Mother India or Mother Goddess?

The song in the novel is immediately followed by Mahendra being inducted into the Andandamath by Satyananda where he is taken to one room after the other to see different images of the Mother. In the first he sees her in the lap of Vishnu. In the next room he is shown the “Mother as she was”; Aurobindo calls her “jagaddhatri” while Lipner has “Goddess as Bearer of the earth” (149). In the room after that Mahendra is brought face to face with “Mother as she is”, in the image of the terrible Kali, stripped bare and naked but for a skull garland. Satyananda explains that the glorious Mother as she was has been reduced to this state. Mahendra is again led through another passage to confront yet another image of the “Mother as she will be” as the golden ten-armed Goddess. She has crushed all her enemies and is glitteringly resplendent.

Roy replaced the image of the goddess by a map of Mother India: “gigantic, imposing, resplendent, yes, almost a living map of India ” in the first room. His guide the ascetic explains that “This is our Mother India as she was before the British conquest”. This is followed by a “map of India in rags and tears” in the next room. A sword hangs over this Mother India and it is explained as the representation of the sword by which the British keep India in subjection. The final glorious picture is of a “map of a golden India —bright, beautiful, full of glory and dignity!” (43) Mother India is a concept that entered the discourse of the nation at a much later stage than Bankim's. When Bankim's identification of the nation with the goddess became problematic, Roy gave it a more acceptable secular image to go with the nationalistic ideals. The Muslim as enemy has been replaced by the British in the Roy translation, thus making it a perfectly patriotic anti-British text.