Why did Leslee Udwin call her documentary on the Delhi gang rape India’s Daughter? Perhaps to suggest a mixture of things: that the victim, who later died of the injuries she sustained in the brutal assault, typified a liberated generation of Indian women; that many see in her death a kind of martyrdom, or at least, a terrible event from which some good has come; that her life and death showed, to put it crudely, the upside and downside of modern India. It therefore seems like a good title – “resonant” would be the word. Unfortunately, one of its resonances reaches back deep into the last century, when another western woman came to India and attacked the traditional behaviour of its men in a book that outraged many Indians, not least the politicians who, 20 years later, would become the country’s governing class.



Katherine Mayo published Mother India in 1927, and it quickly became a sensation in Mayo’s home country, the US, as well as in Britain and India. Before the end of the following year, London publishers Jonathan Cape had ordered five reprints; by 1931 the US edition had reached 32 impressions. Today few people other than scholars have read it, yet the names of both book and author persist in India as the epitome of what might be called foreigner’s libel. When the Bombay director Mehboob Khan borrowed the title in 1957 for a hugely successful and now legendary film that showed the tenacity and moral strength of peasant women, he intended the borrowing as a long-overdue rebuke. That, and MK Gandhi’s description of the book as “the report of a drain inspector”, have made it immortal in the Indian memory.

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Mayo went to India, she said, “to see what a volunteer, unsubsidised, uncommitted and unattached, could observe of common things in daily life”. But she was hardly a blank slate waiting to be written on. She was then approaching 60, a white Anglo-Saxon protestant and a racial supremacist who had spent many years campaigning against non-white immigration, independence for the Philippines and the influence of blacks and Irish Catholics on national life. And while her India trip may not have been funded by the British government, as her Indian critics later alleged, she went with the blessing and help of the government’s propaganda department, the Central Intelligence Division, which was delighted when she produced a book that damaged the cause of Indian independence by showing society there as a squalid ant-heap that badly needed the British empire’s enlightened rule.

At its rotten heart, according to Mayo, lay the untrammelled sexuality of the Indian male, the cause of so much rape, homosexuality, prostitution, venereal disease and child marriage, or what would now be called child abuse. However political her motivation, or wonky her theory, Mayo was energetic in her investigations and produced many examples as evidence. Her book is stocked with them, and to read about her encounters in purdah hospitals with physically damaged young girls – the result as a doctor delicately puts it of “marital use two or three times a day” – is still sickening. In one hospital, she sees a “wan-faced child” recovering from internal injuries that had become maggot-infested. The girl turns out to be a 12-year-old forcibly married to a husband of 50. A doctor says: “Her husband is suing her to recover his marital rights and force her back into his possession.”

Other examples are drawn from official reports that list patients anonymously: “A – aged 9. Day after marriage. Left femur dislocated, pelvis crushed out of shape. Flesh hanging in shreds. B – 10. Unable to stand, bleeding profusely, flesh much lacerated.”

And so on. Mayo’s tone is unpleasant – she relates each atrocity with a self-righteous relish – but even Gandhi conceded that her account was “cleverly and powerfully written” with “carefully chosen quotations [that] give it the false appearance of a truthful book”. He contested no particular fact; his complaint was the incompleteness of the facts. If Mayo had confessed that she visited India merely to examine its drains, he wrote, then perhaps nobody could object. “But she declared her abominable and patently wrong conclusion with a certain amount of triumph: ‘The drains are India.’”

Concerned that the book would damage the independence movement’s image in the US, Gandhi dispatched the Congress activist and poet Sarojini Naidu on an American tour. Naidu shed Gandhi’s subtle attack on the book – that it distorted a true picture of Indian society by exaggeration and selection – in favour of blank denial. “We have early betrothals in India,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle, “but as to child marriage in its real [sexual] sense, I doubt if there is any more in India than elsewhere.”

This wasn’t true. Child marriage in its real sense was prevalent – a distressing aspect of Indian life to the country’s social reformers and not least to Gandhi himself, who in 1926 wrote that it was “sapping the vitality of thousands of our promising boys and girls … [by] bringing into existence every year thousands of weaklings … who are born of immature parenthood”. A survey of 28,000 consummated marriages in Baroda found that in nearly 22,500 of them the first child had been born when the mother had yet to reach 13. A campaign to establish a legal minimum age for marriage had begun some years before, prompted partly by the problem of child widows; the all-India census of 1921 had found 329,076 Hindu widows aged 15 or under, many facing a bleak future in orthodox communities that frowned on widows remarrying.

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In the year that Mother India appeared, a bill was proposed for the Central Indian Legislature that would prohibit the marriage of Hindu girls below the age of 13. It was contentious; many of the groups of educated Indians that were canvassed believed such a legal restraint would be an insult to the Hindu religion. But the debate was free and open, and a version of the bill was enacted in 1930.

Had Mayo’s book helped this reform? It was just as likely to have hindered it. How we respond to information depends to a great extent on its source. “Is it true?” may be the first question. But, “Who’s telling me this?” and “Why am I being told?” soon come bowling along behind to shape our answer. Many if not most of Mayo’s facts were accurate enough, but she was a foreigner to India, and, as an imperial propagandist, also a hostile witness.

It wasn’t the last time Indian politicians reacted badly to a foreign depiction of India, and out of this history has come the Indian government’s recent decision to ban Udwin’s film. Not that Udwin is an imperialist or an unreliable narrator, but like Mayo she has been caught in that awkward intersection between feminism and patriotism or, in this case, state pride. Narendra Modi’s government can hardly be against the film’s message – a month ago the prime minister passionately denounced the practice of female foeticide as “a form of mental illness”, and this at a rally in a part of India notorious for the male/female imbalance in its birth rate. No, the messenger is the problem here. However familiar the truth, governments hate to hear it spoken from the outside.