Mother India (1957) is a 10/10 movie that I will likely watch atleast a couple more times.

Here are a few reasons.

  1. I have imagined myself as a young person during a famine many times throughout my life. Before watching this movie, I had never imagined myself as a mother during a famine. I look at a list of famines in Indian history and think I cannot imagine the strength Indian women have shown time and time again during the most difficult of physical/material circumstances. Also I think I thought my mom was an absolute tank the likes of which I haven’t quite seen before but this movie really made me think about how many absolute tanks came before her.

  2. The socialist in me absolutely lost it when I saw this scene.

A bunch of women in red marching with sickles?! Let’s go!!

This madlad director, Mehboob Khan, actually had another similar image.

You might say But they are farmers, so it makes sense that they have sickles, to which I would respond This was filmed in the 1950s. Mehboob Khan knew what he was doing! Do you see all of the red?!

  1. This little snippet has really stuck with me and I think about it atleast once per week.

I cannot quite find the words to describe why that short clip touches a deep part of me. As I read more Indian history, I am keeping my eyes open for a few more times when maybe women had to be superhuman because the men weren’t quite meeting their own expectations of themselves and someone needed to work for better times.

⚠️ Spoiler warning!

Which of her two adult children do you think Radha will kill? The right or the left one?

A Note on Video Quality

The actual movie video quality is better than what my clips would suggest. ffmpeg and efficient video codecs are not easy. I will improve it later, possibly with some webm .