How did I miss Mississippi Masala while growing up? Thanks to inclusion champions The Other Box for dropping this into my world via their thriving Facebook group. And to London Indian Film Festival for screening what became the Audience Favourite. Starring Denzel Washington (fresh off winning a Best Supporting Actor in Glory) and first-time actor Sarita Choudhury, this curio of a film from 1991 portrays a romance we rarely get to see on screen. It also exposes the uncomfortable truth about prejudice between people of colour.
Mina (Choudhury) is the sheltered daughter of parents expelled from Kampala, Uganda, by Idi Amin (just like my mother). After some time spent in the UK, the family moves to a town called Greenwood in the Deep South. Hence the word “masala”, which is a mixed space. Mina, in particular, is a product of her itinerant early life.
They take over the running of a motel. Director Mira Nair says this was common for Indian families at the time. (National Geographic reported in 2018 that more than half the motels in the US are owned by Indian Americans.) The father, played by Roshan Seth, is particularly bitter about this uprooting, a successful lawyer who considered himself East African first and Indian second. The family is hardworking, serves its customers without fuss and largely keeps to its own – the South Asian community that has congregated in Greenwood. There is an expectation that someone like Mina will marry from within, but only if she is successful in her career as her darker skin is undesirable according to mother Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore).
We see that Mina is dutiful yet rebellious, hungry for independence and eager to take a different path to her parents. After a minor car accident, she meets hardworking carpet cleaner Demetrius (Washington). There is an instant attraction and despite sensing that Demetrius is using her to make an old flame jealous, and knowing that their parents will not approve, Mina makes her intentions clear.
As they spend more time together, Mina gains a clearer perspective on how her identity as an East African Indian living in America relates to her heritage. It’s a true cultural exchange. Demetrius, “Mississippi born and raised”, has a more strident sense of self and helps her along with nuggets like this. “Well, Miss Masala, racism – or as they now say tradition – is passed down like recipes. The trick is that you got to know what to eat and what to leave on the plate. Otherwise, you’ll be mad forever and you’ll never eat."
The aim for Nair in this film was to explore the similarities and differences between the experiences of a black person and an Indian immigrant living in America and their attitude to one another. In conversation with Bonnie Greer at the BFI in 2002, she explained the premise like this. “What was it like to be an African, but of Indian skin who believed India to be a spiritual home without ever having been there and to be living in Mississippi? And what if this world collided with that of a black American who believed Africa to be their spiritual home, but had also never been there? It must collide through love, because we must sell tickets!”
The relationship between Mina and Demetrius, and the discord it provokes, is a useful lens through which to address these questions. It makes the inquiry more personal and about the human condition rather than a stereotypical presentation of either community as an “anthropological other”. And there is barely one white face on screen throughout the film to deflect attention or blame.
We see how family, community and religion are important to both an Indian immigrant and a black person in Greenwood. But Mina and Demetrius stand as individuals rather than exemplars for their respective cultures. And the film exposes token solidarity in one particular scene where a shrewd motel owner called Jammubhai (Aanjjan Srivastav) tells Demetrius and colleague Tyrone (Charles S Dutton), “Black, brown, yellow, Mexican, Puerto Rican, we’re all the same. All us people of colour must stick together.” Jammubhai is not saying this in an unequivocal declaration of unity. He is trying to make sure his friend doesn’t get sued after the car accident.
When the chorus of disapproval rises and other Indian motel owners boycott Demetrius’s business, he and his family realise their true standing in the eyes of their Indian brothers and sisters. Animosity grows between the two sides. Kinnu mentions that toxic word “shame” after discovering Mina shared a bed with Demetrius. Was she ashamed because her daughter had pre-marital sex or because it was with a black man?
The echoes of anti-blackness ring loud and clear in this confrontation between Mina’s protective father Jay and Demetrius, a man who has caused enough trouble apparently. “I know … I know you and your folks can come down here and be as black as the ace of spades, and then as soon as you get here you start acting white,” Demetrius counters. “And treating us like we your doormats. I know that you and your daughter ain’t but a few shades from that right here [points to his cheek]. That I know.”
In his 1992 review of the film, respected critic Roger Ebert summarised the misconception that Mississippi Masala seeks to illustrate. “It was racism, of course, that brought the Indians to Africa in the first place, to build the railroads, and racism that kicked them out. And it was racism that brought Africans to America. But to be a victim of the racism of others does not inoculate anyone against the prejudice that can grow in their own hearts.”
Ebert went on to say that the film tries to cover too much ground. And he’s right. From the family’s expulsion to the everyday life of an insular Indian community in Greenwood (customs, quirks, prejudices), to the love story, as well as Jay’s attempt to reclaim his verdant land (and past) by returning to Kampala. An actor of Washington’s calibre feels underused and it would have been good to learn more about his character and what drives him.
Overall, however, it’s an important and thought-provoking film that made me reflect on my own upbringing. My parents were shopkeepers in Brighton for around 20 years and I never witnessed any overt racism from them towards black customers. But I could sense a little apprehension from my mother and perhaps that has something to do with the relationship between Ugandans and East African Indians. To adopt one buzz phrase, there may have been some unconscious bias there, a reflection of the caste system and a remnant of colonialism. Uncles in Kampala with her assure me that we treated black employees who worked for us with respect but who knows.
Mayukh Sen put it well in her 2016 reappraisal of Nair’s film. “It often seems as if members of my South Asian community prefer to ignore the existence of learned, intergenerational anti-blackness under the hasty guise of solidarity. Nair gestured toward a conversation most in the South Asian community were, and still are, reticent to have – the admission that when we cross borders into white spaces, our trauma, no matter how painful, is not the same as black suffering.”
In the post-Floyd world, there are many young people willing to have frank conversations about anti-blackness with themselves, their peers and elders, and to examine how they might be complicit in their dating preferences among other things. The signs are encouraging.
I have always seen race and culture as one facet of a person to respect and be curious about … as far as they will let me. The individual and their values are what I am really interested in. What do you stand for? To what extent do you define yourself by your colour? I wouldn’t define you by yours. So don’t define me by mine.
As for love and attraction, they come in any number of shades and that’s how I’ve always felt. Applications are open to all!