In a small Indian village, a young women named Radha (Nargis) marries her beloved Shamu (Raaj Kumar) and intend to live a peaceful, rural life with their two sons. However, to pay for the wedding, Shamu’s mother borrowed money from a scheming money-lender called Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal), which puts Radha under Sukhilala’s permanent financial control. Throughout her life, this leads on to a series of dramatic and often life-changing events that test her stoicism and survival instincts to the maximum.
Doug says...
We decided we wanted to watch another Bollywood film because honestly, Bollywood is a bigger film industry than Hollywood and watching only one film from it is like saying you’ve eaten a piece of cheddar and now have an opinion on all cheese.
And once again, I really enjoyed it. Bollywood films (from the limited selection I’ve seen in my life) really do focus on storytelling, throwing in music and humour with gay abandon. Although a three hour film, it rushes past, telling the story of the pious and graceful Radha as she faces struggles at every turn.
The struggles are many. Her husband’s arms are crushed by a boulder as he works in the fields, her mother puts the whole family under permanent debt for the sake of a wedding, her house collapses in a monsoon, her sons Ramu and Birju turn out to be troublesome, and one of them in particular (Birju) ends up being a bandit, obsessively trying to steal his mother’s golden bracelets back from the money-lender. It’s a lot.
Which is where the Bollywood style of cinema really comes in. This is a style where every so often characters stop and sing songs - apparently the music style was far more Western in this picture than usual, but it still sounds very old-school and the lyrics are far from incisive. They also come at bizarre moments. At one point Radha is chasing her bandit son Birju into the forest, the music is setting the pace, and there’s a real sense of danger. They then immediately stop the action so Radha and Birju can sing about a mother’s love for her son.
And yet - it works. This is far from Hollywood’s style, and why should it not be? Paul will talk more about the title and where it came from, and it’s important that this is a backlash from director Mehboob Khan against the smug West. Radha is shown to be the essence of all things Hindu, as well as the essence of all things good, patient and kind. It’s a forceful point - that to be an Indian person is to be as sophisticated, emotional and full of complexity as anyone in the West.
Director Khan really pulls the stops out. There’s scenes with huge crowds, great natural scenery, and vivid close-ups, particularly of actress Nargis (one name, like Cher) who handles the main role with melodrama and feeling. She’s powerful, particularly in the scene when her house collapses in the mud and she literally flings herself around in it, covering herself with mud as she bewails her life. Meryl, she ain’t. But it’s a whole different kind of performance. It’s a whole different kind of film.
Highlight
The penultimate scene with the denouement is all kinds of crazy and yet somehow filled with feeling. Nargis particularly handles the way she makes an incredibly difficult decision with a lot of emotion.
Lowlight
The placement of some of the songs does seem very random and ends up holding up the action rather than accompanying it.
Mark
8/10
Paul says...
Yes, we return to Bollywood! But we travel back in time 50 years before the last Bollywood film we reviewed, a stirring sports movie called Chak De! which tackled women’s participation in sports as well as the fractured relationships between the different ethnic groups that populate this vast country.
Mother India is perhaps more representative of what Bollywood is known for than the slicker, more modern Chak De! As Doug says, the drama makes All About Eve look like Postman Pat, and the distribution of rather banal songs at points when the action is at its most extreme feels unusual to 21st-century Western eyes. The acting styles, even for their time, feel about 10 years out of date and more akin to the movements and expressions of the '20s when the grainy quality of filming meant that actors had to act like they’re on speed.
Nonetheless, the ability to fill up three hours with an incredible array of events that kept both of us gripped is something to be admired. Mother India is comparable to ancient epics such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid in that the main character displays all the ideal attributes that one should have in the face of misfortune. Radha is the epitome of idealised Indian national values post-Empire, showing almost inhuman stoicism, persistence, familial love, community spirit, selflessness and survival instinct, and I couldn’t help but feel inspired myself by her actions even though I’m nowhere near close to the rural poverty that these characters endure.
Indeed, Mother India was a timely film that was understandably a massive hit in its day. It remains, after adjusting for inflation, one of the most expensive and profitable Bollywood films ever made, and was the first Hindi film to be nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film at the Oscars. It lost by one measly vote to the Italian entry. The film was released just 10 years after India’s freedom from British rule, the partition of India and Pakistan and Gandhi’s assassination, so these events would be still fresh in the minds of the Indian people who were still building what would eventually become one of the most significant and populated countries in the world. The message that the film perpetuates is a more serious Dory-from-Finding-Nemo philosophy of “Just keep swimming” no matter what tragedies and injustices life throws at you. And through that, India and its people can show the world that they are a force to be reckoned with.
The title itself is a massive “Fuck you” to the West, as it is also the title of a notorious book written by an American named Katherine Mayo. A quick Wikipedia search will tell you that Mayo’s book is anything but a celebration of India. Rather, it fully condoned Western rule over the country, and claimed India to be a country rife with crime, sexual promiscuity, misogyny, and dirt. Mayo also vehemently opposed non-white and non-Protestant immigration into the United States. In other words, she was a horrendous white supremacist, the far-right Trump supporter of her day. Mother India, the film, was not only designed to inspire the Indians but display India’s strength to the West. Judging by the way in which it was received, the film succeeded tremendously.
Don’t go into Mother India expecting a film reflective of modern-day Hollywood. Some of the acting and film-making styles are very outdated and may raise laughs rather than gasps. But despite this, the film works phenomenally well on two levels - as a piece of Indian and cinematic history, and as a fabulous piece of entertainment.
Highlight
The final 30 minutes, in which pretty much every event the writers could think of is thrown into the story along with, you guessed it, a song! It’s exhilarating stuff.
Lowlight
Sunil Dutt, who plays Radha’s more rebellious son, overacts horribly sometimes. Interestingly, a fire broke out on set and Dutt saved Nargis, who plays Radha. The two fell in love and married in 1958. Their son, Sanjay, is also a successful Bollywood actor. Their elder daughter, Priya, is an Indian politician. And their younger daughter Namrata married the son of their Mother India co-star. Small world!
Mark
8/10
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