The work depicts a saffron-clad woman, dressed like a sadhvi, holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth, and a rudraksha garland (mala) in her four hands.

Havell had to bend much of the school rules to do this, and tolerated many of Tagore's habits including the smoking of hookah in the classrooms and refusing to stick to time schedules.

[1] Bharat Mata is depicted as a saffron-clad divine woman, holding a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a rosary in her four hands.

[4] The painting's central figure holds multiple items associated with Indian culture and the economy of India in the early twentieth century, such as a book, sheaves of paddy, a piece of white cloth and a garland.

[5] The painting has been characterized as "an attempt of humanisation of 'Bharat Mata' where the mother is seeking liberation through her sons," by Jayanta Sengupta, curator of the Indian Museum in Kolkata, India.

I would reprint- it, if I could, by tens of thousands, and scatter it broadcast over the land, till there was not a peasant's cottage, or a craftman's hut, between Kedar Nath and Cape Comorin, that had not this presentment of Bharat-Mata somewhere on its walls.

[10] All these female icons and their paintings expressed a similar idea of purity, resistance and freedom embodied in the feminine figure of the mother.

Through this she counters both the British and its colonial subjugation of India, and gives to the Indians a concrete mother figure with which they can relate, and associate their idea of the nation, and be inspired to participate in Swadeshi.

Abanindranath Tagore's Bharat Mata, the DAG Museums note, is linked with the Swadeshi art and the rejuvenation of a Pan-Asian identity, aestheticism and idiom.