Focus on this artwork and explain the 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.
Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes Dagnan-Bouveret Abanindranath Tagore Kashmir Kanyakumari Prabasi Bharat Mata Sister Nivedita