Anupama Nair
What or who is Bharat Mata? For us her children, she is our mother, and we worship her as a goddess. “Bharat Mata is the national personification of India as a mother goddess”. She is usually depicted as a “woman clad in a saffron sari holding a flag and sitting on a lion. Since we are celebrating Amrit Mahotsav or the 75th Anniversary of our Independence, I thought I will talk about my mother. As it is said, “Janani Janmabhumishcha Swargadapi Gariyasi” which means “mother and motherland are superior even to heaven” in Dev Bhasha Sanskrit, from our great epic Ramayana. I believe in this motto and think my mother and Bharat Maa are superior to heaven.
Before talking about Bharat Mata, you need to understand the concept of Bharat. The Puranas state that it is derived from the name of Bharata, the son of the saint Rishabha, while some other Puranic passages refer to son Dushyanta called Bharata as seen in the Mahabharata. In the Mahabharata, a larger region of North India is included by the term, but south India was excluded.
Bharat Varsha had been used as a self-attributed name by the people of the Indian subcontinent and later the Republic of India. The name is derived from the ancient Hindu Puranas, which refer to the land that encompasses India as “Bharat Varsha” or the country of Bharata and uses this term to distinguish it from other continents.
Jambu Dvipa was another name used in ancient scriptures as a name of India before Bharat became the official name. The derivative Jambu Dwipa was the historical term for India in many Southeast Asian countries before the introduction of the English word India. This alternate name is still used occasionally in Thailand, Malaysia, Java and Bali to describe the Indian Subcontinent.
Aryavarta was a term used for northern parts of the Indian Subcontinent in the ancient Hindu texts such as Dharmashastras and Sutras, referring to the area of the Indian Subcontinent where “Indo-Aryan tribes and where Indo-Aryan religion and rituals predominated”. The limits of Aryavarta spread over time, as the influence of the religion spread southwards in post-Vedic times.
Now let me talk about Bharat Mata. In the book “Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India”, Kalyani Devaki Menon argued that “the vision of India as Bharat Mata has profound implications for the politics of Hindu nationalism and that the depiction of India as a Hindu goddess implies that it is not just the patriotic but also the religious duty of all Hindus to participate in the nationalist struggle to defend the nation”.
Now let me talk about the conversation between a Gujarati politician and writer KM Munshi and Aurobindo Ghosh. Munshi asked Aurobindo Ghosh a question that has become vital a century later. He asked Ghosh “how can one become patriotic?” Aurobindo Ghosh who is one of the fathers of Hindu Nationalism replied with an answer which is especially relevant today in 2021. He pointed to a map of British India on the wall, and said “do you see this map? It is not a map but the portrait of Bharat Mata, her cities and mountains rivers and jungles form her physical body. All her children are her nerves, large and small…Concentrate on Bharat as a living mother, worship her with nine-fold bhakti”. The fact that Aurobindo considered Bharat Mata worthy of ‘navavidha bhakti’ or nine-fold worship is a good indicator as to how the image of India as a mother goddess had already taken origin in 1905.
The concept of worshipping ‘Bhoomi Devi’, or goddess of the earth, has always been part of Hinduism. However, modern forms of equating a nation with a mother goddess first arose in Bengal where ‘Shakto’ worship dominated and forms of the mother goddess such as Kali, Durga, and Chandi were popular.
“Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay transformed Bharat Mata into a fully-fledged Hindu goddess and the symbol of India who is experiencing difficult times, but her children are indifferent to her sufferings, and they need to awaken to the dire conditions and act”. In 1875, Bankim Chandra composed Vande Mataram, a song about a benign goddess figure, which became an anthem for Indian nationalists in their struggle for liberation from British domination. The leader of the rebels in Anand Math showed Mahendra the three faces of Bharat Mata as three idols of goddesses, being worshipped in three consecutive rooms of the ashram — “What Mother Was – An idol of Goddess Jagadhatri”, What Mother Has Become – An idol of Goddess Kali and finally “What Mother Will Be – An idol of Goddess Durga”.
“Bharat Mata appeared in the book as a ten-armed idol in a marble temple”. Vande Mataram, contained within the novel, is a hymn to the goddess Durga and, as Tagore wrote, “Bankim Chandra does show Durga to be inseparably united with Bengal in the end.”
(This article is dedicated to my mother Bharat Mata and may she always be the Punya Bhoomi and the greatest country in the world. It is my love for her that poured as words from my heart. May she no longer be bound in chains of slavery.)
Please let her never be in chains.
Please let her never be in chains.
Bharat mata ki jai
Bharat Mata ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Bharat ma ki jai
Vandemataram from New Zealand
Vandemataram from New Zealand