![]() Historian Kim Wagner at the University of Edinburgh points out that the Hindu text Bhagavata Purana shows Kali as the patron of a band of thieves. Based on pseudo-scientific phrenology studies, the British doctors talked about the thug skulls showing “representative examples of normal Hindoo type”, of the “apathetic, weak and lazy Hindoo” with “natural inclination for the work of death”. Decapitated “thug” heads were sent to Edinburgh. As many post-colonial studies have shown, most of the excesses of thugs were colonial fabrications which enabled officials to fuel their campaigns and usurp authority. According to the British, the thugs were worshippers of Kali who were motivated by their evil religion to waylay and strangulate people. Colonial narratives in the form of tales of brave British officers saving Hindus deluded by thugs filled the English press. The Thuggees or thugs were used by the British to justify their colonial project in India. The British soon “discovered” the secret network of stranglers. ![]() ![]() The subsequent increase in dacoity after the rebellion saw the emergence of Kali as the syncretic goddess bridging the religious divide between Hindus and Muslims. When British control became total in Bengal and started generating famines, the famous Sanyasi Rebellion happened. The goddess tradition started spreading throughout Bengal, coinciding with it coming under Mughal and then British rule. They usually neglect the early goddess-centred unorganised resistance to subjugation of people, documented from medieval to early colonial periods. Most Western and Westernised Indian academic studies start the study of Bharat Mata with Vande Mataram, a song composed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1875 and published as part of his novel Anandamath seven years later. He also added: “As a Tamilian, I see it as one more example of north Indian imperialism.” Marxist historian Irfan Habib announced that “the idea of Bharat Mata was an import from Europe and there was no evidence of any such imagination in either ancient or medieval India”. Anklesaria Aiyar wrote that in his youth he had “not heard of Bharat Mata”. She also claims that “modern secular and scientific mapped knowledge is hijacked” to assist that “unraveling”. ![]() At another level, Sumathi Ramaswamy, professor of History and International Comparative Studies, Duke University, considers the imagery of Bharat Mata as the undoing of the European enlightenment through “the recuperation of old myths and the return of fancy”. As one cannot have two mothers, India cannot be considered as his mother, he said. Recently, a Dravidian politician claimed that to him, only Tamil was mother. There are some who deny her ancient roots. Both her devotees and detractors at one time or another identified her with Kali. ![]() She was disliked and feared by the colonialists. Often portrayed carrying the national flag and riding a lion, she is to most Indians, a goddess in her own right. The Shakti we call India, Bhawani Bharati, is the living unity of the Shaktis of three hundred million people …”īharat Mata or Mother India is a name that evokes a deeply emotional veneration in almost all Indians. It is a mighty Shakti, composed of the Shaktis of all the millions of units that make up the nation, just as Bhawani Mahisha Mardini sprang into being from the Shaktis of all the millions of gods assembled in one mass of force and welded into unity. “For what is a nation? What is our mother-country? It is not a piece of earth, nor a figure of speech, nor a fiction of the mind. ![]()
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