I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
Derek Walcott, A far Cry from Africa

1Mira Nair has used her status as an independent filmmaker to deal with taboo subjects whether as a documentary or fiction filmmaker. She was awarded the prestigious Caméra d’Or at Cannes in 1988 for her first feature Salaam Bombay which portrays a bleak picture of the fate of street children and young female prostitutes in Bombay. Monsoon Wedding in 2000 was acclaimed by critics and Nair won the Golden Lion award in Venice. Both bride and groom in the film hail from the upper middle class of the Punjabi community. Beneath the surface of a comedy—the preparations for an arranged marriage in Delhi between an educated Punjabi girl and an eligible non-resident Indian (NRI)—lurks the ugly reality of sexual abuse of children and the bride’s affair with a married man, thereby shattering the myth of virginity.

2Similarly to Indian born Deepa Mehta, both directors live in North America but are still very attached to their roots in India. And the subject matter of Nair’s films often focuses on people who are torn between two different cultures and cannot come to terms with their exile be it voluntary or forced. Salman Rushdie resorts to a cinematic metaphor to describe his character’s anguish in being forced to choose between two cultures:

So it was England that was breaking her heart, breaking it by not being India. London was killing her, by not being Bombay […] Or was it that her heart, roped by two different loves, was being pulled both East and West, whinnying and rearing, like those movie horses being yanked this way by Clark Gable and that way by Montgomery Clift, and she knew that to live she would have to choose? (Rushdie 1994: 209)

3However, regardless of the time Nair has spent outside India, she inevitably comes back to her mother culture for her source of inspiration. Her ability to identify with the characters of The Namesake prompted Nair to adapt Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel to the screen in 2006.

4Nair’s own experience of living between three continents—Africa, India and America—has made her more acutely aware of the difficulty of bridging the gap between mother and host cultures. Although her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, is at first glance an interracial romance, more interestingly, Nair tries to deal with another issue which is far more complex: the forced dislocation of the characters. The shift results in the establishment of a third space: an in-between space which puts the characters in a kind of cultural limbo. For Homi Bhabha, this very space can be conducive to creation, and it would seem that in this space of tension and confusion, Mira Nair has found material for her art:

Once again, it is the space of intervention emerging in the cultural interstices that introduces creative invention into existence. And one last time, there is a return to the performance of identity as iteration, the re-creation of the self in the world of travel, the resettlement of the borderline community of migration. (Bhabha 1994: 9)

5The film also mirrors the director’s own trajectory and her obsessive questioning of the notion of in-betweenness. Nair states that she has always been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society, on the edge or outside, learning the language of being in-between, always dealing with the question: what and where is home? These concerns, which are not that different from those of Zadie Smith in White Teeth, are of course inextricably linked with [her] personal history as well, since [she has] spent most of the past years living between two worlds.’ (Negi 1994-95: 27). Nair’s concern leads her to venture into an entirely new subject matter seldom shown in films: the classic black-white dichotomy generally seen in films has been replaced by the black—brown in Mississippi Masala.

6The fifteen-minute pre-credits sequence of the film opens against the backdrop of political chaos in Uganda. Jay, his wife Kinnu and their six-year-old daughter Mina, P. I.Os (Persons of Indian Origin) are deported from Uganda in 1972 when dictator Idi Amin Dada expels Ugandan Asians (a term used indiscriminately for brown people) who ’milked the cow but never fed it.’ The camera freezes on the title of the film, which marks both the end of the credits and the family’s life in Uganda. The eighteen-year gap in time is shown through an aerial shot of the route, which takes the family to Greenwood, Mississippi, the final stop of their exile. The line starts at Entebbe Airport and crosses Europe via Britain, finally stopping in the Deep South at Greenwood Mississippi. The change in music from the sarod and tables playing Indian music to the blues on the piano and harmonica as the camera goes past the Atlantic Ocean on the map foreshadows the changes to come in the lives of this family.

7The scene cuts to Greenwood, Mississippi in August 1990, a stark contrast to the lush green landscape of Uganda, which Jay calls ’home’. He is convinced that he is Ugandan first and then Indian. However, the flashbacks make it clear that Jay’s life in Uganda has little in common with that of African Ugandans other than his bond with his best friend, Okelo, an African Ugandan whom young Mina calls ’Okelo chachu’ which literally means father’s brother. In a flashback, Jay and Okelo are shown playing together by the river: both boys are dressed in ethnic clothes. It is not in the least surprising to perceive Jay’s constant longing for his idyllic life in Uganda, which results in his impossibility of belonging anywhere. He is determined not to die in ’some strange country’ but his illusions about his former home country are shattered upon his return to Uganda at the end of the film because his ’brother’ Okelo was killed soon after Jay’s departure from Uganda. His letter to Kinnu who has remained in Greenwood, contains the cliché about home being where the heart is: he realizes then that Uganda can never be his home. His property in Uganda which he fought to recover is finally of little importance. He has lost the one link he had with the country: his friend, who risked his own life to save Jay’s, was killed. He can never live in Uganda again, as Okelo’s death would be a constant reminder of his guilt. Jay is thus condemned to a life of wandering in a no man’s land. He decides to return to Greenwood and try to build a life with Kinnu. Mina’s choice to break the cord in order to create the third space becomes vital to find the equilibrium in integrating the host culture. Her attempt to create this third space with Demetrius is a quest for what Tveztan Todorov calls ’l’assimilation maximale’ whereby her curiosity to discover the host culture results in her acceptance of the Other as well as coming to terms with her own hybridity.

8One wonders whether Jay’s idea of home is not a mere fantasy in order to comfort his own feelings about belonging somewhere. Like his other Indian friends, born in Uganda, Jay is not seen socializing with any black Africans. His idealization of Uganda seems exclusively restricted to his immediate environment of which Okelo was very much a part. Yet, he is deeply wounded by Okelo’s remark, which echoes Idi Amin’s ’Africa is for black Africans’. He is forced to admit much later that Okelo’s harsh words in fact reflected his concern for Jay and his family: for the Ugandan Asians, the colour of one’s skin was a threat. As a successful barrister in Uganda, Jay was the sole breadwinner of the family and he could maintain a lifestyle in keeping with his status. He belonged to the affluent class of businessmen and professionals who dominated the economy. Like other Ugandan Asians, Jay probably never questioned his social and economic status until he was forced to leave what he had always considered his home.

9Displaced migrants can partly identify with Jay’s restlessness and his inability to feel at home. Jay was not able to settle down in England despite the eighteen years he spent there, and Greenwood is a temporary stop as he is convinced that he will return to live in Uganda. Home is thus a makeshift notion: a couple of rooms in the Monte Cristo motel owned by Anil, an NRI (Non-Resident Indian). Jay is the butt of the Indian community’s gibes for being a ’screw-loose’ obsessed with his lawsuit against the government of Uganda to retrieve his property. And winning the case is important to Jay to allow him to recover his self-esteem.

10For those who are uprooted like Jay, the diaspora serves as a safety net because the sense of community maintains the barrier thus keeping out all intrusion from the Other. This leads to what Hanif Kureishi calls ‘the denigration of those unlike oneself […] to the idea that others have less humanity than oneself or one’s own group or “kind”; and to the idea of the Enemy, of the Alien, of the Other’ (31).

11The Monte Cristo Motel becomes a cocoon offering protection and a semblance of belonging. Jay resigns himself to accepting the lifestyle of the highly conservative Gujerati community in Greenwood. In a predominantly white culture, Jay continues to ’stick to [his] own kind’. The ambivalence of this in-between space is polarized between the constant menace of the ghetto mentality on the one hand and the surrendering to the hegemonic forces of assimilation on the other. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie warns the reader that ‘the largest and most dangerous pitfall would be the adoption of a ghetto mentality. To forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers.’ (19)

12Contrary to his enterprising wife Kinnu who runs a liquor store in the black neighbourhood1, or his daughter Mina who cleans the rooms at the Monte Cristo2, Jay whiles away his time writing numerous letters to the Government of Uganda to reclaim his property. Blaming his failure on his exiled status enables him to justify his apathy. Actor Roshan Seth who plays Jay, had a similar role as Omar’s disillusioned father, former journalist in Pakistan, in Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s 1985 My Beautiful Laundrette, one of the key films of the Thatcher period in Britain3.

13The ghetto formed by the diaspora in Greenwood is bound by a code of conduct: Jay and his family are not accepted fully by the members of this community as he is incapable of providing for his family. Running a liquor store is regarded as a degrading occupation for an Indian woman. Added to the family’s economic situation, Mina’s dark complexion is a further and major disadvantage to her parents’ search for ’a suitable boy’.

14Mina persists in calling herself Indian, a contradiction per se: she has been brought up as an Indian and yet the very idea makes her uncomfortable. She has no identity that she can call her own: she hesitantly admits she has never been to India. She was raised as an Indian in Uganda, and the eighteen years spent in England before she came to the U.S. have contributed to widening the liminal space that she occupies. She is a typical example of the third generation of PIOs who are on a continuous quest for identity. Moreover, Mina’s situation is far more complex than that of the Indian-born Gujeratis in Greenwood who are the real NRIs. Mina’s hybridity resides in the very idea she has of herself: a wandering soul. To be placeless is the place to be; for the migrant, the ’masala’ character identity cannot be essentialized or stable, it is an on-going process that questions the very idea of rootedness. The viewer is not surprised to hear Mina refer to herself as ’mixed masala’ to Demetrius. Interestingly, actress Sarita Choudhury who plays Mina embodies her character’s hybridity: her Indian father and English mother brought up their daughter in different cultures. Choudhury seems to be Nair’s alter ego: she grew up in the Caribbean, Central America and Europe. Her experience of such diverse cultures was no doubt invaluable in shaping the character of Mina for her role.

15Mina has obviously never had the chance to socialize with other Americans, and Demetrius is the first social encounter in the three years she has been in Greenwood4. Demetrius introduces her to a part of his culture. She envies his roots and the attachment to his culture and even his nostalgia of his outings as a child to the Bayou. The invitation to lunch with his family at his home is Mina’s initiation into American culture through the discovery of traditional food eaten in the South or reciting Grace. Despite the large family circle who lives at the motel, there are no scenes of the family members eating together. Mina’s life is a void when she compares it to Demetrius’ which to her feels ’like home’: it is difficult for Mina to articulate her feelings with regard to home and family. She and her parents are dependent on Anil’s help and he constantly reminds them of their debt to him. Mina becomes aware of the false sense of security which the community has provided her with once she ventures out of the ghetto; she then rebels against the system which has tied her down for so many years. Her only hope of emancipation lies in her severing the ties, albeit temporarily, with family and community. She is aware that if she succumbs to her parents’ emotional blackmail, she will never leave. Her situation is reminiscent of the narrator’s in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s short story ‘Clothes’, who is ‘caught in a world where everything is frozen in place, like a scene in a glass paperweight. It is a world so small that if I were to stretch out my arms, I would touch its cold unyielding edges.‘ (Divakaruni 1997: 26).

16When Anil and his friend Pontiac5 find Mina in a motel room in Biloxi with Demetrius whom Pontiac refers to as the carpet-cleaning kalu (a derogatory term used for black people), she is blackballed for bringing ’shame and dishonour’ to the family. The concept of family implies the extended family, not necessarily composed of blood relatives, thereby including the Indian diaspora in Greenwood. Mina’s behaviour is reprehensible for she not only loses her virginity before marriage, but she has violated the age-old moral code by falling in love with a black man. Her choice would probably have been less scandalous had Demetrius been white. Mina’s mother feels betrayed by her daughter and she can only retaliate by asking Mina about Demetrius’ family background. Moreover, Mina was sought after by Harry Patel6, one of the most eligible bachelors in Greenwood. Although the community is living in the west, the parents consider it a duty to ensure a suitable match for their offspring into a ’good family’. The shame brought on by Mina prompts one of the other mothers to send her daughter to India to be married off as she fears Mina’s promiscuity might spread ’like a disease’ to her own daughter.

17Both Mina and Demetrius are ostracised by their respective communities for transgressing the laws of ’racial purity’. In an article on Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, to which Nair’s film has sometimes been compared, Gregory Stephens notes: ’the racial divide is impenetrable, and if crossed, will lead to loss of family and community’ (65). However, Mina has to take the step, despite the sacrifice it entails, if she is to find a space for herself. The final credits show Mina and Demetrius in ’ethnic’ clothes dancing to African music. The couple has finally created a third space which they can identify with in spite of the problems they may face adjusting to this space.

18Mina tries to assert her Indian heritage and identity when she is with Demetrius’ family. However, one wonders what her representation of India is as, paradoxically, she has been raised in the Gujerati culture without ever having been to India. Dexter, Demetrius’ younger brother, rather naively compares Mina’s situation to that of his own community: his people have never been to Africa. Mina goes so far as to accept the idea that her ancestors were in a similar position to that of the African slaves whereas the emigrants from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa had little in common with Demetrius’ ancestors.

19In Nair’s film, the first generation of immigrants like Anil’s father Jammubhai are reluctant to changes which will affect the traditional values that keep the community together. They try to ensure that the cocoon formed by its members protects them from the Other— not admitted in the community—to avoid contamination, hence allowing the class and caste system to continue functioning outside Mother India. Zadie Smith uses the term ’corruption’ to designate the threatening ’Western culture’.

20At Anil’s wedding, which takes place at the Monte Cristo Motel, his father Jammubhai7 makes a speech which stresses the importance of values that are passed down from one generation to the next. The effect is somewhat comical as most of the guests at the wedding, including the bride, don’t know the traditional prayer which Jammubhai asks them to recite. In his speech he stresses the importance of preserving their culture, which includes language and religion. When he utters the word ’traditions’, the camera zooms in and stops on two young boys dressed in cowboy and Indian outfits, eating with their fingers thus heightening the incongruity of the situation. The bride in the traditional red wedding sari contrasts with Anil’s conspicuous orange-red shirt and tie, which have replaced the bridegroom’s traditional Indian wedding suit.

21Anil’s life revolves around his business and his two Indian friends: soon after his wedding, he drives off for the weekend to Biloxi with them Athough he has had a car with special number plates bearing his wife’s initials, his wife does not join him. To make up for any inadequacies in his marital life, Anil indulges his fancies with the latest consumer gadgets.

22The preservation of an Indian identity and home inhabits the diasporic Indians who are frozen in time; they are not liberated enough to integrate into the host culture, and so they cling steadfastly to an ideal of a Mother India which is completely unknown to the generation born in the host country. The latter is uncomfortable with many of the traditions that their elders want to maintain at all cost. However, most surprisingly, many of the second generation of immigrants, and often, even those who were born in the country itself, accept to comply with their parents’ wish for an arranged marriage.8

23Mira Nair’s film is a case study in anthropology: her sharp eye for detail comes out in the blend of Indian clothes and accessories, food, eating habits or the stainless steel tumblers used for drinking tea. In Jammubhai’s sitting room, Hindu divinities and a replica of the Taj Mahal for tourists proudly sits on the television set.

24Mina’s clothes and jewellery are typically Indian. Her ring which Demetrius admires is a ’cooling stone for peace of mind from India’. At Anil’s wedding, similarly to other guests, she is dressed in Indian clothes, which she discards for something less conspicuous when Harry Patel asks her out. Although she and Demetrius are supposed to meet secretly, her saffron-coloured salwar-khameez9 and a bright mirror-work shawl, which she wraps around herself at the beach in Biloxi are all but discreet! And yet she wears shorts and an Indian top when she is working at the motel. Even in Uganda, as a child, she is dressed in a brightred Indian outfit at her birthday party at which Okelo is the only non-Indian guest.

25The language used by the different generations is a mix of Indianized English: an example of the code-switch is in Jammubhai’s use of the Gujerati word for the conjunction ’but’ in his speech, and he naturally reverts to Gujerati even in public when he addresses a drunk Pontiac who is a source of embarrassment. There are numerous examples, which illustrate how the morpho-syntactic patterns of their mother tongue are maintained: young Mina tells her mother she can’t go to bed because ’sleep is not coming’. A disillusioned Jay tells Kinnu: ’from where to where we have come’. The expression sounds odd especially coming from the mouth of an educated man like Jay. Jammubhai does not use the auxiliary, the simple present or the indefinite article in his question to customers of the motel: ’You are needing room?’ Anil who peppers his conversation with words from Gujerati, is able to switch to a suave American accent when he answers the telephone at the reception desk. And when he is irritated, he automatically reverts to his Indianized English, which includes phonetic quirks such as: ’There is no Mina-Sheena here! ’

26The intradiegetic music in the film comprises popular Hindi movies, which become a kind of universal language enabling the diaspora to find some form of cohesion, united in their efforts to preserve their Indian identity which is threatened by the intrusion of the host culture. At Anil’s wedding, Kinnu played by Sharmila Tagore10, an icon of the late 1960s and 1970s Hindi movies, sings a song from the Hindi movie Milan, accompanied by the harmonium and tablas. The most interesting example of the use of film music is observed in the pre-credits sequence: the airline bus transporting the Ugandan Asians on their way to the airport is stopped at a check point, and Kinnu is forced to step down from the bus. She is ordered by the African soldiers to switch on the cassette recorder she has in her luggage. Nair’s use of music is very effective as it only stresses the irony for Jay continues to assert his sense of belonging to the very country that no longer wants him. He claims he is Ugandan but everything he does proves the contrary. The lyrics of the song from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, 1955, film sound even louder as the terrified passengers on the bus are completely silent:

’Mera joota hai Japani…’
(My shoes are Japanese
My pants are English
The cap/hat on my head is Russian
But I am Indian at heart)

27On their last night in Uganda, Jay and his Indian friends drink and dance to a disco version of a song from the 1971 film Andaz. The first two lines of the song have ominous undertones:

’Life is a beautiful journey.
One does not know what tomorrow has in store.’

28It is rather strange to see African musicians on stage who are not even singing but simply mouthing the words. A ghazal (Urdu poetry set to music) by Jagjit Singh serves as background music in the motel lobby where white male customers ask for a room at an hourly rate.

29The subversion of codes is recurrent in the film. Nair does not show the Indians in Greenwood in a very flattering light. The men are shown as heavy drinkers who can’t hold their liquor. Most of the women are ladies of leisure who spend their time exchanging gossip about Mina and her family. Some of them have very pronounced Indian accents when they speak English and they sound deliberately caricatural. Napkin, another motel owner and a friend of the family, tries to placate Demetrius so that he does not file a law suit against Anil but Napkin’s words ’we people of colour must stick together’ ring hollow. Napkin is dressed in a white kurta11 and chews betel nut, which gives a reddish colour to his mouth and prevents him from talking clearly! Clichés like ’Power to the people! ’ abound in his conversation with Demetrius and his partner Tyrone. Both communities reason in terms of colour. For the African-Americans the Indians consider themselves to be white because they start to ’act white’ as soon as they are in presence of the blacks whom they treat like ’doormats’. The Indians in Greenwood are not portrayed as victims and their economic superiority makes them condescending to the blacks but deferential to the whites who hate them and want to ’send them back to their reservations! ’

30Mississippi Masala is an interesting example of forced hybridity and how the very idea of ’masala’—a mix of cultures—is subverted as it precisely does not blend. The film does not solve the existential dilemma of finding one’s roots and identity. And an unanswered question surfaces: when ’the culture of hybridity’ (to borrow Homi Bhabha’s term) results in an even wider cultural displacement, can those who are uprooted find the ideal third space? The tension lies in the impossible mediation between past and present. One wonders whether hybridity emerges as the only possible way out of this dilemma.