From Mythology To Modernism: The Many Faces Of Motherhood In Indian Art

In the 4th century CE, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Madonna and Child — depicting the Virgin Mary holding an infant Jesus — became one of the most enduring and iconic subjects in Christian art. The image symbolised motherhood, divinity, and human tenderness as seen through the Christian canon. But long before Roman Catholics deified Mary and Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo humanised her again, early Indians imagined the forces of nature as mother goddesses.

Depictions of deities as maternal figures and maternal figures as deities in India go back to classical antiquity, with terracotta figurines of fertility goddesses found in many archaeological sites from the Indus Valley Civilisation. These terracotta figurines, often interpreted as fertility idols because of their exaggerated feminine features like enlarged breasts, hips, and wombs, represent the mother goddess as both the source and affirmation of life.

As a river-centric civilisation, the mother goddess tradition found another powerful expression in the personification of the great rivers of the subcontinent in early India. Three rivers of northern India — the Ganges, the Yamuna, and the now-lost Saraswati — were worshiped as some of the most ancient deities of India. Saraswati, revered by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists alike as the embodiment of wisdom and knowledge, was one of the earliest goddesses to have cult images made in her honour.

Even as Indians adopted a more patriarchal form of worship in the Vedic and post-Vedic period, the tradition of mother goddess worship continued in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain faiths. In Indian religious art, motherhood was elevated through the depiction of goddesses and mythical maternal figures such as Parvati with Ganesha, Yashoda with Krishna, and the Matrika or maternal deities who became symbols of divine protection and cosmic power. Similarly, the Yakshi — or personified female nature spirits — represented the fecundity and fertility of nature. They survive in sculptures from the early centuries B.C. and were appropriated into Buddhist and Jain worship in the first century A.D.

During the colonial period, depictions of motherhood acquired a new symbolic function as painters like Abanindranath Tagore and Amrita Sher-Gil represented the country as Bharat Mata, or Mother India. Abanindranath Tagore's 'Bharat Mata', painted the year after the first partition of Bengal in 1905, reimagined the maternal figure as a metaphor for the nation and became a nationalist symbol for India's freedom movement. It was appropriated by the political leadership of the Indian National Congress as the Swadeshi movement reached its height and became imbued with national imagination of the nation as a nurturing, spiritual mother.

As the nationalist fervour faded and Modernism became the dominant movement in Indian Art in the post-Independence period, motherhood, once again, found a new expression in the work of Modernists like M.F. Husain. Husain's Mother Teresa series cast her as an 'ideal mother' with limitless compassion. The series depicts Mother Teresa as a faceless maternal figure in the iconic blue-bordered white saree of the Missionaries of Charity. Husain's Madonna series further re-contextualized Christian maternal imagery within an Indian aesthetic language, bridging cultural and spiritual traditions.

Jamini Roy was another significant Modernist who reimagined Indian motherhood. Turning away from British academic realism, Roy adopted the visual language of terracotta temple friezes, Bengali folk arts and crafts traditions, and Kalighat Pat paintings. Shorn of unnecessary embellishments, Roy's deceptively simple and sure lines emphasize the profound connection between mother and child from mythical and religious figures to ordinary women.

In contemporary Indian art, motherhood is again being radically re-examined. Artists like Pushpamala N critique gendered parental roles through satire and performance. Nalini Malani uses the maternal body as a site of memory, trauma, and political resistance. Feminist and Dalit artists centre stories of working-class mothers, grieving mothers, and non-normative caregivers — voices historically excluded from dominant representations of motherhood — in their work. Indian artists continue to reinterpret the maternal figure in all its many dimensions — divine, domestic, political, and personal — pushing the boundaries of how we understand gender, identity, motherhood and care-giving in contemporary art practice. From the ancient fertility figurines of the Indus Valley Civilisation to the conceptual works of contemporary Indian art, motherhood remains a dynamic and deeply layered symbol.

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