08 March 2013, 06:11 PM IST
We at The Times of India reported on Wednesday about a tiger in Bor wildlife sanctuary, Maharashtra, which baffled everyone by not killing a goat for two days despite being hungry. The big cat played with the weaker animal as a friend, well almost. Experts concluded that the tiger has issues: it lacks killer instinct. Why? Maybe because it grew up without its mother and didn't get to learn any hunting skills from her. But the goat wasn't spared by the tiger's two female siblings, who seemed to have learnt to hunt even without their mother. Do male children depend more on their mothers for survival? It may be true at least in the human context.
Boys or men who grow up without motherly care suffer from many psychological or emotional problems. They may also find it hard to differentiate between right and wrong at times: a potentially life-threatening situation. Two years ago, a survey in Bangladesh revealed some worrying stats: children losing their mothers early only have a 24% chance of reaching the age of 10; those having their mothers are 89% likely to reach that age.
One of my good friends had lost his mother at 6. When he was 8, his father sent him to a boarding school in Kurseong. I don't know when, but he developed a stammer that became quite noticeable when he reached the 10th standard. Later, he went to a top college in Delhi and eventually joined a corporate house as a management trainee. His career graph was pretty much okay, but he drew a complete blank on the relationship front. He was an introvert and could never have a girlfriend, not because he didn't want one, but because he didn't know what to say when there was a woman around. Lessons in self-confidence given by other guys in his peer group didn't help at all. When he was 25, his aunt found him a bride. I used to wonder if marriage was a good idea for him. But it worked. His wife was a remarkable woman with an above average understanding of human psychology: something I learnt only last year when we met after many years.
I was quite surprised to see the changes in my friend. His stammer had disappeared and he was much more outgoing. I asked his wife how she engineered this magical transformation. "Just some plain human psychology," she said. "Your friend is a little boy at heart. The loss of his mother at such a tender age hit him hard. He knew life, but never felt it. I just picked it up from where his mother had left. I realized in the first year of marriage that I would have to be a wife and mother at the same time. I had to make him believe that I didn't come into his life to leave him alone. Once he trusted me, it became all easy. The result is in front of you," she said, with a hearty laugh. My friend was surely lucky, but not everyone is.
The mighty Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir lost his mother when he was 13. Empress Mumtaz Mahal, history says, loved all her children equally. She had to part with both her sons Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb in 1626 when Shah Jahan, then Shahzada Khurram, had unsuccessfully rebelled against his father, Emperor Jahangir, and had to give up his two sons as imperial hostages. Later, in 1628, when the mother was united with her sons, she had wept for hours holding them.
(Picture caption: 1637 painting showing the brothers Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb (middle) and Murad Baksh)
After her death in 1631, it was Shahzadi Jahanara who rose to prominence and acted as mother to all her brothers and sisters, but she could never weed out seeds of mistrust sown in the hearts of her brothers by her father's biased treatment. Shah Jahan gave lofty titles, such as Bulund Iqbal, to Dara, but treated Aurangzeb with contempt, almost. This prince, growing up without the care of his mother, was always kept far away from Delhi and Agra. That must have affected his psychology, and influenced his future dealings with his brothers. Aurangzeb didn't have very cordial relations with his wives either, although there was a whiff of an affair between him and a nautch girl named Hirabai Zainabadi who also died very young, leaving the prince hurt for a second time. That makes us wonder if Aurangzeb would have been a different man had he not faced so many upsets in his personal life, if his mom was around always to guide him.
All over the world, women use the term, mama's boy, to refer to men who tend to cling to their mothers. In the Indian situation, that pejorative expression may be used for most men. Many marriages don't work out due to friction between the man's wife and his mother. The mother does not tolerate the intruder who wants to control her boy; the wife feels frustrated when her man turns to his mother and not her for advice. This centuries-old power game has forever acted as fodder for saas-bahu soaps.
One of my friends walked out on her husband for his failure to rein in his mother. Hers was a love marriage, but after marriage, there was no love lost between the two most powerful ladies in the house. She wanted him to relocate to another city, as she needed privacy; he said he would die if he were to be separated from his family. "He was a weakling. He never wanted to grow up. A man cannot live like a boy after marriage. He should be responsible to his wife. She leaves her home and family behind to unite with him in holy matrimony; can't he make small sacrifices for her in return?" my friend would argue whenever we talked about her marriage.
But a common friend, also a woman, had a simple logic for the breakup: "There cannot be two tigresses in the same house." Food for thought?
Happy Women's Day!
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