Political Line Newsletter Bharat Mata and her quarrelsome children

The Hindu

29-06-2025

(This is the latest edition of the Political Line newsletter curated by Varghese K. George. The Political Line newsletter is India's political landscape explained every week. You can subscribe here to get the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.)
Kerala Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar insists on the display of a representation of a woman, Bharat Mata, holding the saffron flag at official functions. This has turned into a political controversy, with people and the Kerala government protesting on paper and on the streets.
The idea of anthropomorphising the country, particularly as mother, has a long and contested history in India. Indian nationalism has drawn heavily from Hindu symbolism and iconography, and the concept of Bharat Mata and its representation was instructive. It had unifying power, but simultaneously triggered discord, as it excluded religious minorities. Muslims, particularly, developed a deep scepticism towards the idea of Bharat Mata, and the worship of the nation as mother.
India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to give the imagery of Bharat Mata a secular character in his book The Discovery of India. But he too is discovering India as a civilizational eternity. Marking the birth centenary of Nehru (in 1989), a 53-episode docudrama on the state-controlled network Doordarshan televised the book. Shyam Benegal directed Bharat Ek Khoj, with the first episode being 'Bharat Mata Ki Jai'. Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister, and Benegal was by no means sectarian. The episode begins with Hindu chants in Sanskrit, before it goes on to Nehru's secular conception of Bharat Mata. The point was that it would be difficult to articulate the historicity of Indian identity without relying on Hinduism.
But Nehru and his compatriots were sensitive about the potential of the slogan creating a communal rift. You could find more about that in this review of historian Sugata Bose's book The Nation as Mother and Other Visions of Nationhood.
The former general secretary of the Lok Sabha P.D.T. Achary traces the history of Bharat as mother and notes that there is no constitutionally recognised depiction of the concept. The Hindu's own editorial considers the Governor's enthusiasm for the public veneration of the image a partisan move.
'Who is Bharat Mata': On History, Culture and the Idea of India, Writings by and on Jawaharlal Nehru, edited by Purushottam Agrawal could also be of interest. You could find a review of the book here.
If you have stayed with me this far on this topic, I would also recommend The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India by Sumathi Ramaswamy. The book brings us dozens of depictions of India as mother and goddess from the 19th century to the present.
Federalism Tract
Regional sentiments
In Tamil Nadu, BJP ally AIADMK is on the back foot following the screening of video clips that showed leaders of Dravidian politics as critics of the Hindu religion at an event where their leaders were present.
In Maharashtra, the BJP is trying to assuage regional sentiments after the government led by it privileged Hindi over other Indian languages in its three-language policy. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis announced that a final decision on implementing the three-language formula in schools in the State will be taken only after discussions with writers, language experts, political leaders, and all other stakeholders.
In West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee government built a Jagannath temple in Digha, which custodians of the Puri Jagannath Temple in Odisha consider a violation of its singular primacy. Ms. Banerjee inaugurated the first 'Rath Yatra' from the ₹250-crore temple in the coastal town. Puri Shankaracharya Nischalananda Saraswati said the Jagannath temple constructed at Digha, lacked religious sanctity and was driven more by commercial interests than spiritual devotion.