Reimagining Motherhood in Indian Modern Art

Through history, the idea of a mother has been fraught, often hijacking the imaginations of writers and artists. The connotations of the word have far outpaced its embodiments, standing in for emotions, nature, social hierarchies, familiarity, enigma, nostalgia, memory, and everything beyond. Between B. Prabha and Madhvi Parekh, two contemporaries—one trained and the other self-taught—there’s a sea of mothers who were born from how they experienced the world throughout their lives.

In many ways, one might argue that Prabha’s (1933-2001) oeuvre was anchored in the figure of women as nurturers, especially those on the peripheries, who carried the weight of the world’s cruelty on their fragile, elongated shoulders. Their eyes were hooded by deep, sooty shadows, blending in with the smudged kohl. Their arms were thin and tall, but rounded around the shoulders, softening and cushioning the blows inflicted on them by the world for the onlooker. We borrow Prabha’s gentle gaze for the women she painted, and allow it to settle on the figure of the mother with her child, who becomes a recurring motif in her career.

B. Prabha, Untitled, 1969, Waterproof ink on paper, 7.0 x 10.7 in. Collection: DAG

Many of these are tribal women holding a child—sometimes an infant, at other times a baby who’s aged a few more years—to their chest. They’re all fairly stoic, caught in an intimate moment, with a hand holding the child’s head or chest, the eyes turned intently onto the child, or outside the frame… at us.

Prabha’s mothers were unsentimental and resilient because they were both the builders and the protectors of the worlds around them. These mothers were always in conversation with each other and with the other women who occupied her canvas, and it feels intentional because Prabha acknowledged a woman’s labour: every woman is working, but not every working woman is paid for their labour.

Prabha’s mothers belong in the same universe as her women in the fields, the fisherwomen at sea, or the ones carrying a pail of water instead of a child at their hip. Visually, they may often collapse into each other because the artist centres their physical and emotional labour in a world where men are largely absent. Prabha’s mothers are placed in almost clinical isolation, bereft of men. And yet, they’re undeniably in the throes of patriarchy.

Her paintings are akin to photographs, in which what lies outside the frame is as crucial as what lies within. This is not to say that Prabha has not painted menfolk—she has, in her arresting visual grammar, showing their stark physiques enslaved by poverty and dearth. But it's undeniable that her preoccupation was with understanding the inner worlds of the women who surrounded her, especially those whom society was happy to reduce to a footnote in the pages of history.

There’s no exhaustive catalogue listing the number of paintings Prabha made on the subject of mother and child, as some went untitled. But there are at least eight that are known and have travelled widely through personal and private collections. In fact, briefly, when Prabha turned to sculpting between the late 1980s and early ‘90s, she couldn’t help but exploit the medium to bring to life a mother with hauntingly aching widow’s eyes in patinated bronze.

There’s something fierce about Prabha’s quiet, rooted, earthy palettes when held in contrast to Parekh’s whimsical and fantastical creatures, which seem to have walked straight out of a children’s book and passed through an adult’s fever dream. The melding of these two distinct languages is no coincidence—Parekh, now 84, began painting while pregnant with her child, artist Manisha Parekh, in the '60s.

In her work, there’s an abundance of Gujarati folk elements, traces of pichwai, kantha, kalamkari, and an explosion of bright colours that, at first, set Parekh’s world far away from Prabha’s. But when you pay closer attention, you notice how Parekh, too, revisits her mother figures in unexpected moments, carrying a curious throughline that brings the two artists closer than one might imagine.

Madhvi Parekh, Mother & Child, 1995, Acrylic on canvas board, 23.7 x 35.5 in. Collection: DAG

Her painting titled Mother, executed in oil and pastel on canvas, unfurls like a giant scroll of tapestry where, in glorious green, a mother figure has subsumed the world that surrounds her. One may read this as an image of Mother Nature, or a goddess who protects her children and devours them when the time comes. She is both gentle and furious; she is the creator and the annihilator, and Parekh found the vocabulary to portray them simultaneously.

But unlike Prabha, Parekh’s mother isn’t a motif. Rather, she’s a metaphor and a literal framework that holds her worlds together. You may often find entire universes and ecosystems embedded inside her mothers whose arms are wide-reaching, spanning several feet of canvas space. Her mothers span species too, like birds, and in all of them, they carry a smaller version of themselves in their wombs.

Madhvi Parekh, Two Figures, 1968, Waterproof ink, marker and sketch pen on paper laid on paper, 15.0 x 22.0 in. Collection: DAG

Within the purview of motherhood, Parekh has traversed several worlds that draw inspiration from the stories her mother told her as a child and from the ones she told herself while expecting her own. Therefore, her mothers are more ontological, questioning the very structures within which they exist. Her initial sketchbooks serve as atlases of the thoughts that gave birth to the artist in her, where, through repetition and constant reinterpretation of what she started with, she abstracts the image of a mother into an idea of a mother. And ideas are fluid and shapeshifting, like clouds.

So her mothers are as sacred as the spaces they’re worshipped in, cohabiting with the animals and the objects that stand on mortal land. Her goddesses are made of flesh and blood, and, curiously enough, are not deified, even if exalted. They may rise above the vagaries of everyday life, but they’re not exempted from them, much like Parekh’s mothers aren’t, despite their steely resolve.

Prabha and Parekh may have been motivated to observe the women within and without them for different reasons, using lenses that are vastly dissimilar. But their mothers, in their respective universes, are often found looking inward in search of answers to the questions that surround them. So while Prabha’s mothers navigate the gravelly terrains of their village homes on the margins of ‘development’, Parekh’s take the shape of a flowing river, or sometimes, even the stem of a flower in a vase, flanked by shoots of buds—her children. But for them both, this figure is omnipresent, resilient, and frankly, invincible.