As I think about all the different kinds of mothers who populate Indian literature, I am reminded of Kamla Bhasin's Hindi poem Ulti sulti amma, meant as much for mothers as it is for their children.



It is the portrait of a “mixed up” mother as told through the affectionate eyes of her child. Through a series of rhyming comparisons between what Amma asks the child to do and what she sometimes does herself emerges the radical idea of mothers as people. It is this idea that stays with me when I think about the literary mothers below, who form a small part of the sheer diversity of what motherhood can mean.



Ammu in The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy

Ammu meets and marries a man for love, divorces him after he repeatedly ill-treats her, is a fiercely loving single parent to twins Estha and Rahel, and has a brief but intense sexual relationship with Velutha, a Dalit man, which leads to violence and disaster for him, herself, and her children.



All this by age thirty-one, "a viable, die-able age", when she dies, alone and devastated. It is not her death that comes back to me now, years after I first read the novel, but the image of her, lost in a song playing on her radio, leaving the world behind for a while, including her children, not mother, not daughter, not lover, only Ammu.



Em in Em and the Big Hoom, by Jerry Pinto

"Her conversation had a way of reducing me to exclamations," says the narrator of Em, who is his mother. Em is hilarious, lewd, and heartbreaking. Her bipolarity is the great dark river running through the story. Em struggles constantly with her suicidal thoughts, which means frequent trips to the hospital, and the consequences of medical treatment in a culture that can only pathologise her. It is the narrator's telling of her story that knocks away this dehumanisation, and shows us an Em who is vigorously alive.



Sujata in Hajar Churashir Maa (Mother of 1084), by Mahasweta Devi

Another story of motherhood and death, featuring Sujata, the titular “mother of no. 1084”, one of the corpses at the morgue. It is from Sujata's recollections that we find out about what happened to No. 1084 – her son Broti – one of the many idealistic young men killed during the Naxal movement in Bengal. Sujata's investigation of her son’s revolutionary work and the injustice of his murder by the state bring her face to face with the injustices she has constantly faced in her own life.



Mangala in The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh

At the heart of his ingenious blending of science fiction, mythology, and mystery is Mangala, a cleaning lady in a scientific laboratory. She is the source and the reason for the metaphysical and extraordinary events in the story. She is the working class woman whose work Ronald Ross takes credit for, and whose actual powers he is totally unaware of.



These powers make Mangala the “mother” not just of other people, but also of her own self. No wonder she has a cult following. This is a sly, playful and subversive representation of the colonised Indian woman.



Ganga in Adi Parva, by Amruta Patil

Speaking of mythology, there's the sutradhar of Adi Parva, Amruta Patil's first offering in a three-part retelling of the Mahabharata. It is the river goddess Ganga, who tells stories to an opinionated audience at dusk in a village square.



One of the stories she tells is her own, in which she marries the king of Hastinapur, under the condition that he must never question her actions. The eight vasus, cursed by Vashishth, seek her help: “You, benevolent mother, know the importance of timely culling,” says one of them. She gives birth to and drowns seven children, and her husband questions her when she's about to drown the eighth, causing her to leave him. This is a sumptuously illustrated, wise retelling of celestial motherhood.



Pandu's mother in Mother, by Baburao Bagul

This story interrogates so many identities: mother, yes, but also dalit woman, widow, single parent, and sex worker. The unnamed mother is constantly punished for suspected infidelity by her husband. After he dies, she navigates a society that seeks to pin down her body and her self, and raises her son alone. Her caste and gender are the forces that she has to constantly battle, and ultimately she is abandoned for the same reasons by the son she has raised. But the unnamed woman is by no means defined only by the oppression she faces constantly, or her relationships with her husband and son.



Yuvanashva in The Pregnant King, by Devdutt Pattnaik

Pattnaik retells the story of the king so desperate for heirs that he instructs a magic potion to be made for his queen. He accidentally drinks it himself, and ends up pregnant. He gives birth, and subsequently impregnates one of his wives.



The birth presents a dillemma, and a confusion between strict binary understandings of gender as just man and woman. “Will a body such as mine fetter me or free me?” asks Yuvanashva. Pattnaik's telling is important, and reminds us that we shouldn't need magic potions to accept the idea that mothers don't always identify as women.



Miao in The Wildings, by Nilanjana Roy

If mothers are not always women, they're certainly not always human, either. One of my favourite characters in this novel is the clan elder, the siamese Miao, who teaches the kitten Southpaw to hunt and kill only for food, not for amusement.



She's the one who tells the young kitten Mara, “When we're close to the other side, Mara, we prefer to die alone. It's – we're cats. That's what we prefer, quiet and silence.” Miao has taught generations of kittens wisely and patiently what it means to be a cat, and it's her, “the finest, bravest warrior” whom they emulate.



Mother in Sharecropping, by Arundhathi Subramaniam

“I’m wearing my mother’s sari, her blood group,



her osteo-arthritic knee.

We’ve voted

for different men, same governments.”



Thus begins Arundhathi Subramaniam's poem about her mother. Throughout the poem she meditates on identity and parenting:



“I come undone with muzak

or a compliment. My mother’s made of sterner stuff.

Sowing the same dream in a different self –

the cussed logic

we both know

behind aeons of parenting.”



