Can fathers be mothers? Bollywood’s obsession with motherhood

Both Mary Kom and Panga make it very evident that their female protagonists are chasing success at the cost of domestic order and a sacrificial husband who has obligingly taken up the role of “mothering” the children.

These success stories of women never fail to drive this point home that women should be obliged to their husbands for “supporting” them in this perfunctory gender role reversal which has made it possible for them to leave in search of themselves. Furthermore, there is a paternalistic normalisation of guilt that Mary Kom and Jaya Nigam (of Panga) have internalized at having forsaken a child in their pursuit of ambition.

Both these films romanticise this idea of an intensely internalised guilt over the underperformance of motherhood as a gender imperative. More recently, Shakuntala Devi exhibits a patriarchal fetishization of motherhood. Albeit a mathematical genius, Shakuntala Devi’s success is measured by the parameters of a successful mother and a successful daughter. Interestingly, she becomes a successful daughter only in retrospect after she becomes a successful mother. Self-realization dawns on Devi once she herself has successfully manoeuvred the vagaries of motherhood as she declares at the end of the movie. Devi tells a hall packed with the audience that she could wholly understand her mother as a woman only after she herself became a mother. In other words, motherhood becomes a site through which women attain wisdom and sanctified enlightenment and the only space through which feminine solidarity and kinship can be achieved.

The overdramatization of motherhood in the film once again reminds us that however successful a woman might be, in the imaginary of mainstream Bollywood, such narratives are always foregrounded through patriarchal legitimation and sacralisation of motherhood. These films very strongly depict the idea that caregiving and nurturing by a father is only an act of substitute mothering. They can never be natural roles that fathers can fulfill.

Fathers in Mary Kom and Panga step in as substitute mothers and not as fathers fulfilling the roles of caregiving. Shakuntala Devi becomes a commentary on motherhood and though there are poignant scenes where the audience is made to realise that society should not be judgemental towards mothers, the central protagonists in the movie are shown as consolidating their feminine worth through the fulfillment of motherhood.

Autonomous womanhood is imbricated in motherhood and all these women-centric films are less about their personhood as they are commentaries on motherhood. Motherhood should be an exercise of a woman’s choice and not an ideology to control them. Bollywood unfortunately has been doling out narratives of woman empowerment only in a patriarchally sanctioned manner. It is high time that Bollywood wakes up to a realisation that there is moral hypocrisy in producing women-centric movies to covertly further and perpetuate masculinist presumptions of gender rather than breaking those very shackles.