A Film Canon

The centrepiece of Golden Age Bollywood, Mother India supplements a relatively formulaic narrative with an exquisite elaboration of female martyrdom, in the form of Mehboob's dialectic between the veil covering Radha's (Nargis) face as a bride, and the mud cloaking it as a widow, as well as his identification of both with the camera's presence, which alternately caresses and forces melodramatic Technicolour to radiate out through them. Not only does this completely collapse those distinctions between luxury and poverty, sensuality and abjection, and pity and sadism, around which the film ostensibly hangs - or, rather, grafts an overtly fantastic aesthetic onto its social realist content - but it eroticises the agricultural backdrop, ensuring that the musical numbers that take place against it are transformed into so many palpitations of a life-force that recalls Dovzhenko's pantheism, and informs their inextricability from supernatural, miraculous or at least momentous consummations, whether between husband and wife, mother and son, or farmer and land. Unfortunately, the second half tends to focus more on the stagier village, which forms the backdrop for an even more generic romantic narrative, albeit concluding with an acknowledgment of melodrama's inherently irrealistic, even preposterous, pretensions that surpasses anything in American cinema: Radha's attempt to save her wayward son from the entire gamut of natural forces, as a primordial forest frames an expansive river which, in turn, frames a field full of fiery haystacks - Mehboob's most lavish, ridiculous spectacle.