Bharat Mata Temple - is dedicated to Mother India and not any member of the Hindu pantheon. It was inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936. It has a splendid relief map of India carved in marble.
It has a huge relief map of the Indian sub-continent showing all its rivers, mountains and pilgrimages.
The institutionalised entry of the icon into the domain of religious practice goes back to
the 1930s. In 1936, a Bharat Mata temple was built in Benaras by Shiv Prashad Gupt and was
inaugurated by none less than Mahatma Gandhi. The temple contains no image of any god or
goddess. It has only a map of India set in marble relief. Mahatma Gandhi said, "I hope this
temple, which will serve as a cosmopolitan platform for people of all religions, castes and
creeds including Harijans, will go a great way in promoting religious unity, peace and love
in the country." [10] In the Mahatma's speech we see a concern for the universal mother,
not
restricted to the mother that is India but the mother that is the earth.
A little under fifty years later, Swami Satyamitranand Giri founded a Bharat Mata temple in
Haridwar. The consecration of this temple took place on 15 May1983, followed six months
later by an ektamata yajna, a sacrifice for unity, involving a six-week, all-India tour of
the image of the goddess. Both these events were organised by the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
Unlike its Benaras precursor, this temple contains an anthropomorphic statue of its deity.
Here, Bharat Mata holds a milk urn in one hand and sheaves of grain in the other, and is
accordingly described in the temple guide book as "signifying the white and green revolution
that India needs for progress and prosperity." The guide book also tells us that, "The
temple serves to promote the devotional attitude toward Bharat Mata, something that
historians and mythological story teller may have missed."11
I look at these two temples as a process of the institutionalisation of a particular form of
nationalism. These shrines to Bharat Mata frame not merely the gaze of onlookers (as do
posters and popular prints) but make claims over the entire body of the visitor. The moment
one enters a temple complex, the human body is, potentially at least, transformed into the
body of a devotee. This transformative characteristic has sufficient ability to change the
nature of the icon, Bharat Mata itself. In the Benaras and the Haridwar temples, we may see
a shift in the locale of the image of Bharat Mata, from nationalism drawing upon the
vocabulary of religious cultures to religious cultures trying to upgrade themselves by
mobilising resources from nationalism.
The proliferation of Bharat Mata's imagery as a member of the Hindu pantheon has other
effective and fluid popular registers. Her incorporation in the long list of the gods and
goddesses of the Hindu pantheon can be seen, for instance, on the web-site of Vaishano Devi,
one of the most popular goddess of twentieth century north India.
Shifting the scopic register, one can say that posters and calendars carry out this task at
much more ordinary moments of daily life. For instance, at the back of the RSS poster
discussed in the beginning of this essay, a loop is attached, so that it can be properly
displayed on a wall. This simple loop converts the poster into a wall-hanging, and, as a
wall-hanging, this text transforms the domestic into the public sphere.
Read More at: http://www.indiatogether.org/manushi/issue142/bharat.htm
