‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘Ma Victoria’: Forms of Divine Motherhood in Colonial Bengal

Abstract

This article attempts to explore the cult of the ‘Bharat Mata’ that was born out of the patriotic fervour of Indian nationalist leaders who transformed their nationalist passion into an image of the nation as mother, and the widely promoted idea of Queen Victoria as a mother to her subjects in the nineteenth-century Bengal. The image of ‘Bharat Mata’ was conceived with the rising tide of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the impetus provided by the Bengali novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Anandamath (1882). The image of Queen Victoria as a mother to her Indian subjects found its most emphatic projection in Bengali texts like Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore’s poem Srimad-Victoria-Mahatmyam, The Greatness of the Empress Victoria: A Sanskrit Poem, Set to Music with English Translation (1897). Composed on the occasion of the completion of 60 years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the poem was a ‘humble offering of loyalty’ to the Queen-Empress, whose reign over India was glorified and regarded auspicious.

The article looks into the apparently contradictory nature of the worship of the feminine form as the ‘mother’ in a pre-independent nineteenth-century Bengal, through a consideration of texts like Anandamath, Srimad-Victoria-Mahatmyam and Girishchandra Ghosh’s play Hirak Jubilee (1897), among others. In this context, the article also takes into account the theoretical perspective of the cultural ‘Other’, inherent in a study involving the dynamics of colonial relations.