ABSTRACT
This chapter will look in detail at the emergence of the Mother India topos, which plays such a crucial role in many modern Indian diasporic narratives. Therefore, the historical retrospect serves as a foundation for all further discussions of modern diaspora discourses and their engagement with concepts of the maternal. While the significance of the topos has long been recognised and studied for the Indian independence movement, this chapter questions the apparently natural association between land and mother to examine, with reference also to contemporary linguistic theory, how the anthropomorphisation of the geo-body of the nation has come into being. It analyses the Mother India construct as a metaphor, clearly product of a colonial “contact zone”, in the sense of M.L. Pratt, gaining prominence as a specific textual image in various works of fiction. Austin’s speech act theory helps shed light on the question of how this image was able to develop such an enormous political impact. For, intriguingly, the paradox of the polyvalent, internally plural mother metaphor, which has come to represent a unique, singular and unquestionable origin, was historically also employed on the colonial side of British India. Thus, the second part of this chapter looks at Rudyard Kipling and his Indian fiction to show how imperial discourse, too, staged and articulated its agenda through strategic maternalisations of colonial space.
