Colonized Brown Motherhood: Em and the Big Hoom, Imelda and Indian Mothering

Abstract

Mothering is a bond mothers share with their children, a feeling they experience subjectively. Yet motherhood is more often seen as a construct to be followed and by which to be judged. This societal expectation takes away what Andrea O’Reilly describes as the mother’s ‘agency’ (2004). Motherhood has been bifurcated in meaning, as Adrienne Rich observes in Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), between ‘[…] the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction and children; and the institution, which aims at ensuring that that potential –and all women– shall remain under male control’ (Rich 1976: 13). In addition, the way motherhood is experienced is shaped by the way the institution of motherhood and the experience of mothering form a women’s sense of self. Yet on the other hand, mothering can be empowering for women. This article explores the maternal issues raised in the literary work, Em and the Big Hoom, a novel by Jerry Pinto. The article also examines the disparity between the institution and experience of mothering as it affects issues of identity, subjectivity, or agency. Imelda, a daughter and a mother, suffers at the hands of colonized motherhood, which she has been practising since she became a “mudd-dha,” and her life had “turned inside out” (Pinto 2012: 133). The study will investigate how her mother colonized her agency as a mother and how she carried forward the motherhood inflicted by her mother, resulting in her loss of self.