From Mother India to Mother Ireland: Objectifying the Worshipped through Nationalist Rhetoric in Satyajit Ray's Ghare Baire and Neil Jordan's Michael Collins

<p>The concept of femininizing<br>the nation has been an all-pervasive<br>theme in the domain of nationalism. This<br>is nowhere more explicitly visible than in<br>the anti-colonial nationalism breeding in<br>the ground of the British colonies like<br>India, Ireland, South Asia and Africa.<br>This paper tries to highlight the<br>limitations of such apparent glorification<br>and idealization of women with the<br>perpetual imagery of a benevolent mother<br>or devout wife. It also tries to<br>systematically unfold the mechanism<br>behind such masculinist creation of<br>capturing the female body within<br>nationalist rhetoric and metaphors. This<br>paper is precisely an exploration of the<br>unsurmountable gap between the<br>masculinist discourse of idealization and<br>the corporeal experiences of the real<br>mothers, wives and daughters vis-à-vis<br>Indian and Irish Nationalism. It will also<br>highlight with special reference to<br>Satyajit Ray’s Ghare Baire and Neil<br>Jordan’s Michael Collins the tendency of<br>delimiting the women characters with a<br>quintessential frigidity and passivity in<br>the cinematic representations while<br>treating the motif of nationalism.</p>