In Wheeler Auditorium
Admission $4.00

One of India's biggest box-office draws ever, Mother India is a fascinating film, a paean to Indian womanhood, set to music, and featuring the popular star Nargis (Awaara) as an impoverished village woman who acts with extraordinary persistence against all odds. What begins as a hopeful marriage for Radha and her farmer husband, Shamulu, quickly turns to misery - first economic, then personal. Left by the disgruntled Shamulu, Radha faces several starving children and a lecherous moneylender who exacts his interest in her body. She perseveres, and her courage serves as an example for the rest of the community, who acknowledge her as a village leader. Mother to her children and Mother to her community, Radha is eventually called upon to sacrifice the former for the latter, in a final, willful act. Director Mehboob Khan left his poverty-stricken village in Gujarat at the age of 16 for Bombay, where he made his first film in 1935. By 1952 he had begun Mehboob Studios, today one of the best-equipped studios in the country. "Though never a communist," the Museum of Modern Art notes point out, "he made the hammer and sickle the insignia of his company, in acknowledgment of his early poverty and struggle.... "With unerring instinct, Mehboob Khan touches upon issues which are emotionally highly explosive in a culture where the bonds of the joint family system are being eroded, and where the once self-sufficient village economy is becoming spawning ground for crime...."