Exhibition Explores Mother-Child Motif Across Epochs, Geographies

Similarly, the image of Skanda Mata from 6th century AD Udaipur, carrying a child on her hip, is not markedly different from Sandro Botticelli’s evocative "Madonna and Child" from 15th-century Florence.

Separated by centuries, geography and context, a collection of 27 objects at "One Mother, Many Mother Tongues" exhibition at Humayun's Tomb Museum here explores the enduring image of the mother and child -- one of human history's most universal visual narratives.

Organised by the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, the exhibition brings together a range of figures and images of the mother and child -- from the votive figures of Mater Matuta in ancient Rome to the representations of Hariti in the Indian subcontinent, and to the Madonnas of the Renaissance.

"These statues are iconic and representative of diverse traditions of motherhood. The image can sometimes look the same, but if you think about it and you study it a little more, you'll realize that it is actually communicating a different religion or a different cult or a different sub-cult. And it is actually doing it in a very diverse way,” Naman Ahuja, art historian and co-curator of the exhibition, told PTI.

If the statues of Mater Matuta, produced in central Italy between the 6th and 3rd centuries BCE, present an intimate image of motherhood while "embodying a principle at once cosmic and civic", according to the wall text, Hariti from the Buddhist tradition, once a child-stealing demon, was converted by the Buddha into a benevolent guardian.

The two images across India and Central Asia, share a formal resonance in their "frontal stillness, the seated authority, and above all the centrality of the maternal body as a generative and symbolic locus".

"So you get many mother tongues and a lot of diversity which seems to be united under a common rubric of looking at the same kind of image," Ahuja added.

The exhibition draws from diverse Indian traditions, including yoginis, saptamatrikas, and the non-religious matrika (mother) figures from 1st century BC to 3rd century AD.

"At some temples, the matrikas are developed into a fixed set of either seven (saptamatrika), eight (ashtamatrika or even up to 64 yoginis), the wall text reads.

While Botticelli in "Madonna and Child" establishes "a delicacy of gesture and restrained tenderness…that intensifies the sacred dimension", several protective matrikas like Jyeshtha from 8th century AD Tamil Nadu and goat-headed mother goddess from 1st century BC project a fiercely protective figure for children.

Through sculptures, paintings, and visual juxtapositions, the exhibition demonstrates how the archetype of the mother and child evolves "without ever dissolving, adapting itself to the symbolic languages of different cultures".

While the exhibition recognises the universal narrative of "motherhood as an originating act", it also aims to ask if "motherhood is the only rubric under which the feminine is granted agency".

"Are all ancient images of the feminine made only because they are one or another kind of mother goddess? Do we have enough examples that celebrate the baby girl or are all those swaddled babies boys? What forces in society promoted these depictions of little boys with their mother goddesses?" asked Ahuja.

He invited the viewers to note that "not all the images subscribe to the cliche of the benign, playful or compassionate role that we give women as mothers".

"These mothers don't just give birth physically to babies, but they are yoginis, they are dasamahavidyas who also give birth to ideas, they give birth to speech, they give birth to cognition," he said.

The exhibition will come to an end on August 16.