Universal Mother

Figure 1: Ancestor by Bharti Kher

On a crisp fall morning, I stepped out for a walk in New York City’s Central Park.  As I entered the park through its southeast entrance, I encountered an eighteen-foot-tall statue depicting a woman with twenty-three heads emerging from her body. I was awed by her presence; the statue’s monumentality dwarfed me. Larger-than-life images have the power to do that: they make the viewer marvel at their colossal nature, impelling us to wonder about our place in the world.

The woman, dressed in a reddish-pink saree, holds a lotus in her hand. The heads of her children sprout from her womb, belly, shoulders, and back. Her expression is serene. She looks lovingly at her children, who she literally “embodies” within herself. She looks lovingly at me and at others who pass by her in Central Park. Her presence reminded me of my mother; my grandmother; the women in my life who provided me compassion, instruction, and protection.

Figure 2: Artist Bharti Kher.

The artist Bharti Kher has named her sculpture Ancestor. The sculpture is part of a series of artworks entitled “Intermediaries”. Much of the press coverage on the sculpture has focused on the artist’s intention and creative process. But few commentators have reflected on the other side of the artistic experience: the impact and response the piece generates in its viewers.

Standing underneath this modern-day interpretation of our “ancestor” made me question:  who is an ancestor? Is an ancestor male or female? Does an ancestor have to belong to one’s racial, ethnic, or cultural identity?

Figure 3: The Goddess Isis and her Son Horus. Ptolemaic Period, 332–30 B.C., from Egypt. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 55.121.5.

As an art historian and a doctoral student working on a dissertation on “imaging motherhood” in South Asia, I was immediately struck by the sculpture’s connections with much older mother and child imagery. The genealogy of imagining motherhood goes back to antiquity, ubiquitous in most cultures around the world. From depictions of Isis and Horus in Egypt (whom we see as early as 664 BCE) or the Madonna and Child in Christianity, the idealization of the mother-child image and its subsequent worship as a religious icon represents a continuous, global tradition, the origin of which is as difficult to identify as art itself.

Consciously or unconsciously, Kher draws the imagery for Ancestor from a large corpus of South Asian images attributed to the mother goddess. In the ancient South Asian context, starting in the first century CE, the religious art of the Indian subcontinent saw the gradual emergence of an image of a female figure holding a child. This mother and child image is pervasive in the subcontinent throughout the first millennium, appearing under different guises as goddesses serving different religious communities. These mother goddesses share essential features in appearance, myths, and functions. Their legends often narrate the fierce protection of their offspring, and they protect the life of those who worship them just as they protect their own children. Classic representations of the mother goddess, such as the so-called ‘Skarah Dheri’ Hariti (see figure 5), are iconographically similar to Kher's Ancestor. They represent the same image of motherhood: the mother stands unmoved while her children emerge from her body, using her body to support themselves.

Figure 4: Icon with the Virgin and Child. Mid-10th to mid-11th century, Byzantine, made in probably Constantinople. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.190.103.

While Kher’s familiarity with the genealogy of imaging motherhood in South Asia is evident, her choice to depict an Indian woman as an Ancestor of the world acts as a challenge to two binaries that have long structured our understanding of history in general: the male and the female, and the local and the global.

First, the issue of male versus female. In the modern world, despite successive waves of feminist ideologies and activism, society largely remains patriarchal on a global scale. For most modern peoples, the male lineage takes precedence over the matrilineal understanding of ancestors. The very word “ancestor” is often assumed, by default, to refer to a male line: we define our existence in the world through our fathers and forefathers, not our mothers and foremothers.

This is, however, not solely a problem of modernity. Consider the play Eumenides, written by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (c. 525 – 455 BCE), in which Apollo declares that Clytemnestra, the female protagonist, has no legitimate claim to her son, Orestes. Aeschylus’ drama reflects the changing notion of the oikos (household), where patriarchy prevailed. In the genealogical tree, mothers were considered, at least in theory, as mere bodies of reproduction instead of active participants in child-rearing. (In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the historicity of this narrative that sets man against the “other,” the woman.)

In depicting the Ancestor as female, Kher challenges the long-held, patriarchal understanding of “the ancestor” as male. What is also interesting is the depiction of both male and female children. This differs from images of Isis, Hariti, and other mother archetypes who are usually portrayed holding exclusively male children.

Figure 5: Skarah Dheri Hārītī. 2nd century (inscribed with date 121 AD), Skarah Dheri, Peshawar valley. Gray-schist stone, height: 132 cm, width: 54 cm. Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, (accession no. 1625).

The other aspect Kher has challenged through her work is the geographical and cultural scope of the word “ancestor” itself. At first glance, Kher’s mother might be identified as being South Asian—her saree, her skin tone, her jewelry, her hair, and even the attributes marking her children all point to what we understand to be symbols of a South Asian identity. Yet she stands in Central Park, overlooking a cosmopolitan and heterogenous crowd that marvels up at her. Her garb might fool you into thinking that she is Indian (owing also to Kher’s South-Asian descent). Still, in her interviews, Kher insists that the Ancestor’s “children are from everywhere, all countries, all religions, all genders, all peoples.”

Herein lies Kher’s genius: her art embodies images of motherhood and ancestry that go beyond the ideas of national, ethnic, and religious boundaries that bind the modern world. As the world becomes more cosmopolitan, the universal Ancestor comes to embody the multiculturalism, pluralism, and interconnectedness that arise with an increasingly changing world order. Kher encourages her audience to move past long-held notions of “ancestry” to more fluid conceptions of genealogy. She dispels the nationalist narrative that has taken hold in many societies, encouraging viewers to consider that ancestry goes beyond the markers of culture, race, and ethnicity.

The various “children” of the Ancestor are made up of heads depicting diverse individuals—male, female, royal, worker, dark-skinned, fair-skinned. The artist is signifying that regardless of class or country, we all emerge from the same Ancestor. In doing so, she prompts and challenges some of the questions modernity poses for humankind: are human beings individualistic or community-oriented? Can love and compassion surpass racial, ethnic, and national boundaries?

Many writers have praised the statue in terms like these: Artist Bharti Kher’s Monumental ‘Ancestor’ Is Now Guarding Central Park. I am struck by the language of “guarding,” which invokes feelings of protection and care. In her essay, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” Toni Morrison interprets the role of our ancestors as those who “are not just parents” but a “sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.” Kher draws from this supra-historical understanding of the Ancestor, pushing the boundaries of modernity while drawing from and reconfiguring a genealogy of imaging motherhood in South Asia. With this latest public sculpture—currently on view in Central Park through August 27, 2023—Kher challenges the divisions of modernity by calling our attention to a deeper common Ancestor. 

Vaishnavi Patil is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her current research is on the origins and development of the mother goddess in South Asia, particularly her representations and the popular practices centered on her. Instagram: @travelingmatrika