The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India by Sumathi Ramaswamy

‘No Country for Old Women’: Female Aging in Bollywood

“…Mother India, on account of her origin from the Hindu iconographic tradition of divine females, is represented as a forever-young woman ‘clad in lush coloured silks and draperies’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, p. 65) possessing ‘filial affect’ (Ramaswamy, 2010, p. 9). Ramaswamy reads the figure of Bharat Mata as a palimpsest that retained features of idealised British femininity and Hinduism’s fierce warrior-goddesses but was self-consciously modelled on the ‘new woman’ of the late-19th-century bhadralok (native bourgeoisie) (Shah, 2011, p. 530).…”