From O-Lan to Radha

Our story begins in 1938, when Indian director, Mehboob Khan (1907–1964),Footnote ³ viewed Sydney Franklin's film version of The Good Earth in Delhi, and was inspired to make his own film depicting the rural-as-nation, this time centered on the figure of the peasant woman as its quintessential embodiment (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 12). The result would be his 1940 film Aurat/Woman, which then became the blue print for his iconic 1957 global super-hit, Mother India, still seen as the most successful film in Indian cinematic history and its transnational projection (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 9).Footnote ⁴ Indeed, although Pearl Buck's The Good Earth pivots around the struggles and conflicts of Wang Lung, in Sydney Franklin's film, O-Lan shares the narrative and symbolic center (see, e.g., Conn Reference Conn2010, 192; Hoban Reference Hoban1992, pp. 131–33). O-Lan's death comes closer to the end than it does in the novel, her husband suddenly remembering his love for her at the same time as he rediscovers his love and attachment to the land. The film's final scene has Wang Lung picking up the earth around the peach tree that O-Lan had planted near the start of the film to symbolize their shared effort to make the land fruitful, and declares, “O-Lan, you are the earth!” (Franklin, Reference Franklin1937).

In a twist, however, although O-Lan's cinematically rendered mythic connection to the land was the key inspiration for Mehboob Khan's films, in the end, he followed his friend and scriptwriter Babubhai Mehta's suggestion to base a film script on another of Pearl Buck's novels, The Mother (Reference Buck1934) (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 12). The Mother is a feminized Good Earth, or, rather, an alternative story of the symbolic connection between O-Lan, the land, and the eternal values of a cyclical rural moral universe, chronicled through the life of a nameless Chinese peasant woman who deeply embodies a fertile mother-earth subjectivity. Both of Mehboob Khan's films follow the basic story of The Mother, although now the struggling peasant woman at the heart of the narrative is powerfully named as Radha (Sardar Akhtar in Aurat, Nargis in Mother India).Footnote ⁵ Along with this name change, Khan's films radically transform the narrative and visual esthetics of both The Mother and The Good Earth (novel and film). Radha becomes an embodiment of the rural-as-nation, both as its essence and through linking a rural struggle against forces of nature, class, and gendered oppression to a national struggle for political, economic, and cultural sovereignty. These themes come to a dramatic contest in two key moments of both films. The first is in their climactic scenes of a natural disaster that bring out both the possibility of peasant revolt and reveal the economic and sexual vulnerability of the peasant woman. The second is in their shared penultimate scene of Radha shooting dead her own rebellious son, who is about to kidnap one of the village's “daughters” after killing the symbol of rural social oppression in the film – the rich and exploitative landlord/moneylender, Sukhi-Lala.

Yet, Aurat is not Mother India. Again, both narratively and esthetically, there are significant differences between the two films, differences that bespeak the shifting “modalities” of the relationship between the esthetic and the political, the debates between critical, social, and socialist realist politics of form and representation, and contending ideas of the rural/peasant/woman as emblematic condition of the nation that demarcate the period in which both films were produced as well as the one between them (Gopal Reference Gopal2005, p. 5; Sunderason Reference Sunderason2020, pp. 38–39). The transformations of the 1940 Aurat into the 1957 Mother India will be elaborated below, but they may be momentarily posited by their different endings: Aurat has Radha remembering her life through an assemblage of past scenes that she melancholically observes like a film; Mother India ends, as it began, with a new sense of historical time and change, as Radha is celebrated as a mother whose sacrifices may be honored and authored by the “liberated” space of the new post-colonial nation. Thus, in the encounter and transformation of Pearl Buck's texts into Mehboob Khan's films, we can ask what makes possible O-Lan becoming Radha, first in Aurat, and then in her spectacularly re-envisioned form in Mother India? What do the transformations of this figure of peasant womanhood as a symbol of the nation within these texts and their related co-texts tell us about global political-esthetic imaginaries of the rural/peasant/woman nexus in which these subjects both define and contend with imaginations of the coming-into-being of Indian and Chinese nationhood in the era of the anticolonial and socialist nationalisms?

An expanded space of esthetic circulations

Mehboob Khan's inspiration from Sydney Franklin's film and Pearl Buck's novels is often mentioned in histories of the making of the 1957 Mother India, but usually only as an ironic fact for such an emphatic representation of Indian womanhood (see, e.g., Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 12; Creekmur Reference Creekmur and Pauwels2007, p. 178; Sinha Reference Sinha2006, p. 248). Equally, the 1940 Aurat is often noted as a blueprint for Mother India but there has been little consideration of the relationship and changes between the two films within the shifting terrain of the political-esthetic questions around representing the rural/peasant/woman-as-nation nexus that animates their interlinked production.Footnote ⁶

Most often, the 1957 Mother India has been placed within a history of Indian nationalist responses to another text, American polemicist Katherine Mayo's Reference Mayo1927 tract, Mother India. Mayo infamously argued against Indian independence from British rule due largely to the treatment of women at the heart of what she termed Indian, read as essentially Hindu, culture – thus solidifying an imperialist imagination of India as “backward” and in need of saving by western civilization. Mayo's title and text also evoked and argued through the terms of a powerful Indian nationalist imagery of Bharat Mata (Mother India) – an essentialized “woman-as-nation” concept encapsulated by the map of the Indian nation overlaid with the image of a goddess-like Indian woman (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 49; Ramaswamy Reference Ramaswamy2010, p. 5; Sinha Reference Sinha1998, p. 34). Since the late nineteenth century, this representation of the “cartographed” Indian woman was used both to depict the captivity of the nation/woman under colonial rule and to represent the spiritual plenitude and endurance of a timeless nation-as-civilization that would emerge once more out of its state of oppression (Ramaswamy Reference Ramaswamy2010, p. 5; Sinha Reference Sinha1998, p. 32,  Reference Sinha2006, p. 48). As Mrinalini Sinha has elaborated, Mayo's argument opened the space for a nationalist revalorization of this imagery in which the liberation of the Indian nation is the liberation of the Indian woman – leaving in the historical dustbin more radical formulations of gender, class, and caste liberation that challenged this essentialist discourse (Sinha Reference Sinha1998, pp. 56–57,  Reference Sinha2006, p. 55). Mehboob Khan's Reference Khan1957 film, Mother India, thus, becomes as a definitive post-colonial cinematic “nationalist rebuttal” to Mayo's imperialist text, affirming its essentialized, civilizational figuration (Sinha Reference Sinha2006, p. 25; see also Roy Reference Roy1998; Schulze Reference Schulze2002; Thomas Reference Thomas1989).Footnote ⁷

Without fully refuting a reading of Mehboob Khan's Mother India as a finale to the history of Indian nationalist responses to Katherine Mayo's imperialist text, I re-position this relationship, via Pearl Buck, into a more expanded space of political-esthetic circulatory histories embedded within the film. Buck's novels and Mayo's Mother India participate as co-texts within this expanded space. The American scene of the late 1920s to the 1940s, where The Good Earth and Mayo's Mother India co-circulated as the two most popular “non-Atlantic” texts, inspiring a host of commentaries and cross-media adaptations, and where Buck and Mayo themselves contended on questions of Indian and Chinese national futures through various public forums, brings to light their hitherto unstudied entangled history (Nadkarni Reference Nadkarni2008, p. 805; Conn Reference Conn2010, pp. 199, 268; Lye Reference Lye2005, pp. 241–42; Sinha Reference Sinha1998, pp. 2–3, 5; So Reference So2016, p. 65). Both texts and their authors shaped global imaginaries of India and China, via their representations of the rural, the peasantry, and women as symbols and symptoms of nationhood, during a historical moment that witnessed a restructuring of imperial relations through the rise of anti-colonial and socialist nationalisms (Sinha Reference Sinha2006, pp. 24–28). Brought together, they further make visible the contours of connected India–China political-esthetic vocabularies and modes of encounter in this moment.

Mehboob Khan's evocation of nationalist responses to Mayo's polemic in his 1957 film, and Pearl Buck's contentious dialog with Chinese leftist writers and critics over representing the rural as national space, both expose the power hierarchies and instances of failed solidarities engendered by imperialist binaries. The connection between Pearl Buck's novels, Sydney Franklin's film, and Mehboob Khan's Aurat and Mother India, however, suggests forms of encounter in which power hierarchies are more attenuated, or that generate instances of political-esthetic affiliation, and modes of transculturation that crisscross and sometimes go beyond such binaries. Political-esthetic encounters here participate in the making of a “coeval” transnational cultural space of debate, contention, and possible solidarities (So Reference So2016, pp. xxv–xxvi).

The leftist anti-colonial and socialist esthetics of “the people” in both India and China – including their active engagement with a resonant and shared transnational body of leftist esthetic movements, theories, and texts from the mid-1920s to the 1950s – also emerges within this expanded space of political-esthetic circulation, its structures and temporalities (see e.g., Bohnenkamp Reference Bohnenkamp, Chen, Li-Min Chun and Liu2021; Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2019; Gopal Reference Gopal2005; Grewal Reference Grewal2013; Pang Reference Pang2002; Sunderason Reference Sunderason2020; Volland Reference Volland2017). Although a more specific elaboration of the institutions, practices, and networks of leftist esthetic circulations across India and China is not possible here, I suggest their contours and dynamics through my readings below. I first read Pearl Buck's literary interventions in China within the sphere of leftist cultural debates and through key co-texts that grappled with the representation of the rural as national space via the peasant woman as its embodiment. These texts and interpretations of them resonate deeply with the contexts of Mehboob Khan's Aurat and Mother India. I then turn to a close reading of Khan's transformations of Pearl Buck's works that embeds his films within a connected body of Indian and transnational leftist co-texts. In the end, I suggest how bringing these Indian and Chinese co-texts, encounters, and modes of transculturation together within an expanded space of political-esthetic circulation, brings to light a contested terrain of meanings to the rural/peasant/woman nexus as interlinked sites representing Indian and Chinese nations – a complex terrain that takes us beyond the frame of predetermined nationalist recuperations of imperialist texts.

From O-Lan to Golden Bough

The critical reception of Pearl Buck's novels within the Chinese leftist cultural sphere of the 1930s distills the tenor of the intense globally resonant political and cultural debates over the question of the rural and the peasantry as nation in this period, and connects them to a range of Chinese co-texts writing the rural and peasantry as symbols and subjects of the Chinese nation.Footnote ⁸ Buck's novels and their Chinese co-texts further bring to the fore the gendered politics of writing the rural and peasantry into the center of the national imaginary, through representations of the peasant woman as embodiment of the national past, present, and future. Leftist literary depictions of peasant women oscillate between their symbolization as downtrodden figures of an ossified traditional patriarchal order, or conversely as symbols of an endangered cultural purity located in the rural, to representations of women as superbly exploited victims of feudal and imperialist-capitalist classed oppression, to narratives of their emerging revolutionary peasant consciousness, or as laboring “heroines” of a new liberated socialist nation (see e.g., Chen Reference Chen2003; Du Reference Du2017; Grewal Reference Grewal2012, pp. 228–34; Han Reference Han2005, p. 39; Spakowski Reference Spakowski2020). This literary imagination of peasant women meets a larger discourse around “the woman question,” in which gendered forms of oppression are acknowledged but often sutured into questions of national oppression and liberation (see e.g., Evans Reference Evans and Wasserstrom2003; Judge Reference Judge, Perry and Goldman2002; Merkel Hess Reference Merkel-Hess2016, p. 50). Pearl Buck's novels and their Chinese co-texts illuminate this suturing while also exposing the tensions within this discourse through the writing of the peasant woman as emblematic of the rural and the peasantry-as-nation.

Two key co-texts connected to Pearl Buck's imagination of the rural/peasant/woman as essence of the nation and its reception within the Chinese leftist literary sphere are Lu Xun's Zhufu/New Year's Sacrifice (祝福, Reference Lu1924), and Xiao Hong's Shengsi chang/The Field of Life and Death (生死场, Reference Xiao1935). Lu Xun's works have a uniquely tangled history with those of Pearl Buck. Not only did they comment on each other's literary creations, but their works were simultaneously subject to critical attention and debate within the changing field of ideas of realism and depictions of the rural and peasanty that gripped the leftist literary sphere in the late 1920s and 1930s, and reverberated into the 1950s (see e.g., Conn Reference Conn2010, p. 199; Liu Reference Liu1992, p. 64). The differences in the critical commentary on Lu Xun's and Pearl Buck's works highlight the conflicted contours of this shifting vocabulary. Xiao Hong, who was a refugee from Japanese-occupied Manchuria, was supported by Lu Xun, and her The Field of Life and Death was published the same year that Pearl Buck's The Mother first appeared in Chinese translation.Footnote ⁹ The two novels come together in their shared depiction of peasant women's experience of the rural space and in their questioning of the modern nation as liberated space. Yet, their vast divergence, also on these terms, and the radically different critical appraisal of the two authors in the Chinese leftist sphere further illuminates the fraught imbrication of “the woman question” in the imagination of the rural and the peasantry as symbol of the nation.

Lu Xun's New Year's Sacrifice presents a disturbing encounter between the narrator – a modern, educated, and reformist young man returning to his village for the New Year – and his former maidservant, Xianglin Sao, or Xianglin's wife. With all his modern knowledge and reformist ideas, the narrator fumbles in the face of this destitute figure and he has no answer to her desperate questions about salvation in the afterlife. When she dies the next day, the narrator retells her tale of tragedies and cruel rejection by the village community, but with little explanatory or redemptive power. Unlike in The Good Earth, where O-Lan herself has redemptive power through maintaining her connection to The Good Earth, or in The Mother, where the Mother's sense of her position in the rural order is recovered by the birth of a grandson, for Xianglin wife, there is no redemption, either through the ethos of the village community or through the ‘liberated’ male national agent's knowledge.

Lu Xun's experimental critical social realism and representation of hopeless, hapless, or tragically innocent poor peasant characters who fail to understand the conditions of their existence, made him a foundational figure of the iconoclastic May Fourth cultural movement of the nineteen teens and early 1920s, in which an ossified traditional order appeared as the source of China's cultural, economic, and political decline (Anderson Reference Anderson1990, pp. 76–118; Denton Reference Denton, Rojas and Bachner2016). By the late 1920s, however, as ideas around both the rural and peasantry as symbols of the nation and the debate on the literary forms for representing these subjects changed, Lu Xun's May Fourth works came under criticism for their pessimism. The 1930s emerged as a new era of “revolutionary literature” (Cheng Reference Cheng1928). The oppressions of the rural space were more clearly the oppressions of a classed order created by the intertwined structures of feudalism and imperialist-capitalism, while poor peasants, suffering under this order, were also heroic and the subjects of revolutionary consciousness. At the same time, debates over literary forms turned toward the incorporation of traditional popular forms as key ways to represent the lived experience of peasants and proletarians and to develop “national forms” of revolutionary literature and arts (see e.g., Hung Reference Hung1994; Van Fleit Hang Reference Van Fleit Hang2013). The difficult status of Lu Xun's 1920s’ works in this sphere – even as he himself remained a dominant figure in developing, promoting, and debating these new leftist esthetics (Davies Reference Davies2013) – distills both the contours of this shifting space, and illuminates the terms of Pearl Buck's entry and controversial status within it.

Pearl Buck herself disparaged what she saw as the culturally disconnected realism of May Fourth literary depictions of the peasantry as a downtrodden “backward” mass (So Reference So2016, p. 51, Spurling Reference Spurling2010, p. 185). Her criticism and own turn to rural culture and the classical vernacular tradition put her squarely within the emerging discourse of developing literary forms connected to “the people” that dominated Chinese leftist literary debates in the 1930s (So Reference So2016, p. 51). Yet, Pearl Buck's answer, to posit an authentic Chinese culture rooted in the “vast folk mind” of an eternal, organic rural society (see Buck, Reference Buck1938), diverged from the themes and formal interventions of this leftist political-esthetic project. For her critics, Buck's The Good Earth presented a fantasy of an unassailable and essentially “just” rural order in which poor peasants may struggle but in which they essentially see themselves as participants. As one of Lu Xun's most prominent protegés, the writer and critic Hu Feng, argued, The Good Earth elides the structures of landlordism, imperialism, capitalism, and economic crises that actually inform the events in the lives of Wang Lung and his family (Reference Hu1935).Footnote ¹⁰

Curiously, Hu Feng notes that The Good Earth's representation of the downtrodden rural woman is one of its strong points, even as Buck fails to represent the structures engendering her oppression (Reference Buck1935). Yet, in both The Good Earth and The Mother, although O-Lan and the Mother are subjects of tragedy, they are not represented by Buck as downtrodden. Rather, they both represent more firmly than their male counterparts the noble connection of the peasantry to the “good earth” and the timeless endurance of a Chinese rural moral universe. Thus, although in Pearl Buck's novels, peasant women represent the resilient, if buffeted, authenticity of the nation, Hu Feng, like Lu Xun's narrator (though he fails), assumes the peasant woman's condition can be represented through liberating forms of consciousness or knowledge that will bring forth a new political community of the nation. Although Lu Xun's story questions this assumption, Xiao Hong's The Field of Life Death not only challenges Pearl Buck's representation, but also fractures the smooth consolidation of peasant women's experience into the territorial nation's liberation.

Lu Xun wrote a preface and Hu Feng an afterword to The Field of Life and Death, framing it as a firm representation of the oppressed yet resilient and resistance-capable beating heart of the real “people” of China – which was very unlike, at least for them, Pearl Buck's representation (see Liu Reference Liu, Grewal and Kaplan1994, p. 38). But, their framing elides The Field of Life and Death's ambivalent presentation of the peasantry's idea of the nation, and its questioning of what the collectivity of the nation promises to women – despite their willingness to put their bodies on the line to fight for it. The young woman Golden Bough's words are striking here. After going into the city in an attempt to find work, she is raped, not by a Japanese soldier but by a Chinese soldier. Golden Bough states, “I used to hate men, and now I hate those [Japanese]…. If I hate the Chinese as well, then there is nothing else for me to hate” (Xiao Hong Reference Xiao2002, p. 84).

Golden Bough, thus, not only upends a dominant nationalist linkage of the rape of woman as rape of the nation, but also questions if a national community that treats her as a woman equally is possible. This questioning takes on a visual form in Xiao Hong's own cover design for The Field of Life and Death. The image has elicited many interpretations linking the struggle of China's peasantry to the fate of the nation as a whole. One interpretation is that it depicts the uplifted face of a peasant woman figured onto a map of Manchuria, or the divided territory of the China (Liu Reference Liu, Grewal and Kaplan1994, p. 48). Although such a reading suggests the peasant woman body seamlessly symbolizes the linked struggles of women and the nation, we might also posit, how, in both its harsh visuality and in its ambiguity, the image questions this seamless connection, and actually presents a more fractured relationship between the rural space, the national space, and women.

Lu Xun's New Year's Sacrifice and Xiao Hong's The Field of Life and Death become key co-texts of Pearl Buck's novels imagining the Chinese nation through the rural/peasant/woman nexus. The co-circulation and critical appraisal of these texts within the expanded space of the rural turn in China from mid-1920s to the 1950s, not only reveals the shifting vocabularies of this turn in both political and esthetic imaginaries, but also the tensions and ambiguities existing within the imbrication of the rural and peasantry as symbol and subject of the nation, and women as symbols and subjects of the nation. Similar tensions, via Pearl Buck's novels, come together in Mehboob Khan's transformations of O-Lan into Radha in both the 1940 Aurat and the 1957 Mother India. I return to Lu Xun and Xiao Hong's texts in the conclusion to re-stage their ambivalent depictions within the socialist and post-colonial space that connects the new Indian and Chinese nation-states in the 1950s. Through these co-texts, I ask if we can complicate Mother India's trajectory as a film seamlessly suturing the peasant woman into a singular narrative of post-colonial national liberation. What politics of the rural and peasantry-as-nation contend with the politics of woman-as-nation in Khan's films and their Indian co-texts?

The texts of Mother India

Although Aurat and Mother India after it, follow much of the plot and characters of Pearl Buck's The Mother, there are key aspects of their stories that link back to The Good Earth novel and film, transforming both, not solely as instances of cultural localization but rather through modes of transculturation within the expanded space of shifting leftist political-esthetic vocabularies, in India and China that this essay has sought to map out. Khan's films particularly illustrate the shifting vocabularies around the rural that marked the late colonial and early post-colonial periods in Indian literature, visual art, theatre, and cinema – from a nationalist pastoral romanticism, to the rural as a site of struggle on the land and deep social hierarchies, to the rural as potentially revolutionary subaltern space (Sunderason Reference Sunderason2020, pp. 37–38, 47). These representations appear in the divergent critical, social, and socialist realisms animating the movements of progressive arts in the 1930s and the communist cultural front of the Bengal Famine era of the 1940s, the legacies of which reverberated through the 1950s (ibid., 41).

Khan and his production team's varied interactions with the politics, esthetics, and texts of the Progressive Writers Association and the Indian People's Theatre Association, and his own avid incorporation of a set of transnational socialist and leftist avant-garde film techniques distill the locational and experimental terms in which “partisan aesthetics” emerges in late colonial and post-colonial India (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 32; Sunderason Reference Sunderason2020, p. 42). This engagement is an important aspect of the social and socialist realist esthetics of both Aurat and Mother India, and also speaks to the differences between them. That Pearl Buck's novels and Franklin's film become part of this space of transnational leftist esthetics in Khan's films, suggest the ambiguous status of Buck's representations across this terrain, as well as the multiple forms of interaction between the political and the esthetic, and modes of affiliation, affinity, and solidarity within “the partisan esthetics” of this period.Footnote ¹¹

Finally, Aurat and Mother India both redirect Pearl Buck's O-Lan and the Mother into the conflicted space of the representation of woman-as-nation that we see in Katherine Mayo's polemic and the imagery of the Mother India figure – or the “cartographed body” of the Indian woman as a symbol of the nation (Ramaswamy Reference Ramaswamy2010, p. 5). Aurat's imagination of the peasant mother presages what in the 1940s would become a more explicit re-articulation of the imagistic “mother-map” symbiosis within cultural representations of the Bengal Famine (1943–1944). The peasant woman and her linkage to the space of the Indian nation emerged in dramatic and traumatic forms in this period, and that interval is an important aspect of how we may discuss the re-writing of Radha between Aurat and Mother India.

Transformations of The Good Earth and The Mother in Aurat

Like both the novel and film versions of The Good Earth, Aurat begins with the marriage day of the protagonist. The meaning of this day between these texts, however, takes on a different valence, in terms of setting up the trajectory of the narrative, its symbolic structure, and the staging of central conflicts. When Wang Lung arrives at the rich House of Hwang to collect his new bride, O-Lan, a lowly kitchen servant there, he is met with cold, opulent indifference that gives him a sense of inferiority. This sense opens up a desire to have what the Hwang's have, and, upon learning of the family's financial decline, he hatches a plot to buy the land they are so eager to sell off (The Good Earth, pp. 18–20, 52).Footnote ¹² Thus, in The Good Earth, the rich family is not written as having taken anything away from the poor peasants, but is superior because of what they own, especially their vast tracts of land. The Hwang family suffers decline because they have lost their connection to the land through an over-consumption of goods not produced on the land (GE 52). Wang Lung's acquisition of this land leads him to a struggle to accumulate more land and become rich, but to not, like the Hwang family, lose the connection to and the understanding of the land as the essential resource for life.

The novel's central struggle between land and wealth also defines the symbolic role of O-Lan. O-Lan does not struggle with the effects of accumulation like Wang Lung, but continues to symbolize the land as life-giving resource, and the natural “goodness” of a land-connected rural moral universe, which has its own rhythms of fortune, adversity, justice, and injustice. After surviving a famine and returning from the city with stolen riches, with which he buys more land – and laborers to cultivate it – Wang Lung begins to devalue both the land and O-Lan's earthy, laboring body (GE 162). In Franklin's film, as already noted, Wang Lung's re-discovery of his connection to the land and his re-discovery of his love for O-Lan are fully merged in the final scene and lines, “O-Lan, you are the earth!”

A similar conflict and rooting of the enduring authenticity of the rural moral universe onto the figure, and essentially the body, of the peasant woman occurs in Pearl Buck's The Mother. The Mother's family, unlike Wang Lung's, is tenant farmers, and there is a felt sense of an exploitative relationship that is not seen in The Good Earth. However, although this exploitative relationship carries the plot of The Mother, it is de-emphasized on a moral and symbolic level. The husband's anger and abandonment of his family is a moral flaw, aimed not at the exploitative relation, but the result of a desire to emulate the citified life and delicately adorned look of the landlord agent (Buck Reference Buck1934, p. 25). The Mother's youngest son's forays into the city to gamble and sit in tea houses is as flawed as his turn to communism – empty of any real sense of class solidarity or even empathy for his fellow human beings (Buck Reference Buck1934, pp. 151, 158).

In contrast, for the Mother, who is the subjective and symbolic center of the novel, the landlord-tenant relation is akin to the cycle of seeding, planting, harvesting, and agricultural festivals. She understands her labor not as a struggle to free herself from exploitative social relations but because it is life-giving and affirming (The Mother, p. 17).

If the central conflicts and their resolutions in Pearl Buck’ novels present the eternal endurance of a land-connected rural moral universe via the peasant mother as its quintessential embodiment, Aurat suggests a much more conflicted narrative of rural social relations and establishes a different structure of meaning for the connection between the peasantry, the peasant woman, and the land. In Aurat, the opening scenes of a traveling wedding party and a festive marriage ceremony are quickly overshadowed when Sundar Chachi admits to herself (and the audience) that she mortgaged her land to the village's rich money lender, Sukhi-Lala, to pay for the wedding of her only son, Shyamu. This debt and Sukhi-Lala's insatiable demands as he continually adds more interest to the ledgers that Sundar Chachi and Shyamu cannot read, drives the film's narrative and visual esthetics.

The landlord/money lender is, thus, a very present and explicit exploiter of the poor in Aurat. There is a seething undercurrent of anger at the extractive relationship, which cuts across their individual, familial, and communal lives. This undercurrent rises to the surface when Shyamu abandons his family out of weariness over the debt-immiserated conditions under which he cannot feed his ever-growing family; it explodes further when the farmers gather to demand Sukhi-Lala release his stores of hoarded grain during the famine; and finally erupts violently in Birju's rebellion against Sukhi-Lala and the moral codes of the village. The most intense depiction of class exploitation in Aurat, however, happens in gendered and sexual terms, when Radha is forced to submit to Sukhi-Lala's offer of sex in exchange for food for her starving children during a devastating drought. This forced exchange is never completed, but its stands as the pinnacle of Sukhi-Lala's crass exploitation of the poor in the form of taking everything they own, including their dignity. In contrast to The Mother's acceptance of the landlord–tenant relation, in Aurat, Radha's struggle is to have her land back so she can defend both her economic and sexual integrity from the predations of the money lender – who is after both her land and her body.

Although the first half of Aurat weds a visuality of pastoral romanticism and the cycles of nature with that of the rural as a site of struggle against social oppression, the climactic mid-point of the film, after Shyamu's departure, significantly shifts the visual text. The forces of nature, class oppression, and sexual oppression come together during a devastating drought the grips the land and leads to famine. The drought is depicted through a series of intensifying montage sequences that drastically alter the continuity-editing style that dominates the depictions of rural life in Sydney Franklin's The Good Earth. Instead, they evoke the political montage esthetics of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, and King Vidor (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, pp. 41, 42). They further embed the film within an expanded, transnational space of a new esthetics of the rural, that we also see in Aurat's contemporary co-texts, such as Bengali director Nitin Bose's Dharti Mata/Motherland (Desher Mati in Bengali, Reference Bose1938) and Dovzhenko's Zemlya/Earth (Reference Dovzhenko1930) (Schulze Reference Schulze2002, p. 84). These films present the rural as a site of struggle against social oppression and nature, and the contest over conflicting solutions to the “agrarian question” – how to transform the immiserated rural condition – is central. In Aurat, however, the intensifying imagery of the devastating forces of nature and rural social oppression collude most fiercely and symbolically on the economic and sexual vulnerability of the peasant mother.

The montage presents colliding paths of action or intervention: protest and revolt that could overturn the social order (the mass of peasants gathered at Sukhi-Lala's door), divine intervention (the temple bell, Lakshmi), the cycles of nature (the drought and storm), or sexual exchange (Radha's choice). Or, one could say that the unforgiving earth and the situation of a woman about to sell her body (her honor/virtue/laaj) can be transformed by collectivist revolt, divine intervention, or the cycles of nature. The montage sequence presents all in dramatic and tense collision, although the film seems to choose divine intervention. The villagers back away from Sukhi-Lala without breaking down his doors (as they could easily have the power to do) and turn to praying at the temple. Radha mocks Sukhi-Lala's comparison of her to the goddess Lakshmi, but is then saved by lightening that strikes her assaulter down; she turns from sexual victim of Sukhi-Lala to his savior.

The political text of exploitation then fades with the end of the montage sequence. As the years after the drought pass, there seems to be a reconciliation in the village. Instead, the struggle turns to be against Birju's angry revenge, which would undo everything the peasant mother has struggled for to gain her economic independence and respect in the village. Indeed, at the end, Aurat seems to follow The Mother in making the peasant mother chief defender of the rural moral order, or a “village republic” (Jodhka Reference Jodhka2002, p. 3342). Yet, the choices stand, as the villagers' treatment of Radha is cruel, while Birju's turn to robbery and his tragic end could be read as the result of the paths (the path of collective revolt) not taken. Divine intervention does not bring justice in the end.

Aurat's climatic montage and the questions it poses presage what would become a renewed focus on the social and natural forces causing devastating effects on the rural peasantry in the literature, art, and cinema of the Bengal Famine. The interval between the 1940 Aurat and the 1957 Mother India is informed by this crucial intervention and the way it both dramatized the rural condition through, and yoked the very integrity of the nation to, the economic vulnerability, and sexual honor of the famine-stricken peasant mother.

Transformations of the rural and the peasant mother in Mother India

Mehboob Khan's Mother India, through its unique combination of folk-theatre stylization and socialist realist esthetics, sharpens the narrative and visual focus on the forces of rural oppression that we already see in Aurat and Dharti ke Lal, while also radically transforming the image of the peasant mother as a symbol of Indian nation and womanhood. She is no longer solely a tragic victim but a powerful agent inaugurating the new nation, and she does so with her mother/body firmly connected to the mother/land. Yet, Mother India, too, may ask on what terms her agency within the space of the new nation is formulated.

Mother India opens with the story of Radha in the time and space of the new rural village at the heart of the liberated post-colonial nation-state. An old woman's face appears as a close-up, her skin all wrinkled and resembling the earth, a clump of which she proceeds to pick up and hold to her heart. The scene shifts then to views of an industrializing rural landscape shaped by electric poles, jeeps, paved roads, large-farming vehicles, and finally, an irrigation dam under construction. The old woman is soon surrounded by her son and a group of official-looking men in white suits and caps, asking her to take the place of honor in opening the dam: “You are…the mother of the whole village. If you don't participate, we can't open the dam.” She goes with them haltingly, and when someone puts a garland of flowers over her head, the scene fades, to be replaced by a close-up of the woman as a young bride with garlands of flowers around her neck.

Thus begins Radha's memory of her marriage day. But this time, unlike in Aurat, she overhears Sundar Chachi's private confession about mortgaging the land right on her wedding night. Radha's immediate knowledge of the debt and Sukhi-Lala's more frequent and obvious presence adds a layer of intense foreboding onto the early sequences accompanied by song or dramatic musical scores. The second song sequence is grim and protracted, repeating a series of stylized tableaus of Radha and Shyamu's sweaty physical labor and the theft of its produce through the transfer of increasingly large portions of every crop – from wheat to cotton – to Sukhi-Lala. A following sequence is an even more extreme focus on the taught, stretched body parts, and strained faces of Radha and Shyamu as they try with everything they have to break through the unyielding earth of a fallow field over which Sukhi-Lala has no claim, in order to gain their independence from the cycle of debt and theft. At the peak of this effort, Shyamu's arms are crushed under a massive boulder and he can no longer work in the fields. He leaves his family, not because he desires to mimic the rich (as in The Mother), or because he gives up in face of incessant immiseration (as in Aurat), but because he would just take scarce resources away from them unnecessarily.

Mother India heightens its already steady focus on Radha's laboring body after Shyamu's departure. This focus on Radha's physicality is a drastic change from her depiction in Aurat. Aurat's Radha is often viewed in close up, and looks worn, disheveled, and pale during the drought. But, she is never shown with the same focus on arms heaving, and panting body at work, covered in the earth that she labors on, as is the Radha of Mother India. Radha's depiction as a “labor heroine” evokes depictions of peasant women at work featured in the internationally disseminated print and visual media of the Soviet Union, such as the magazines Soviet Land and Soviet Woman that circulated in India from the late 1940s on (Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti2019, p. 244; Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 44). Such imagery was also dominant in the literary and visual productions of the early People's Republic of China (PRC) (see, e.g., Chen Reference Chen2003, Du Reference Du2017; Spakowski Reference Spakowski2020). But, the Soviet and Chinese imagery was often accompanied by smiling faces or glowing cheeks, signaling labor in a society free from oppression, and unequal ownership of land. It also symbolized socialist women overcoming past ideas of weak and confined femininity (Chen Reference Chen2003). Radha's version of this imagery, if esthetically similar in shot style and choice of focus, is different, as hers is a physical labor of resistance, struggle, and determination to overcome nature and social oppression. Rather than overcoming a past gender-order of segregation and ideas of female inferiority through proud socialist public labor, Radha's labor on the land is to protect her feminine honor and identity as mother. Her often upward and outward gaze resembles what has been defined as the “socialist realist gaze” of much communist iconography, but rather than gazing out to a liberated future, Radha's gaze is one signaling her fierce struggle to protect her mother body/land (Donald Reference Donald2000, p. 62).

The transformed visual esthetics in which Radha's body becomes central in Mother India is also key to its new depiction of the dramatic natural disaster that reveals the extent of social oppression in the village. In Mother India the drought of both The Good Earth and Aurat becomes a devastating flood that ruins the harvest and soaks the land beyond recovery. Although the original version of Mother India also included scenes of villagers protesting at Sukhi-Lala's hoarding of grain, the censors at the Film Bureau mandated their removal (Chatterjee Reference Chatterjee2002, p. 54). Yet, the idea of collective revolt remains integral to Mother India's text, lingering in its tense narrative and visual esthetics. The village's collective protest is re-embedded in Birju's revenge at the end. Unlike his more disaffected and cynical revolt in Aurat, Mother India's Birju actually burns Sukhi-Lala's debt records – thus freeing the poor from owing anyone who may come to claim Sukhi-Lala's possessions. More centrally, however, the communal revolt is placed upon Radha as a symbol of heroic resistance against all forces of oppression, and by making a dramatic symbolization of her body as mother/land.

Throughout the scenes of devastating drought and her desperate decision to submit to Sukhi-Lala's offer of sex in exchange for food for her children, Radha is covered head to toe in the mud of the earth, and becomes larger than life, even as Sukhi-Lala seeks to dominate her. In the end, her refusal and fierce attack with a stick on her oppressor propels Radha's power to save the integrity of the communal body as well. In a scene that evokes both the mass exoduses of the Partition and the Bengal Famine, Radha's face covers the entire screen as she gazes at the line of departing farmers across the horizon that is superimposed upon her image. Radha, first with a scythe over her shoulders, then with her arms outstretched and a clump of earth in her hands, sings to the departing villagers to stay and help her recover the fields: “Your mother is calling you, asking you to stay, with hands folded. The earth is your mother, after all.” The villagers stop their exodus and, coming to her, they begin to dig at the earth alongside her. This sequence of collective recovery ends with a view of the mass of farmers forming, in a dance-like motion, the shape of the map of an undivided India. The image lasts for but an instant but it consolidates Radha as Mother India, Mother of the political community.

The imagistic connection between mother and land powerfully evokes the linked integrity of the peasant/mother/land that made its appearance in the cultural production of the Bengal Famine, and its cinematic iteration in Dharti ke Lal. This scene also shifts the terms of the civilizational woman-as-nation concept incorporated into Mayo's imperialist text. Here, the mother/land/nation are sites of struggle rather than eternal.

Finally, in its penultimate scene, Mother India both repeats and changes the nature of Birju's revolt and Radha's reasons for killing her own son from their versions in Aurat. For the villagers, for Ramu, and especially for Radha, Birju's act of burning Sukhi-Lala's debt records and killing him is enough. They plead with him to not touch Rupa, the daughter of the moneylender, who, while petulant and privileged, is not her father. But Birju is undeterred. In Radha's final encounter with her son, she declares, “I am a woman, and Rupa is a daughter of the village. She is my own honor.” Radha shoots her son, and then as she looks at her blood-covered hands, the shot is superimposed with another, of earth-red waters flowing out of the newly inaugurated dam the film's liberated modern national present. The elderly Radha, garlanded and surrounded by men in white suits, looks over the fields. The camera focuses on her face, which is grim. She trembles, almost sobs, and the film ends with a long shot of her standing with the men surrounding her.