Our country has long been imagined as Bharat Mata or Mother India, symbolising a sacred land nurturing and protecting her children (citizens). She is portrayed as a sacred feminine figure draped in saffron, holding the tricolour, just like a mother would hold her child. This image gained popularity during the nationalist movement and became a powerful symbol of unity and sacrifice (Kapur, 2010). Her image is everywhere, on posters, banners, she is invoked in speeches and chanted in slogans. Yet, in the same country, the spaces outside buildings, under flyovers and bridges and the roads overflow with garbage, plastic waste clog drains causing floods, walls are stained with spit, and rivers choke with chemical and other waste materials. This contradiction is impossible to overlook; if India is our mother, why do we treat her with such neglect? This becomes more disturbing if we go ahead and draw an analogy: that is, the way we treat our country mirrors the condition of women in Indian society. In a country where goddesses are being worshipped and motherhood is revered, women continue to face violence, discrimination, and are objectified on an everyday basis. Similarly, our nation is glorified symbolically while being actually violated through pollution, civic irresponsibility and corruption. The way people treat Bharat Mata reflects the treatment of women in the country: she’s adored in rhetoric but neglected in reality.

Let’s start with the metaphor of Bharat Mata. It depends heavily on the image of a self-sacrificing mother. A mother who puts everyone before herself. A mother who forgives endlessly, absorbs pain without complaining and continues to nurture despite the suffering she is being subjected to. Needless to say, Indian society has been and continues to expect the same from its women. Young girls are conditioned to endure emotional labour, be submissive, and tolerate domestic violence for the sake of family honour (Chakravarti, 2003). Similarly, the nation is expected to nurture the exploiters in the name of development, whereby rivers are poisoned, forests cut down, streets littered, and public spaces disrespected.  The rich increasingly seclude themselves from the dirt and mess in gated communities, even as they continue to be served by the poor who live in slums outside.

A walk through any Indian city is enough to reveal the painful irony. There will be crowds who will passionately proclaim patriotism during national holidays, but will simply toss out the plastic water bottle from their car windows while driving through a national highway moments later. Public spaces in India are treated like someone else’s responsibility. Deep-seated inequalities allow this idea to flourish. Just like the domestic work performed by women is rendered invisible and is undervalued, the maintenance and cleanliness in public spaces are dismissed as the sole responsibility of sanitation workers rather than individual citizens. Cleaning and nurturing become a burden, and the responsibility is often shifted onto others.

Feminist sociologists have argued that women’s care work is often naturalised and rendered invisible (Federici, 2012). This way of putting down care work or emotional labour and rendering it invisible is very well documented in the Indian Context. Prabha Kotiswaran, in their work, traces how Indian Applellate courts gradually began recognising unpaid and domestic work, resulting in a decision by the Supreme Court in 2010 (Kotiswaran, 2021). The unfortunate part is that the societal and moral recognition is still absent for such work, in spite of getting legal recognition. Natarajan and Rangarajan (2022) further contribute to the topic by demonstrating how migrant women doing domestic work in urban India experience a lack of time while navigating through multiple shifts of paid and unpaid domestic labour within a largely unregulated informal market. Similarly, sanitation workers and municipal labourers become the taken-for-granted invisible figures who are expected to clean the dirt and waste which the privileged ones produce irresponsibly. The ‘burden’ of care gets shifted downwards to the marginalised groups; specifically, the lower caste sanitation workers whose labour sustains the urban life while remaining socially stigmatised (Guru, 2009). Hence, the broader issue is not just cleanliness or nurturing; it is about rights and respect. It also reveals the deep structural inequalities which are rooted in gender, caste and class. The history of hygiene in India is not only about cleanliness but also has its roots in the purity and pollution concept imposed by the caste system (Dumont, 1980). The upper castes distanced themselves from any work which involved waste disposal and cleaning and assigned such work to the Dalit communities. Unfortunately, in parts of the country, this historical stratification continues to shape contemporary civic behaviour. The result is well in front of us: a fragmented civic culture where the nation is emotionally worshipped by materially abandoned. A country’s physical surroundings reflect its moral imagination. When the roads look like dumping grounds and rivers look like sewers, it automatically demonstrates a broken and fragmented collective body of the nation. It becomes a thing for consumption, something that can be endlessly exploited and controlled rather than respected. Land, rivers and forests, just like women’s bodies, are looked at as resources to be used and consumed rather than something that deserves care, respect and dignity.

Ecofeminist scholars, from time to time, have argued that patriarchal societies tend to dominate women and nature by imposing a similar power structure and exploitation (Shiva, 1988). Hence, India’s environmental degradation and gendered inequality cannot be viewed as separate from each other. Both have their roots in cultures of entitlement and disregard. In this context, throwing garbage on the streets, polluting the rivers (which are considered sacred), becomes symbolic violence against the ‘body’ of the nation itself. They call the nation Bharat Mata, and yet her physical body, in this context, the environment, is being exploited beyond measure in the name of consumption and development. This widens the gap between symbolic and civic nationalism. The former depends on emotional attachment, rituals and slogans. Civic nationalism, however, requires action. It requires active participation in maintaining public welfare through ethical conduct and having a sense of social responsibility. When chanting patriotic slogans becomes easier than being socially responsible for your country and its future, the nation is reduced to just being an object of sentiment rather than a collective responsibility.

The Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, which was launched in 2014, aimed to address the problems of public sanitation and cleanliness on a national level. While it was able to bring awareness about hygiene and waste management, the behavioural change remains incomplete (Government of India, 2020). While the initiative increased awareness regarding hygiene and waste management, scholars note that behavioural transformation remains uneven because structural inequalities and cultural attitudes toward public responsibility persist (Vyas & Spears, 2018). In a diverse country like ours, laws and ethical campaigns are not enough to create civic sense, nor can they address deeper social attitudes regarding caste-based labour and public ownership. The nation must be respected, and for that, we need to go beyond symbolic nationalism into everyday responsibility. Patriotism cannot only survive in slogans and rallies while public spaces continue getting neglected and degraded. Similarly, respect for women cannot merely exist by worshipping goddesses and by celebrating motherhood or glorifying their sacrifices while their real problems remain unheard, unsolved and unrepresented. In both the cases of women and the nation, devotion outnumbers accountability. Society bends towards revering the abstract image and neglects the lived realities.

Lastly, the image of Bharat Mata forces India to confront an uncomfortable question: do we truly honour what we claim to worship? The answer lies not in speeches or rituals but in streets, rivers, homes, and daily behaviour. A nation cannot be respected through symbolism alone. It is respected through care. Until India learns to care for its land the way it claims to revere its mother, the image of Bharat Mata will remain both powerful and painfully ironic.

References:

Dumont, L. (1980). Homo hierarchicus: The caste system and its implications (Complete rev. English ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Federici, S. (2012). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM Press.

Guru, G. (2009). Humiliation: Claims and contexts. Oxford University Press.

Kapur, A. (2010). Making India Hindu: Religion, community, and the politics of democracy in India. Penguin Books.

Kotiswaran, P. (2021). An ode to altruism. Economic and Political Weekly, 56(36).

Natarajan, A., & Rangarajan, M. (2022). Bound to labour. Economic and Political Weekly, 57(53).

Shiva, V. (1988). Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. Zed Books.

Vyas, S., & Spears, D. (2018). Sanitation and religion in South Asia: What accounts for differences across countries? The Journal of Development Studies, 54(11), 2119–2135.

Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and nation. Sage Publications.

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Antara Misra is a sociologist, writer, and PhD scholar at Universität de Barcelona. Her research focuses on precarity, labour, and social inequality in South and Southeast Asia.