Mother India - Influence and Legacy

Influence and Legacy

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". 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. It also represented the agrarian poverty and hardship of the people at the time. 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. 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". The Hindustan Times identifies the "film's pungent social references 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."

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." 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". 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. A 1983 Channel 4 documentary into Bombay cinema described the film as setting a benchmark in Indian cinema for subsequent films to aspire to. The film was in continuous distribution being played in some theatre or other for more than three decades; the record ended in mid-1990s with the advent of satellite television and a change in film-viewing habit of the audience. 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 are repeatedly watched throughout India and are viewed as definitive Hindi films with cultural significance. 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. 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." The Hindustan Times stated that Nargis symbolised mothers in "which all the mothers 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."

Mother India is ranked #80 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010. In 2005, Indiatimes Movies ranked the movie amongst the Top 25 Must See Bollywood Films. 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). It was ranked third in the British Film Institute's poll of "Top 10 Indian Films" of all time. It is one of the films on Box Office India's list of "Biggest Blockbusters Ever In Hindi Cinema". The film provided an inspiration for many later films. It pioneered the portrayal of two morally opposed brothers personifying good and evil, a repeated motif in Hindi films of subsequent years, 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).