Widowhood and Motherhood in Cinematic Imagination in the Historical Context

This article engages with the question of how Hindi cinema sought to synergize and imagine the nation, community and land in independent India as the embodiment of widowhood. I suggest that this process of embodiment was the culmination of a long historical-political process. The focus of this chapter is a 1957 Hindi film by Mehboob Khan named Mother India. The film stands out as a powerful emotional drama. On the one hand, this film marked continuity with the Indian literature, painting, theatre and cinema of the colonial period,1 on the other, Mother India influenced the culture of a new Indian nation after 1947. Within a decade after India attained independence from Britain, the Indian cinema became an undisputed site where the cultural engineering of a new nation could be enacted.2