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Hundreds of years ago, when the Lodhi kings were ruling over Delhi, a great artist in Florence painted a picture of a mother and her child. Today, that painting, Madonna and Child by Botticelli, is on a short visit to our city. The painting’s subject was common then, as artists had depicted mothers and children for centuries, and it remains common to our day. While the theme is familiar, each such artwork feels slightly different.
This very motherhood sits at the heart of One Mother, Many Mother Tongues, opening next Monday at the Havells Gallery in Central Delhi’s Humayun World Heritage Site Museum. The exhibition dwells on a bond that transcends time and place. Spanning 3,000 years, it brings together 25 images of mothers holding children. Some are cast in clay, others carved in stone or shaped in relief. Mostly drawn from early Hindu traditions, Buddhism, Christianity, and even ancient Etruria in Italy, they trace the enduring presence of motherhood across cultures. The oldest, a tiny terracotta figure from Mohenjo-daro, depicts a simple, everyday moment between mother and child that, despite its small size, has miraculously survived for millennia.
The exhibition is not merely an art history lesson on styles and eras. It is a reminder to our fragmented humanity that, long before borders, languages, or religions, there was this, a mummy holding her baby.
The exhibits have been loaned from museums and collections across India, travelling in from Chandigarh, Mathura, Udaipur, Baroda, Prayagraj, Surat, and the states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, along with Delhi’s National Museum. Adding a cross-continental touch, the exhibition brings nine mother-and-child works from Italy, inviting us Delhiwale to see how “maa” in India and “mamma” in Italy carry the same impulse of mamta.
One work from Italy severely disrupts the exhibition’s rhythm (in a nice way!). Amid the stone and terracotta mothers, it stands out for being the exhibition’s only painting—Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, already mentioned in the opening lines. On a recent afternoon, this reporter was granted access to the heavily secured painting at the Italian Cultural Centre on Chandragupta Marg, where it had arrived in India weeks earlier. In the darkened hall, a solo pool of light gathered upon the Madonna and Child, isolating the frame in a halo of radiance (see photo). The painting felt solemn and self-contained, bearing the gravity of a tradition that has travelled oceans and centuries to arrive, finally, in our Dilli.
This said, the exhibition’s final element is not a part of the exhibition. The Sabz Burj monument, beside the Humayun’s Tomb Museum, is now believed to have been the tomb of Emperor Humayun’s mataji.
PS: The duration of the exhibition is from June 22 to August 16
Mayank Austen Soofi is a writer-snapper trying to capture Delhi by heart.
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