Lure of the motherland
This is the first column of 2024 and I’m writing it from India, where I’m visiting family and friends for a few weeks.
Every winter, when I travel from Vermont to my home country, this Bollywood song invariably plays in my head: “Ghar Aaja Pardesi Tera Des Bulaye Re” (return home, o foreigner, your country beckons you). The song appears in Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s epochal 1995 film, “Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge” (hereafter referred to as DDLJ), when the character of Chaudhary Baldev Singh, a non-resident Indian (NRI) convenience store owner in London, is dreaming of visiting his home in Punjab, India.
Much like Baldev Singh, Indians living overseas experience a heightened romanticism attached to the homeland and I’m certainly one of them now; the allure of familiar sights, sounds, smells, foods, places and people is overpowering. A lot of this patriotism has been proliferated through films of the region and the various songs and paeans written about the country that all Indians have consumed growing up.
In this column, I will trace the roots of India’s patriotic fervor and examine the related themes and symbols that have become a part of the country’s culture through cinema and vice versa.
Songs of freedom
The roots of India’s strong sense of patriotism lie in the country’s freedom struggle (roughly between the period of 1857–1947) when poems, folk songs and devotional music were composed to unify the population against foreign powers. Celebrated philosopher and 20th-century poet Mohammed Iqbal’s Urdu poem became the one of the most popular patriotic songs in the country.
A few lines from the poem:
Saare jahan se achcha, Hindostan hamara
Hum bulbule hain iski, yeh gulsitan hamara
Ghurbat mein hon agar hum, rehta hai dil vatan mein
Samjho vahin humein bhi, dil ho jahan hamara
Better than the whole world, is this Hindostan of ours
We are its nightingales and this is our garden
If we are in an alien place, the heart remains in the homeland
Know us to be there, where our heart is
In addition to bards like Iqbal, the Progressive Writers’ Movement (from 1935 to mid-1950s) emerged as a vehicle of change comprising poets and litterateurs who mobilized the sub-continent’s population through nationalistic and revolutionary writing.
Later, when a few of the progressives such as Kaifi Azmi, Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Shailendra became lyricists in the Bollywood film industry, they wrote radical songs even in non-patriotic films so that their progressive ideologies could reach a wider audience while still fulfilling commercial objectives. These lyricists regularly pushed the envelope with the rigid colonial censor board. At the peak of the Quit India movement during WWII, lyricist Pradeep hoodwinked the censor board into thinking this song from Kismet (1943) was written for the Japanese army, when in fact, it was referencing the British:
Aaj Himaalay ki choti se, phir humne lalkaara hai
Door hato, door hato ae duniyawalo Hindustaan hamaara hai
From the peak of the Himalayas, we defiantly announce
Get out O foreigners, for India is ours
“Vande Mataram,” meaning salute to the mother, is India’s national song in Sanskrit, penned by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1896, and became a protest song during the independence movement. The poem was likely written in response to the British national anthem, “God Save The Queen,” which the colonizers were trying hard to make popular.
Mother and mitti (soil)
The maternal identity of India, because of which the country is often referred to as “Bharat Mata” (mother country), is also linked to its freedom struggle. The familial connection implied that the children of the land could not and should not be kept away from their mother and that freedom from colonial rule was the only way to “protect” the mother from invaders.
Connected with this divine feminine is the symbol of desh ki mitti (soil of the country) as representative of home. In several Indian films, the protagonist is seen taking a handful of soil and rubbing it on their forehead as a promise to protect the motherland. In DDLJ, a homesick Baldev Singh sniffs the letter he receives from his friend in India, savoring the familiar fragrance of his desh ki mitti.
The nationalistic symbol of the soil of the homeland is also an ode to the farmers and the agrarian society that India is. The film “Upkar” (1967) featured the song, “Mere desh ki dharti sona ugle, ugle heere moti, mere desh ki dharti,” meaning, “my country’s soil produces gold, precious stones and pearls,” referring to the massive yield of the fertile land of India.
Returning to the homeland
During India’s colonial period, close to 1.6 million indentured laborers were displaced to other colonies including Fiji, Mauritius, Caribbean Islands, East Africa, Reunion Islands as well as European nations. Most of these laborers were never able to return to their homeland, which is why the sentiment of returning home from foreign employment is a strong one in India.
The 2004 film “Swades” remains one of the foremost narratives about returning to your roots. The protagonist Mohan Bhargav is an NRI who lives in the U.S. and works as a project manager at NASA. He travels to India in search of his nanny, Kaveri Amma, who, after his parents’ passing is his only connection to the country. He meets her with the objective of emigrating her to the U.S., but while living with her in her village, he engages with change-making at the grassroots level and helps the villagers set up a hydroelectric power facility. For the character to choose a life connected to his rustic birthplace over a high-paying, cushy employment opportunity in a developed country is seen as a form of subtle and grounded patriotism.
Over the last few years of visiting my home country, I’ve experienced how patriotism has adorned the garb of jingoism. The same songs that were used to unite the people during the freedom movement have been used to divide the country, and progressive voices, if any, are muffled by strict censorship. On Jan. 26, India will celebrate its Republic Day, the formulation of the country’s constitution that took place on the same date in 1950. The constitution declares India a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic.
With hope that these constitutional values will continue to be upheld, I’m reminded of this song by progressive writer Sahir Ludhianvi from the film “Phir Subah Hogi” (1958):
Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi
… Jis subah ki khatir yug yug se
Hum sab mar kar bhi jeete hain
Ek din toh karam farmayegi
Woh subah kabhi toh aayegi
That morning will eventually come
The morning for which we died a hundred deaths
Some day will shine upon us
That morning will eventually come