Moral Mother and Malathi De Alwis
I believe that a nation that has to protect its women rather than empower them has a problem. One has to understand that power hides itself in the language of protection and purity. This is where the statement, "Fundamentalism uses women's bodies as a battlefield in its struggle to appropriate institutional power", by Malathi De Alwis, makes sense.
Malathi de Alwis is a pioneering Sri Lankan anthropologist, feminist scholar, peace activist and a teacher. Born on 6 October 1963 in Sri Lanka, she earned her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. She spent her career unpacking the uneasy alliance between gender and nationalism. During the turbulent decades of civil war in Sri Lanka, she stood out as a voice that asked difficult questions. Her work has been indispensable to understanding Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and its construction of the good woman.
Her PhD work, titled- Maternalist Politics in Sri Lanka: A Historical Anthropology of its Conditions of Possibility, focuses on women gaining political voice through their identity as mothers. She talks about a movement called the Mothers’ Front, where thousands of women took to the streets, demanding answers about their sons who had been abducted during the country's internal conflicts. To many, this was a spontaneous eruption of maternal grief; it opened a moral space for women in the public sphere. But Malathi de Alwis cautioned that such politics legitimised itself through suffering and respectability, not equality. She emphasised that these mothers gained public legitimacy because they spoke as mothers. The nation listened not because they were citizens demanding justice, but because they embodied the moral conscience of the Sinhala family, which was rooted in a much older cultural script.
Sri Lankan nationalist thought has long celebrated Viharamaha Devi, the mother of King Dutugemunu, as the epitome of feminine sacrifice and patriotic virtue. According to the legend, she is a woman without blemish. A person who nurtured her young son to be a true patriot and nationalist, and encouraged him to wage war against the Tamil king, Elara. She is considered to have placed the needs of her country above her own, knowing her rightful place, and content to take pride in her son’s achievements. For Malathi De Alwis, this legend revealed how the ideal of womanhood was written into the moral fabric of the nation — a woman becomes revered when she suffers, sacrifices, and reproduces national virtue through her motherhood. Viharamaha Devi’s purity and obedience transformed her into the moral mother of the Sinhala nation, setting the standard for women’s roles in times of both war and peace. It was here that she coined the idea of "Moral Mother Syndrome".
In the essay titled- Moral Mother Syndrome, Malathi argues that Sri Lankan politics often constructs the figure of the mother as both moral centre and symbolic weapon. The grieving mother of a dead soldier, the nurturing mother of the nation — both serve to legitimise nationalist violence, while real women remain constrained by the expectations these icons impose. The mother, in this imagination, is not just a person but a metaphor: pure, nurturing, self-sacrificing, and ultimately, apolitical. Mothers could speak because they embodied moral suffering, not because they were political citizens. Their power was permitted, not claimed.
De Alwis’s insights connect to a global pattern. Across the world, nations have imagined themselves through the metaphor of the mother — Mother India, Mother Russia, the Motherland. These images evoke devotion, purity, and sacrifice. They turn love for the nation into duty: sons must protect the mother’s honour, avenge her wounds, and die in her defence. It persists in names like 'Operation Sindoor', India's military response to a terrorist attack, framed around the idea of protecting the sindoor (the red mark that signifies marital status). It shows how easily symbols of womanhood are drawn into the service of nationalism.
To revisit Malathi De Alwis's words today is to be reminded that feminism’s task is not only to fight for equality but to expose how power hides itself in the most ordinary symbols. De Alwis leaves us with an enduring challenge: to look harder, listen longer, and remember differently.
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