The myth of the mother and the child is a visual image that is fairly ubiquitous in art history. You see it everywhere — from Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’ to Yashoda’s doting indulgence of Krishna, right down to the sentimental melodrama of mother-child bonding in Hindi cinema. What I have always wondered is, why is it always the son in the lap of the mother? Is this an innocent choice or a calculated patriarchal indicator? Is the daughter not visible because she offers no continuity to the lineage, no civic currency, no property inheritance?
But all my preconceived narrow prejudices were debunked when I entered the exhibition ‘One Mother, Many Mother Tongues’ at Delhi recently. Walking into the Havells Gallery at Humayun’s Tomb to see the exhibition, one was greeted by images of the mother and child carved in various kinds of materials. From terracotta and clay to stone, marble, limestone, sandstone, etc, highlighting regional geology and craftsmanship. The curators tried to show continuity despite material and cultural differences. The display showed an array of sculptures, ranging from the monumental to the minuscule, set against the steel grey walls with sharp lighting illuminating the images.
The first thing that hits you isn’t the weight of antiquity, but the overwhelming and deeply meditative tone of the exhibition, where 27 rare artefacts are placed in a charged conversation. Co-curators Naman Ahuja and Andrea Anastasio have set up an extraordinary friction of textures, styles, epochs and materials. You have Sandro Botticelli’s pristine 15th-century Renaissance masterpiece ‘Madonna and Child’ — exhibited in India for the very first time — creating an intangible dialogue with a tiny thousands of years old Harappan terracotta figurine. Its oil paint and classical European imagery seems to confront the coarse, sun-baked earth of the subcontinent. Nearby, a massive 4th-century BCE Etruscan volcanic stone of the Goddess Mater Matuta stands alongside representations of Hariti, the Buddhist protector of children, and a 7th-century stone sculpture of the Hindu Goddess Skanda Mata, celebrating the concept of motherhood in all its manifestations.
What the curation did for me was to brilliantly rip the mother image out of this polite, male-centric cage and throw her into the raw, visceral landscape of the rasas.
Suddenly, motherhood wasn’t just a soft, weeping karuna or the sweet, domestic sringara of a lullaby. It was fierce, unpredictable, and terrifyingly complex.
Botticelli’s ‘Madonna’ is framed against perfect lighting, underscoring a heavy, melancholic karuna there, a quiet grief that knows the tragic end before the story even begins. But then you turn a corner and encounter the Gandharan Hariti or the ancient Matrikas, and the energy shifts violently. Here is vibhatsa — the grotesque, the raw, the unfiltered reality of protection. These are animal-headed mothers, deities of misfortune like Jyeshtha, who don’t cuddle; they ward off disease and death through sheer terror. There is rudra in their gaze — a maternal fury that can destroy the world to protect their own. And in their rigid postures, you feel a striking veer rasa — a heroic, cosmic defiance that owes absolutely nothing to patriarchal permission.
A sculpture on display at the Havells Gallery.
What is truly fascinating is how these sacred ancient tensions translate seamlessly into our modern, secular mythmaking. The visual and emotional vocabulary of this exhibition is the exact blueprint for mainstream Indian cinema. Our films didn’t invent the “mother myth” out of thin air; they inherited it from the myths, from the images engraved in stone on the temple walls and the endless depiction of the mother and child on Renaissance canvases. The tragic gravity of the western ‘Pieta’ was fused with the chaotic, overflowing vatsalya rasa of Yashoda and Krishna, transforming the mother into a secular deity and the ultimate moral anchor of our imagination.
This connected immediately with post-Independence cinema: Nargis’ Radha in ‘Mother India’ (1957). She is the earth itself — suffering, unyielding, and so fiercely righteous that she shoots her own outlaw son to preserve the moral code of the community. By the 1970s, this evolved into the iconic, long-suffering maternal archetype played by Nirupa Roy. Clad in austere white saris and enduring systemic poverty, her silence was louder than any monologue.
The ultimate crystallisation of this moral compass occurs in Yash Chopra’s ‘Deewaar’ (1975). When the criminal brother boasts of his fancy cars and gold, he is utterly defeated by his morally upright brother’s iconic rebuttal: “Mere paas maa hai” (I have Mother). Decades later, in the epic ‘Baahubali’ duology (2015-2017), the myth undergoes a grand evolution. Queen Mother Sivagami merges the fierce authority of Goddess Durga with complex political agency — she is powerful, active, and deeply flawed, her decisions dictating the fate of an entire empire. The image of her breastfeeding her biological son, along with her nephew, and shooting her enemy simultaneously strikes at the very root of conventional nurturing.
But the exhibition also left me with an uncomfortable thought. Across cultures, the mother has been granted immense symbolic power, yet that power often comes with invisible conditions. She is revered when she nurtures, forgives and protects. She is celebrated when she becomes the keeper of family, faith or nation. The woman herself, with her ambitions, contradictions and desires, can quietly disappear behind the radiance of the maternal image. The template expands as the individual behind the image is erased.
Perhaps that is why these works continue to echo so strongly in contemporary culture. The mother remains one of our most enduring moral figures. From ‘Mother India’ to ‘Deewaar’ and even ‘Baahubali’, she is never just another character. She is the emotional centre around which everything revolves; she is the conscience, the judge, the source of legitimacy. The image has travelled remarkably well, from temple walls and Renaissance canvases to the cinema screen, carrying much of its emotional vocabulary intact.
Stopping before each image in this beautifully lit gallery, I found myself creating my own narrative as I walked along. Yet I wondered if the curatorial conversation had stretched just a little further, what sort of dynamics it would have created. Imagine Henry Moore’s monumental semi-abstract sculptures or Ramkinkar Baij’s raw, earth-bound figures entering this dialogue. Suddenly, the focus would shift from a timeless, sacred ideal to the visceral lived experience of motherhood — the body’s labour, its resilience, its vulnerability, and its unmistakable individuality. Moore’s heavy, protective hollows and Baij’s sweat-stained, working-class realities would violently disrupt any passive notions of divinity. It would remind us that behind every idealised image stands a person who cannot be contained in frameworks of singularity, proving that motherhood has many tongues — none of which can be reduced to a single, silent myth.
Perhaps that is the quiet achievement of ‘One Mother, Many Mother Tongues’. It never tells us what motherhood means. Instead, it reveals how every age has imagined it differently — sometimes as tenderness, sometimes as protection, sometimes as grief, sometimes as power. Walking out of the Havells Gallery into the calm of Humayun’s Tomb, I realised the exhibition had done something rare. It had taken one of the oldest images in art history and made it feel unsettled again.
But this exhibition, on view till August 8, isn’t just a passive celebration of maternal warmth; it is a provocateur. By displaying wrathful, fierce deities alongside the soft, nurturing ones, the curation actively interrogates a painful historical truth: why has human culture so consistently assigned feminine power to the act of childbirth, and why has historical art overwhelmingly favoured the depiction of male infants over female ones?
— The writer is a theatre director