sensitive sense of smell. The novel is divided into three books.
The book begins with the story of the Sinai family, particularly with events leading up to India's Independence and Partition. Saleem is born precisely at midnight, 15 August 1947, therefore, exactly as old as independent India. He later discovers that all children born in India between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. on that date are imbued with special powers. Saleem, using his telepathic powers, assembles a Midnight Children's Conference, reflective of the issues India faced in its early statehood concerning the cultural, linguistic, religious, and political differences faced by a vastly diverse nation. Saleem acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting to discover the meaning of their gifts. In particular, those children born closest to the stroke of midnight wield more powerful gifts than the others. Shiva "of the Knees", Saleem's nemesis, and Parvati, called "Parvati-the-witch," are two of these children with notable gifts and roles in Saleem's story.
Meanwhile, Saleem's family begin a number of migrations and endure the numerous wars which plague the subcontinent. During this period he also suffers amnesia until he enters a quasi-mythological exile in the jungle of Sundarban, where he is re-endowed with his memory. In doing so, he reconnects with his childhood friends. Saleem later becomes involved with the Indira Gandhi-proclaimed Emergency and her son Sanjay's "cleansing" of the Jama Masjid slum. For a time Saleem is held as a political prisoner; these passages contain scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi's over-reach during the Emergency as well as a personal lust for power bordering on godhood. The Emergency signals the end of the potency of the Midnight Children, and there is little left for Saleem to do but pick up the few pieces of his life he may still find and write the chronicle that encompasses both his personal history and that of his still-young nation, a chronicle written for his son, who, like his father, is both chained and supernaturally endowed by history.
The technique of magical realism finds liberal expression throughout the novel and is crucial to constructing the parallel to the country's history. The story moves in different parts of Indian Subcontinent – from Kashmir to Agra and then to Bombay (now Mumbai), Lahore and Dhaka. Nicholas Stewart in his essay, "Magic realism in relation to the post-colonial and Midnight's Children," argues that the "narrative framework of Midnight's Children consists of a tale – comprising his life story – which Saleem Sinai recounts orally to his wife-to-be Padma. This self-referential narrative (within a single paragraph Saleem refers to himself in the first person: ″And I, wishing upon myself the curse of Nadir Khan." and the third: "'I tell you,' Saleem cried, 'it is true. ...'") recalls indigenous Indian culture, particularly the similarly orally recounted Arabian Nights.
Midnight's Children has been called;
"a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel"
Rege, Josna E. (Fall 1997) "Victim into Protagonist? 'Midnight's Children' and the post-Rushie National Narratives of the Eighties". Studies in the Novel. 29 JSTOR 29533221)And this is true to the extent that the decade after its 1981 publication has been called "post-Rushdie". During that decade, many novels inspired by Midnight's Children were written by both established and young Indian writers.
Midnight's Children was awarded the 1981 Booker Prize, the English Speaking Union Literary Award, and the James Tait Prize. It also was awarded The Best of the Booker prize twice, in 1993 and 2008 (this was an award given out by the Booker committee to celebrate the 25th and 40th anniversary of the award).
In 1984 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi brought an action against the book in the British courts, claiming to have been defamed by a single sentence in chapter 28, penultimate paragraph, in which her son Sanjay Gandhi is said to have had a hold over his mother by his accusing her of contributing to his father Feroze Gandhi's death through her neglect. The case was settled out of court when Salman Rushdie agreed to remove the offending sentence.
Indian English Literature
Salman Rushdie writes in English, and as such, is one of a group of contemporary novelists and a body of work that is referred to as Indian English Literature or IEL. IEL refers to the body of work by writers in India who write in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous languages of India. Its early history began with the works of Michael Madhusudan Dutt followed by R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao who contributed to Indian fiction in the 1930s. It is also associated with the works of members of the Indian diaspora, such as V. S. Naipaul, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Kovid Gupta, Agha Shahid Ali, Rohinton Mistry and Salman Rushdie, who are of Indian descent.
Postcolonial literature
This phenomenon in the literary arts necessarily falls within a larger category of Postcolonial literature, that is the literature by people from formerly colonised countries. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of the novel in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
Recent history of Indian English literature
IEL has a relatively recent history, being only one and a half centuries old. The first book written by an Indian in English was Travels of Dean Mahomet, a travel narrative by Sake Dean Mahomet published in England in 1793. In its early stages, IEL was influenced by the Western novel. Early Indian writers used English unadulterated by Indian words to convey an experience which was essentially Indian. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894) wrote Rajmohan's Wife and published it in 1864; it is the first Indian novel written in English. Raja Rao (1908–2006), Indian philosopher and writer, authored Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope, which are Indian in terms of their storytelling qualities. Kisari Mohan Ganguli translated the Mahabharata into English, the only time the epic has ever been translated in its entirety into a European language. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) wrote in Bengali and English and was responsible for the translations of his own work into English. Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1890–1936) was the first Indian author to win a literary award in the United States. Nirad C. Chaudhuri (1897–1999), a writer of non-fiction, is best known for his The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), in which he relates his life experiences and influences. P. Lal (1929–2010), a poet, translator, publisher and essayist, founded a press in the 1950s for Indian English writing, Writers Workshop.
R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) contributed over many decades and continued to write till his death. He was discovered by Graham Greene in the sense that the latter helped him find a publisher in England. Greene and Narayan remained close friends till the end. Similar to the way Thomas Hardy used Wessex, Narayan created the fictitious town of Malgudi where he set his novels. Some criticise Narayan for the parochial, detached and closed world that he created in the face of the changing conditions in India at the times in which the stories are set. Others, such as Greene, however, feel that through Malgudi they could vividly understand the Indian experience. Narayan's evocation of small town life and its experiences through the eyes of the endearing child protagonist Swaminathan in Swami and Friends is a good sample of his writing style. Simultaneous with Narayan's pastoral idylls, a very different writer, Mulk Raj Anand (1905–2004), was similarly gaining recognition for his writing set in rural India, but his stories were harsher, and engaged, sometimes brutally, with divisions of caste, class and religion. According to writer Lakshmi Holmström, "The writers of the 1930s were fortunate because after many years of use, English had become an Indian language used widely and at different levels of society, and therefore they could experiment more boldly and from a more secure position."
Contemporary Indian authors writing in English
Among the more recent writers, the most notable is Salman Rushdie, born in India, now living in the USA. Rushdie's famous work Midnight's Children (Booker Prize 1981, Booker of Bookers 1992, and Best of the Bookers 2008) ushered in a new trend of writing. He used a hybrid language – English generously peppered with Indian terms – to convey a theme that could be seen as representing the vast canvas of India.
He is usually categorised under the magic realism mode of writing most famously associated with Gabriel García Márquez.
Nayantara Sehgal was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political change. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.
Anita Desai, who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain and a British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea.
Her daughter Kiran Desai won the 2006 Man Booker Prize for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss.
Ruskin Bond received Sahitya Akademy Award for his collection of short stories Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra in 1992. He is also the author of a historical novel A Flight of Pigeons, which is based on an episode during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
Vikram Seth, author of The Golden Gate (1986) and A Suitable Boy (1994) is a writer who uses a purer English and more realistic themes. Being a self-confessed fan of Jane Austen, his attention is on the story, its details and its twists and turns.Vikram Seth is notable both as an accomplished novelist and poet. Vikram Seth's outstanding achievement as a versatile and prolific poet remains largely and unfairly neglected.
Another writer who has contributed immensely to the Indian English Literature is Amitav Ghosh who is the author of The Circle of Reason (his 1986 debut novel), The Shadow Lines (1988), The Calcutta Chromosome (1995), The Glass Palace (2000), The Hungry Tide (2004), and Sea of Poppies (2008), the first volume of The Ibis trilogy, set in the 1830s, just before the Opium War, which encapsulates the colonial history of the East. Ghosh's latest work of fiction is River of Smoke (2011), the second volume of The Ibis trilogy.
Rohinton Mistry is an India born Canadian author who is a Neustadt International Prize for Literature laureate (2012). His first book Tales from Firozsha Baag (1987) published by Penguin Books Canada is a collection of 11 short stories. His novels Such a Long Journey (1991) and A Fine Balance (1995) earned him great acclaim.
Shashi Tharoor, in his The Great Indian Novel (1989), follows a story-telling (though in a satirical) mode as in the Mahabharata drawing his ideas by going back and forth in time. His work as UN official living outside India has given him a vantage point that helps construct an objective Indianness.
Vikram Chandra is another author who shuffles between India and the United States and has received critical acclaim for his first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and collection of short stories Love and Longing in Bombay (1997).
His namesake Vikram A. Chandra is a renowned journalist and the author of The Srinagar Conspiracy (2000).
Suketu Mehta is another writer currently based in the United States who authored Maximum City (2004), an autobiographical account of his experiences in the city of Mumbai.
In 2008, Arvind Adiga received the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel The White Tiger.
Recent writers in India such as Arundhati Roy and David Davidar show a direction towards contextuality and rootedness in their works. Arundhati Roy, a trained architect and the 1997 Booker prize winner for her The God of Small Things, calls herself a "home grown" writer. Her award winning book is set in the immensely physical landscape of Kerala.
Davidar sets his The House of Blue Mangoes in Southern Tamil Nadu. In both the books, geography and politics are integral to the narrative. In his novel Lament of Mohini (2000), Shreekumar Varma touches upon the unique matriarchal system and the sammandham system of marriage as he writes about the Namboodiris and the aristocrats of Kerala.
Similarly, Arnab Jan Deka, a trained engineer and jurist, writes about both physical and ethereal existentialism on the banks of the mighty river Brahmaputra, and his co-authored book of poetry with British poet-novelist Tess Joyce appropriately titled A Stanza of Sunlight on the Banks of Brahmaputra (1983) published from both India and Britain (2009) which is set under this backdrop evokes the spirit of flowing nature of life. His most recent book Brahmaputra and Beyond: Linking Assam to the World (2015) made a conscious effort to connect to a world divided by racial, geographic, linguistic, cultural and political prejudices. His highly acclaimed short story collection The Mexican Sweetheart & other stories (2002) was another landmark book of this genre.
Jahnavi Barua, a Bangalore based author from Assam has set her critically acclaimed collection of short stories Next Door on the social scenario in Assam with insurgency as the background.
The stories and novels of Ratan Lal Basu reflect the conditions of tribal people and hill people of West Bengal and the adjacent states of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal. Many of his short stories reflect the political turmoil of West Bengal since the Naxalite movement of the 1970s. Many of his stories like ‘Blue Are the Far Off Mountains’, ‘The First Rain’ and ‘the Magic Marble’ glorify purity of love. His novel ‘Oraon and the Divine Tree’ is the story of a love for an age old tree. In Hemingway style language the author takes the reader into the dreamland of nature and people who are inexorably associated with nature.
What about Indian literature?
One of the key issues raised in this context is the superiority/inferiority of IWE (Indian Writing in English) as opposed to the literary production in the various languages of India. Key polar concepts bandied in this context are superficial/authentic, imitative/creative, shallow/deep, critical/uncritical, elitist/parochial and so on.
The views of Salman Rushdie and Amit Chaudhuri expressed through their books The Vintage Book of Indian Writing and The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature respectively essentialise this battle.
Rushdie's statement in his book – "the ironic proposition that India's best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists is simply too much for some folks to bear" – created a lot of resentment among many writers, including writers in English. In his book, Amit Chaudhuri questions – "Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?"
Chaudhuri feels that after Rushdie, IWE started employing magical realism, bagginess, non-linear narrative and hybrid language to sustain themes seen as microcosms of India and supposedly reflecting Indian conditions. He contrasts this with the works of earlier writers such as Narayan where the use of English is pure, but the deciphering of meaning needs cultural familiarity. He also feels that Indianness is a theme constructed only in IWE and does not articulate itself in the vernacular literatures. He further adds "the post-colonial novel, becomes a trope for an ideal hybridity by which the West celebrates not so much Indianness, whatever that infinitely complex thing is, but its own historical quest, its reinterpretation of itself".
Indian literature is a literature that is ancient and diverse
Indian literature refers to the literature produced on the Indian subcontinent until 1947 and in the Republic of India thereafter. This represents a vast and complex artistic phenomenon, that reflects a diversity of language and tradition across India and the wider region. The Republic of India itself has 22 officially recognized languages.
The earliest works of Indian literature were orally transmitted. Sanskrit literature begins with the oral literature of the Rig Veda a collection of sacred hymns dating to the period 1500–1200 BCE. The Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata appeared towards the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Classical Sanskrit literature developed rapidly during the first few centuries of the first millennium BCE, as did the Tamil Sangam literature, and the Pāli Canon. In the medieval period, literature in Kannada and Telugu appeared in the 9th and 11th centuries respectively. Later, literature in Marathi, Odia and Bengali appeared. Thereafter literature in various dialects of Hindi, Persian and Urdu began to appear as well. Early in the 20th century, Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became India's first Nobel laureate. In contemporary Indian literature, there are two major literary awards; these are the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship and the Jnanpith Award. Eight Jnanpith Awards each have been awarded in Hindi and Kannada, followed by five in Bengali and Malayalam, four in Odia, three in Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu and Urdu, two each in Assamese and Tamil, and one in Sanskrit.
The film of Midnight's Children
Selling ‘Midnight’s Children’ in India
By Neha Thirani Bagri and Gayatri Rangachari Shah February 1, 2013 10:15 am
“Am I allowed to mention the Rushdie word?” quipped the historian and author Tom Holland at the recently concluded Jaipur Literature Festival. Mr. Holland was speaking of Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel, “Midnight’s Children,” a book he called a contemporary classic.
His comment alluded to the political baggage attached to Mr. Rushdie in India, the country of his birth, because of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which is banned in India and sparked a death threat against him from Iran in 1989. Last year, Mr. Rushdie canceled a scheduled appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival because of an assassination threat against him in connection with the book.
Controversy over Mr. Rushdie flared up again this week, as he came to India to promote the film “Midnight’s Children,” directed by the award-winning filmmaker Deepa Mehta and based upon Mr. Rushdie’s acclaimed novel by the same name. Beginning on the eve of India’s independence from British rule, “Midnight’s Children” follows the country through its early years as a new nation through the lives of the children born at the stroke of midnight on Aug. 15, 1947.
On Wednesday, Mr. Rushdie was scheduled to attend a publicity event in Kolkata for the movie, along with Ms. Mehta. However, the visit was called off at the last minute, giving rise to speculation that the state government had canceled the visit because of pressure from Muslim groups.
On Friday, Mr. Rushdie said as much on Twitter. “The simple fact is that the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee ordered the police to block my arrival,” he said. In a statement issued Friday, he clarified that he had been planning to take part in a session at the Kolkata Literary Meet, where he had been invited by the organizers to appear as “a surprise guest.” He also said that a police source had shared his itinerary with the press, thereby inciting trouble.
“What is happening in India nowadays is an accumulating scandal and a growing disgrace to this great nation,” said Mr. Rushdie in the statement. “I can only hope that the people of India have the will to demand that such assaults on freedom cease once and for all.”
However, Mr. Rushdie was able to attend the premiere of the film at Mumbai’s PVR Cinema in Phoenix Mills on Thursday. The theater was lined with nearly 50 police officers standing guard, and two truckloads of officers sat outside the gates of the mall complex.
The premiere was well attended by the actors in the movie, including Shriya Saran, Shahana Goswami, Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Rahul Bose, and they were in a celebratory mood.
“I think that this is a bit of good news that in the middle of dark times for our creative freedom that this film is releasing here,” Mr. Bose said at the premiere. “I am sentimentally invested in the movie because it’s a movie I was supposed to be part of in a production 15 years ago. That one was stymied at the last moment, but this one wasn’t. And I’m playing a small role, but it’s nice to be part of it.”
As the crowd vied to get a view of Mr. Rushdie as he entered, he gamely posed for photographs with fans and greeted friends and well-wishers. Also in attendance were the actress Nandita Das, the director and screenwriter Dev Benegal, the film director and screenwriter Sudhir Mishra, the cricketer Yuvraj Singh, the columnist Anil Dharker and the actor Arunoday Singh.
While film adaptations of books, particularly those considered classics, are always tricky, “Midnight’s Children” elicited a largely positive response. “I think Midnight’s Children is a pretty impossible book to make a film of, and this one is a fantastic effort,” said the Indian stage and film actor Gerson da Cunha after the screening. “I just hope that it works in India because, well, it is a difficult film.”
The performances by each of the actors drew wide praise from the audience, who clapped enthusiastically at the end of the film. “The search for identity as depicted by the actors was very touching,” said Dolly Thakore, a veteran theater actress.
“Midnight’s Children,” which had its worldwide premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, is opening in India in 250 theaters and 15 cities, a wider rollout than in Canada in November (120 screens) and in Britain in late December (180 screens). A release in the United States is slated for April.
Distributed in India by PVR Pictures, the film is opening across a “good number of screens,” said the company’s vice president of marketing, Arun Nair.
“As a nondubbed, nonaction film, it’s a big opening for an English film,” Mr. Nair added, noting in comparison that other similar English-language films, like last year’s “Killing Them Softly,” starring Brad Pitt, opened in only 75 screens. (Big-budget Hollywood movies, typically dubbed in local languages, open to much larger audiences. “The Amazing Spider-Man,” for example, opened in 1,250 screens while “The Avengers” opened in 1,100.)
While there was initially some uncertainty about the film finding a distributor in India, when PVR purchased the movie rights in October, Kamal Gianchandani, the company’s president, told Reuters that he was not expecting any trouble. “We don’t think the film is controversial,” he said.
Apart from the canceled Kolkata event, “Midnight’s Children” seems to have elicited a muted response from the public so far, which is surprising, considering Mr. Rushdie’s involvement and the book’s criticism of Indira Gandhi and her imposition of emergency powers in India between 1975 and 1977. Three years after the book was published, Mrs. Gandhi sued for defamation in Britain, over a single sentence that implied she was responsible for her husband’s death. The case was settled out of court, with Mr. Rushdie deleting the sentence.
The Congress Party, which reveres Mrs. Gandhi as an icon, has said nothing publicly. The film passed the censors without any cuts.
The movie was shot in Sri Lanka, somewhat secretly, said Ms. Mehta, who has been the target of protests by Hindu fundamentalists. “He’s got the Muslims, and I’ve got the Hindus,” she told the The Globe and Mail two years ago. Production was briefly interrupted because the Iranians protested, but was allowed to go ahead after the intervention of the Sri Lankan president. The filmmakers changed the title to “Winds of Change” for the remainder of the shoot.
A somewhat stealthy marketing strategy by PVR Pictures appears to have paid off for “Midnight’s Children,” which opened throughout the country Friday with little incident. “With Salman Rushdie, we did not want a repeat of Jaipur 2012,” said Mr. Nair.
“Controversies only create awareness for a film. What we were aiming for was ‘intent to watch,’ ” he said. “We avoided all controversy by keeping his plans in India under wraps. We targeted specific media, the six news channels and English-language press and specific cities.”
In Mumbai earlier this week, the venue for a promotional event for the movie was shifted from the Landmark bookstore at Infiniti Mall, in suburban Andheri, to south Mumbai’s National Center for the Performing Arts. Ashutosh Pandey, the chief operating officer of Landmark, said in a press release that the move was due to “security concerns.”
The new venue was the Little Theater, a 114-seater tucked inside the center’s compound, with plenty of police personnel and plainclothes officers in attendance. Anil Dharker, who heads Literature Live, a local literary festival, later said that he was asked to organize a new venue four days before the scheduled promotional gig. “I knew the N.C.P.A. would support it. I said, ‘We will keep it for people only I know.’ We sent out no invites.”
Mr. Rushdie may be the sharpest assessor of why “Midnight’s Children” appears to have avoided attracting the screaming hordes. Last March, he told a spellbound audience at a conclave organized by the news magazine India Today: “I have this theory that the Indian electorate is smarter than the politicians and sees through them. Yes, people can sometimes be whipped up, as they were by the religious extremists in Jaipur. But how many people? How big are these mobs? How representative are they? These attacks, whether upon my book or people’s films or plays or paintings or whatever, these are not things that come from the bottom up.”
Reception
The Film's reception included this review by Philip French.
As a film and novel, Midnight's Children is a great baggy work covering over 60 years in the turbulent history of India and Pakistan from the end of the second world war up to Indira Gandhi's repressive "Emergency" of the late 1970s, as they affect five generations of a well-off Muslim clan and their associates in Kashmir, Agra, Mumbai, Karachi. It brings together Dickens, Kipling and Shakespeare, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, comedy, tragedy and farce, and has as its moral and dramatic fulcrum the year 1947 when the misjudged partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was insisted upon by the Muslims and acquiesced in by the departing British.
Rushdie's brilliant insight was to bring together the private and public lives of those involved by inventing a mystical bond between the children born around the midnight hour of 17 August 1947. The narrator and central character famously remarks: "I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country." He and his peers are given special powers (prophecy, magic, metamorphosis) in exchange for terrible responsibilities, and they become the embodiment of the best hope of the two nations during a period of bad faith, violence and the betrayal of democracy. At the centre is a variation of Mark Twain's tale The Prince and the Pauper: a rich boy and the son of a street musician are swapped at birth in the early seconds of 18 August by a misguided midwife, who (following the political dictates of her communist lover) believes she is exercising benign social engineering. So the central characters have divided identities, a situation made even more complex by the concealed paternity (from a European source) of one of them. The lesser of these charismatic children suffers most through the dropping of sub-plots and the trimming of character and loss of nuance demanded by reducing the film to some 150 minutes.
In the first post-Partition episode of Midnight's Children, we're briefly shown a poster of the 1957 film Mother India, the most popular and revered of all Bollywood movies. It features the monstre sacré, Nargis, the country's biggest postwar star, as a suffering peasant mother, a symbolic Mother Courage figure of independent India. This is a clear hint that the makers consider Midnight's Children a sophisticated urban riposte to Mother India's sentimental rural story. Deepa Mehta, born and educated in India, is an established film-maker living in Canada. Salman Rushdie, born in Mumbai and educated in Britain, is the subcontinent's most visible cosmopolitan exile. They are united by this film in both sorrow and anger for what their homeland is, and drawn together in hopeful anticipation of what it still might be.
This is that poster . . .
This is the film . . .
Mother India
Mother India has 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", Mehboob Khan's magnum opus and an "all-time blockbuster", which ranks highly among India's most successful films. It was in continuous distribution, being played in theatres for more than three decades; the record ended in the mid-1990s with the advent of satellite television and a change in Indian film-viewing habits. Mother India belongs to only a small collection of films, including Kismet (1943), Mughal-e-Azam (1960), Sholay (1975) Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994), and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) which are repeatedly watched throughout India and are viewed as definitive Hindi films with cultural significance.
Mother India, directed by Mehboob Khan and starring Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Rajendra Kumar, and Raaj Kumar, is a remake of Khan's earlier film Aurat (1940), the story of a poverty-stricken village woman named Radha (Nargis), who in the absence of her husband, struggles to raise her sons and survive against a cunning money-lender amidst many troubles. Despite her hardships, she sets a goddess-like moral example of an ideal Indian woman.
The film was the most expensive Hindi cinema (Bollywood) production and earned the highest revenue for any Hindi film at that time. Adjusted for inflation, Mother India still ranks among the all-time Indian box office hits. It was released in India amid fanfare in October or November 1957, and had several high-profile screenings, including one at the capital, New Delhi, attended by the country's president and prime minister. Mother India became a definitive cultural classic and is regarded as one of the best films in Indian and world cinema. It was India's first submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1958, where it got the nomination and lost the award by just one vote. The film won the All India Certificate of Merit for Best Feature Film, the Filmfare Best Film Award for 1957, and Nargis and Khan won the Best Actress and Best Director awards respectively.
Mythological references
Various authors identify the character of Radha with Hindu mythological goddesses and characters, such as Radha (the lover of the god Krishna, personifying love and romance), Sita (the divine heroine of the Hindu epic Ramayana, personifying high moral value), Savitri (representing great morality and loyalty to husband), Draupadi (personifying duty and morality), Dharti-mata (earth-mother goddess) and Lakshmi (Hindu goddess of prosperity). Besides these gentle goddesses, the character of Radha has shades of more ferocious warrior goddesses such as Durga and Kali. Film scholars have compared the mild-mannered, obedient son Ramu with the god Rama of the epic Ramayana, and the romantic outlaw Birju—a name of Krishna—with the god Krishna, known for his transgressions. Shamu (another name of Krishna), Radha's husband who leaves her, is also equated with Krishna, who left his lover Radha in mythological accounts. The title Mother India and Radha's character are described to be allusions not only to the Hindu Mother Goddess, but also to Bharat Mata (literally "Mother India"), the national personification of India, generally represented as a Hindu goddess.
Film scholar Vijay Mishra has pointed out the presence of the "highly syncretic hyphenated Hindu–Muslim nature" of Bollywood in the film. Parama Roy has interpreted that Nargis's legendary status as the titular Mother India is due to Hinduisation of the role and her real-life marriage with a Hindu; she is, according to Roy, scripted as a renouncer of Muslim separatism in the film. Mishra has found metacritical value in Salman Rushdie's commentary on the film in his novel The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) in which Rushdie describes:
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 mother who haunts the fantasy of Indian males'Reviews
Baburao Patel of the film magazine Filmindia (December 1957) described Mother India after its release as "the greatest picture produced in India" and wrote that no other actress would have been able to perform the role as well as Nargis. A review in Monthly Film Bulletin in 1958 remarked that audiences in UK should be grateful that the international version was shortened by 40 minutes, and termed it a "rag-bag pantomime". After its US release in 1959, Irene Thirer reviewed the film in the New York Post in which she praised its "striking dramatic appeal", but feared it might not be accepted by American audiences due to cultural differences. In a 1976 article in the journal Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, author Michael Gallagher found the film "an amazing mixture of political allegory and cheap musical, a cross between the impressiveness of Eisenstein and the banality of Show Boat". The New Internationalist in 1999 found Nargis's acting "exemplary", and noted "a clever interplay—artistically and politically—between the traditional and the radical" evident in Mother India.
In a 2002 article in The Village Voice, film critic J. Hoberman described the film as "an outrageous masala of apparently discordant elements." He characterised it 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." Hoberman criticised the acting as "broad", and also wrote about the "vaguely left-wing" nationalist overtone of the film. Author Phill Hall, writing for Film Threat in 2002, described the film as exceptionally sluggish and one-dimensional, and lampooned it saying "it takes the strongest of constitutions to endure this film without entertaining notions of matricide." Jonathan Romney in his 2002 report in The Independent observed the earth-mother Radha as "India's answer to Anna Magnani" and the film as "an all-out exercise in ideological myth-making." Women's Feature Service, in a 2007 article, noted Mother India as "one of the most outstanding films of the post-Independence era." Ziya Us Salam of The Hindu wrote in her 2010 report: "Mehboob was able to blend the individual with the universal, thereby enhancing the film's appeal without compromising on its sensitivity."
The title "Mother India"
The title Mother India was inspired by American author Katherine Mayo's 1927 polemical book of the same name, in which she attacked Indian society, religion and culture. Written against the Indian demands for self-rule and independence from British rule, the book pointed to the treatment of India's women, the untouchables, animals, 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, premature sexual intercourse and maternity. The book created an outrage across India, and it was burned along with her effigy. 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". The book prompted over fifty angry books and pamphlets to be published to highlight Mayo's errors and false perception of Indian society, which had become a powerful influence on the American people's view of India.
Mehboob Khan had the idea for the film and the title as early as 1952, five years after India's independence; in October that year, he approached the import authorities of the Indian government to seek permission for importing raw stocks for the film. In 1955, the ministries of External Affairs and Information-and-Broadcasting learned of the title of the forthcoming film and demanded that the director send them the script for review, suspicious that it was based on the book and thus a possible threat to national interest. The film team dispatched the script along with a two-page letter on 17 September 1955 saying:
There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding in regard to our film production 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.Katherine Mayo (January 27, 1867 – October 9, 1940) was an American researcher and historian. Mayo entered public life as a political writer advocating White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Nativism, opposition to non-white and Catholic immigration to the United States, and opposition to recently emancipated African slave laborers. She became known for denouncing the Philippine Declaration of Independence on racialist and religious grounds, then went on to publish and promote her best-known work, Mother India (1927), wherein she opposed Indian Independence from British rule. Her work was well received in British government circles and among American Anglophile racialists, but was criticized by others for notorious racism and Indophobia.
Several of Mayo's early writings promoted anti-Catholicism and hostility to non-white independence movements against European colonial rule. Mayo combined anti-Catholicism and Anti-Filipino sentiment in her writings that opposed the independence of the Philippines from American rule. Mayo's early journalistic works celebrated the Anglo-Saxon "racial character" of American nationalism and promoted xenophobia against Irish Catholic immigrants, as well as increasingly prominent African American laborers. Mayo claimed that "negroes" were sexually aggressive and lacked self-control, thus rendering them a threat to "innocent white Anglo-Saxon women". Mayo put her highly effective writing skills behind the effort to establish a rural police in New York and supported their ability to control immigrants and blacks whose involvement in labor rights agitations were viewed by Mayo as a threat to white supremacy.
Mayo became notorious for her polemical book Mother India (1927), in which she attacked Hindu society and religion, and the culture of India. Critics of Mayo accuse her works of being racist, pro-imperialist and Indophobic tracts that "expressed all the dominant prejudices of colonial society."
The book created a sensation on three continents. Written against the demands for self-rule and Indian independence from the British Raj, Mayo alluded to the treatment of India's women, the Dalits, the animals, the dirt and the character of its nationalistic politicians.
Mayo's claims were supported by British Indian authorities as a countermeasure to growing sympathies for the Indian Independence Movement against British rule in the region. The book was thus received enthusiastically by British authorities and propagated among Americans who related the movement for Indian independence with the American Revolution.
Mayo's claims and perceptions of Indian society has probably become one of the most negative influences on the American people's view of India in history. The book prompted the publication of over fifty critical books and pamphlets and an eponymous film. It was burned in India and New York, along with an effigy of its author. It was criticized by Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote in response:
This book is cleverly and powerfully written. The carefully chosen quotations give it the false appearance of a truthful book. But the impression it leaves on my mind is that it is the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains. If Miss Mayo had confessed that she had come to India merely to open out and examine the drains of India, there would perhaps be little to complain about her compilation. But she declared her abominable and patently wrong conclusion with a certain amount of triumph: 'the drains are India'.After its publication Dalip Singh Saund (later a congressman) wrote My Mother India to counter Mayo's assertions. Another response to Mayo's book was Dhan Gopal Mukerji's A Son of Mother India Answers.
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