Mother India!

Women Power to Empowerment:   Fiction and Facts

'And God Created a Woman' !

It was a lovely film with Gina Lolobrigida, the Italian legend, a woman so beautiful, and the beautiful woman that she portrayed amidst a classy, extravagantly staged milieu. That is the imprint I am still carrying from those impressionable childhood in Africa.

Almost around the same time, even as I was entering the romantic adolescence dreaming about the beautiful Ginas, ‘Mother India’ happened!

And the beautiful woman again - Nargis this time!

However, what Nargis portrayed in Mehboob’s classic magnum opus, was a transition, from a demure village belle in love, to a young poverty-stricken widow surrounded by her two dirty looking, grieving children, and finally, to a politically empowered lady. What she assayed was a rural Indian beauty with an unforgettable expression of pain on her mud slapped yet beautiful face, stuck with thick brown streaks of wet, disheveled hair.

What was only a transition, turns to transformation, as Mother India undergoes the drudgery of daily life in a village full of antagonistic elements and a villainous money lender who eyes her lecherously - a classical situation in a society where caste, class and widows are taboos. For a short while that she is happy even as the transformation towards the old aging mother continues subtly, she enjoys life with her two sons and their lovers - until the moneylender invites trouble, and one good son turns a murderer.

And Mother India, the innately powerful rural woman comes alive! On the screen that is!

The old woman as portrayed by a beautifully young Nargis, is by now a bent figure with wrinkles, gray hair and with a couple of teeth missing. Her drooping eyes showing the venom of justice despite her personal social predicament, she picks up a heavy rifle, and shaking with rage,  manages to mount it on her drooping shoulders. And then, she takes an unsteady aim at her murderer son with one eye closed, the grey eyebrows twitching with a momentary rage.

The close-up remains unforgettable, the whole range of emotions, quite simply, heart rending - her unseen yet surely broken heart and her visibly angry determination to bring her son to justice and that too, in spite of her very social constraints that he fought to demolish.

The trigger did work and there is one last transition. The innate but benign power of Mother India transforms her to a genuine political leader of the village even as she sees, or so she imagines, the blood of her son, flowing into a canal that she has just inaugurated!

But, that was a celluloid fiction, a visual feast for the masses. What are the facts today in agrarian mother India? Transition, transformation, social biases and evils, poverty, isolation, attitudes; the oppression and neglect; decision making, conflict/resolution; the daily drudgery, the innate beauty and the tenacity of the beautiful Indian woman, particularly in a village; the things she can do if only empowered. That for us is the rural Indian woman in a predominantly male bastion that is supposedly proud of its villages with a diverse set of traditions and culture, set amidst our fast degrading natural heritage.

Well! Be it a fact or the fiction, some sensitive, creative souls gave us a beautiful rendering by Gina and the ugly-yet-beautiful Mother India. We are forever grateful to them.

‘And God created a Woman’ – yes. But whosoever created the subject of 'Gender and Equity, it was certainly not Him!!