Should Indian daughters hate their mothers?

A friend recently pointed out an advertisement for Hamdard Safi – a blood purifying tonic - that she felt was blatantly sexist and could potentially upset India's sacred relationship between a mother and daughter. A bond most consider beyond stigma or shame, since we are also the nation of the Mother Goddess.

The commercial has a line which goes like this: "I get only dejection, isolation and bitterness because I didn’t have her flawless skin." My friend felt this was mocking the complex nature of a mother-daughter relationship, besides reasserting the need to be a good-looking woman.

I thought about my mother, at once. How I always blame her for being fat and short, and that at 37 I am borderline diabetic.

I also feel we Indians bullshit a lot.

After all, how many mothers and grandmothers smear children with ubtan, haldi and a coarse sandalwood paste just so that the child has smoother arms and legs? How many times is a woman blamed and chastised by her in-laws and women relatives for either being a baanjh (barren) or for producing a line of girls? How many mother-in-laws and sister-in-laws parade her to a guruji?

And if you think the Safi advertisement is sexist – why isn’t the same noise created when mothers hide sanitary napkins and commercials go like "mahiney ke unn dino ke liye" like one’s period is like contracting a disease.

A woman who I once worked with spoke of how she wasn’t allowed to enter the kitchen by her mother when she was menstruating. She used to be segregated from the men in the family, and even her meals were served on a separate plate.

Why do Indian mothers rarely kiss their husbands? Or explain birth control to their adolescent daughters, or the side effects of the I-pill? Why is the Indian mother the one to warn her daughter not to bring a Muslim boy home? Why is she disappointed when her daughter wants to study fashion designing? Why must the daughter prove her worthiness to her own sex?

Why do we only show the loving "nok jhok" between mothers and daughters and never really the same-sex jealousy that takes place? We need to explore the angle of a rebellious daughter wanting to break free from her mother’s preconditioned fears in popular culture. The mother's guilt for producing a girl child, an imperfect happiness that constantly needs male validation and protection, needs to be explored.

Indian mothers tell their daughters to suffer and endure the sasural as though it is a requirement, because after marriage, that is the daughters' home. Their fate.

At most Indian weddings, during the vidai ceremony, a daughter throws back rice in the direction of her maike – her mother.

It's her lifetime of debt.

Perhaps it’s time to view the mother-daughter equation with a more critical lens. As equals.