Bharat Mata is a work painted by the Indian painter Abanindranath Tagore in 1905. However, the painting was first painted by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in the 1870s. The work depicts a saffron-clad woman, dressed like a sadhvi, holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth, and a rudraksha garland (mala) in her four hands. The painting was the first illustrated depiction of the concept and was painted with Swadesh ideals during the larger Indian Independence movement.

A nephew of the Indian poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore, Abanindranath was exposed at an early age to the artistic inclinations of the Tagore family.

Tagore had been exposed to learning art when he first studied at the Sanskrit College in Kolkata in the 1880s. In his early years, Tagore had painted in the European naturalistic style, evident from his early paintings such as The Armoury. In about 1886 or 1887, Tagore's relative Gyanadanandini Devi had set up a meeting between Tagore and E.B Havell, who was the curator of the Government school of Art in Calcutta. The meeting resulted in a series of exchanges between Havell and Tagore, with Havell gaining a native art collaborator with ideas in the same direction of his own, and Tagore gaining a teacher who would teach him about the 'science' of Indian art history. He attempted to induct Tagore as the Vice Principal of the art school, which was faced with heavy opposition in the school. Havell had to bend much of the school rules to do this, and tolerated many of Tagore's habits including the smoking of hookah in the classrooms and refusing to stick to time schedules.

Subject
Bharat Mata is depicted as a saffron-clad divine woman, holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a rosary in her four hands. The painting holds historical significance as it is one of the earliest visualizations of Bharat Mata, or "Mother India."

Themes and composition

The work was painted during the Swadeshi movement. The movement began as a response to the Partition of Bengal (1905), when Lord Curzon split the largely Muslim eastern areas of Bengal from the largely Hindu western areas.  In response, Indian nationalists participating in the swadeshi movement resisted the British by boycotting British goods and institutions, holding meetings and processions, forming committees, and applying diplomatic pressure.

The painting's central figure holds multiple items associated with Indian culture and the economy of India in the early twentieth century, such as a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a garland. Moreover, the painting's central figure has four hands, evocative of Hindu imagery, which equates multiple hands with immense power.

The painting has been characterized as "an attempt of humanisation of ‘Bharat Mata’ where the mother is seeking liberation through her sons," by Jayanta Sengupta, curator of the Indian Museum in Kolkata, India.

After completion
Since 1905, many iterations of the Bharat Mata have been made in paintings and other forms of art. However, the significance of Tagore's original painting is still recognized. In 2016, Bharat Mata was put on display at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, India.

Sister Nivedita, the inspiration behind the Bengal School of Art, praised the painting by saying:From beginning to end, the picture is an appeal, in the Indian language, to the Indian heart. It is the first great masterpiece in a new style. I would reprint- it, if I could, by tens of thousands, and scatter it broadcast over the land, till there was not a peasant's cottage, or a craftman's hut, between Kedar Nath and Cape Comorin, that had not this presentment of Bharat-Mata somewhere on its walls. Over and over again, as one looks into its qualities, one is struck by the purity and delicacy of the personality portrayed.

Title and literary context 

This famous painting by Abanindranath Tagore did not have its now-popular title Bharat Mata when it was first published in the famous periodical of arts and culture, Prabasi. The caption to the image in the magazine read: Matrimurti. The word in Bengali literally means the figure of the Mother. Contrary to the norms of the day, the artist's name also, did not feature alongside the caption.

Abanindranath Tagore himself had thought of the painting's title as Banga Mata, literally meaning the Mother of Bengal. For the artist had based his representation on the common, everyday Bengali woman, and it was an ode to her. Yet the nationalist feelings that the painting evoked metamorphosed it Abanindranath's Banga Mata to Bharat Mata, a pan-Indian figure, inspiring people across the length and breadth of the nation.

However, it was Sister Nivedita who rechristened the painting as Bharat Mata, noting down its iconography and politics of representation in detail. Nivedita was so enamoured by the painting that she wished to carry it from Kashmir to Kanyakumari to inspire the people in the mantra of Swadeshi. For her, the symbols and specifically the things the image holds, connotes clear nationalist meanings of strength and resistance. 

The Prabasi magazine had subsequently featured prints of similar maternal icons during this period of the Swadeshi. These included: a painting of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, painted by Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, and a painting of Madonna, by Dagnan-Bouveret, the French naturalist painter. Dagnan-Bouveret's painting was also entitled Matrimurti. All these female icons and their paintings expressed a similar idea of purity, resistance and freedom embodied in the feminine figure of the mother. By labelling Abanindranath's painting as Bharat Mata, Nivedita brings it to the same level as that of the Christian female icons. Thus, she links Abanindranath's canvas with European art's convention of embodying the spirit of the country and patriotism in the figure of a mother. Through this she counters both the British and its colonial subjugation of India, and gives to the Indians a concrete mother figure with which they can relate, and associate their idea of the nation, and be inspired to participate in Swadeshi. 

Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat Mata, the DAG Museums note, is linked with the Swadeshi art and the rejuvenation of a Pan-Asian identity, aestheticism and idiom. However, when one looks at the gradual evolution of its etymological label, we see how it gets complicated as a piece of nationalist art.

References

Hindu goddesses in art
Indian paintings
1905 paintings