As the scope of Aurat's agrarian tale expands into a gritty but grand Technicolor allegory, the suffering of the titular woman/mother becomes proportionately greater. In Aurat, Radha (Sardar Begum) loses her youngest sons to famine, and her husband Shamu (Arun, Govinda's father) to abandonment. She also suffers some indignity at the hands of the usurious moneylender Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal). But when the rains finally come, the hand of God directs them to collapse Sukhilala's home, releasing Radha from her debt to him.
In Mother India, though, Radha (Nargis) faces an almost unimaginable pageant of hardships, each bearing its own symbolic force. When she learns that her mother-in-law has mortgaged the family farm to Sukhilala (Kanhaiyalal again, in a broader, even more sniveling performance well-suited to the larger scale of the film), Radha assigns to herself a mountain of responsibility for the family. She breaks her own back working the soil, even pulling the plow herself after the family's ox dies. Mother India the earth and Mother India the woman merge in a sweaty display of the true hard work of nurturing. Shamu (Raaj Kumar this time) abandons Radha in this film as well, but first, he loses his hands in an accident while working by her side. In both films, Radha loses a child to famine, but in Mother India she must also be the pillar that saves her boys from flood, literally hoisting them on her shoulders to keep them out of the water that rushes around her neck-deep.
In contrast to Aurat, Mother India tells Radha's story in flashback, adding a pair of bookends to the story that frame its broad allegorical implications. The film opens with villagers pleading with Radha, now an old woman, to bless the inauguration of the village's new canal. “Arrey, tu to hamari maa hai, saare ganv ki maa,” they implore – and so the viewer knows, from the outset, that Radha not only will survive her trials, but will come to hold a revered place as the mother of the village. And indeed she does, shouldering not just the burden of rearing her family but of restoring a village upheaved, and finally, in the end, blessing that canal for her children, for the people of the village and, by implication, the people of the nation. With this framing, the simple, sad story of Aurat is perfected into metaphor for the construction of modern India and healing the fresh wounds of Partition.
Radha's relationship with her wayward son Birju also becomes more pointedly symbolic in the later version of the film. In Aurat, Birju (Yakub) is an unprincipled rogue, acting on his own whims and for his own pleasures, an overgrown id. By Mother India, Birju (Sunil Dutt) has acquired a moral compass of sorts, if a misguided one. This Birju refuses to pay his family's tariff of grain to Sukhilala, trading it instead to buy bangles for Radha. This is not undifferentiated adolescent rebellion, but righteous fury at the injustice Sukhilala brings down on Birju's family (not to mention its Oedipal undertone). Injustice is what drives Birju into exile as a dacoit. Nevertheless, in Mother India as in Aurat, Radha makes the most cutting sacrifice a mother can make, killing her own son in protection of the village, and especially of its women. In Aurat, that death was a necessary tragedy, but when Mehboob Khan remade his film, he freighted that climax with the film's broader message: once Mother India has made the difficult decisions and painful sacrifices, those of her children who remain will be squarely on the road to prosperity.