Bharat Mata

Bhārat Mātā ( Mother India in English) is a national personification of India (Bharat) as a mother goddess. In the visual arts she is commonly depicted dressed in a red or saffron-coloured sari and holding a national flag; she sometimes stands on a lotus and is accompanied by a lion.

Quotes

• Satyendranath's younger brother, Jyotirindranath's poem composed for the Mela the same year ('Rise! 0 rise! children of Bharat') returned to the theme of resistance by portraying Mother India where she is
  Sickly and withered, a body of skin and bones,While the mighty demons Subjection and Ignorance
  Suck her blood and wound her soul
  And selfish Disunity, the monstrous fiend
  Her fair body into fragments doth hack!
  ...Behold, the mother sits captive
  In ignorant darkness, with feet and hands shackled.
  • Jyotirindranath, quoted in Indira Chowdhury - The Frail Hero and Virile History_ Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal-Oxford University Press (1998) also in Jain, M. (2010). Parallel pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim relations, 1707-1857. ch V

• Bhabananda replied, “We recognize no other mother. ‘One’s mother and birthland are greater than heaven itself.’ But we say that our birthland is our mother. We’ve no mothers, fathers, brothers, friends, no wives, children, houses, or homes. All we have is she who is rich in waters, rich in fruit, cooled with the southern airs, verdant with the harvest fair.”
  • Bankim, excerpts from Anandamath, qutoed in (Introduction to Asian civilizations) Rachel Fell McDermott, Leonard A. Gordon, Ainslie T. Embree, Frances W. Pritchett, Dennis Dalton - Sources of Indian traditions. Volume 2, Modern India, Pakistan,