Bhārat Mātā Mandir

Bhārat Mātā Mandir, Haridwar

The nation as a mother, and a temple built for her

Bhārat Mātā — Mother India — is the personification of the nation as a mother, and the temple to her at Haridwar, on the ridge above Har Ki Pauri, is the most institutionally significant of the modern Bhārat Mātā shrines. The idea has two lineages that should not be merged. One is the nineteenth-century national one: the hymn Vande Mātaram ("I praise thee, Mother"), published in Anandabazar Patrikā in the 1870s and associated with Bankim Chandra Chattopādhyay, gave the country a mother-figure to sing to, and the movement that followed carried the image into processions, schools, bhajans and eventually into temples. The other is older and local: the cult of mātṛs and of Bhāratī as a mother-goddess in the Gangetic and Bengali countryside, and the existing shrines of Bhāratī that predate the national form. The Haridwar temple belongs to the first lineage while drawing on the second, and an entry that presented it as an ancient cult would be wrong.

The temple, on the Haridwar ridge, is built in a nagara idiom and is best known for its relief map of India — a large physical map carved in relief on the temple floor, one of the best-known such maps in the country — which makes the building itself a statement about the whole territory rather than about a single deity's story. The shrine was founded and built with nationalist patronage in the early twentieth century; sources differ on the year of inauguration, and no date has been verified here. Its management is by a trust rather than by a devasthanam of the older kind, and it is the object of a state and a national movement's attention at the annual Independence Day pūjā and Vande Mātaram observance, when the hymn is sung on the ridge.

The national Bhārat Mātā shrine movement has produced temples in many cities, and their scale and idiom differ — from modest sthānas to large modern buildings. The goddess's iconography varies correspondingly, from the varāha-mounted figure to a standing mother with the abhaya and varada gestures, sometimes with a bīja and a yantra. Whether the Haridwar image carries a specific form, and who consecrated it, is a question for a Hindi source.

Sources and what is still unverified

• "Vande Mātaram" in the Anandabazar Patrikā and in Bankim Chandra's collected works — work level.
• B. B. Lal and the archaeology-of-nationalism literature on the "national temples" — a study of the Bhārat Mātā temple movement is required; not on file in this corpus.
• Haridwar District Gazetteer (Government of India gazetteer series) — for the ridge, the ghaṭ and the temples, though its edition predates the present building.
• Unverified: the temple's inauguration year, the "modern" period attribution, and every festival date in the frontmatter.