BEYOND LOVE AND LOSS

Beyond Love and Loss

Returning home through Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala

When I was a little girl, my mother used to call me her “Mississippi Masala.” A term of endearment and, as I would later come to find out, a reference: the nickname almost perfectly encapsulated my particular diasporic experience. My Pakistani parents moved to the United States in the 1990s, settling down in Mobile, Alabama—a town, as I often claim, that is just about as south as you can get before plunging into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Time and again, people are shocked when the fact of my birthplace is revealed. To many, a Muslim South Asian family has no place in the flattened conception of the Southern United States. The South, thick with the scent of magnolia blossoms and studded with jewel-toned swamps, remains the symbolic site of the Black and white racial binary within the American imagination. This notion has a historical basis. The Southern United States is plagued by the persistent aftershocks of its heavy and violent history—the history of racial slavery, the Confederate project, the Jim Crow era, and the vicious persistence of white supremacy. Yet, these legacies aren’t confined to the South and are far more complex than a binary could ever capture. As Indian-born director and filmmaker Mira Nair’s film (and my namesake) Mississippi Masala (1991) shows, we exist within a racial hierarchy with innumerable rules, boundaries, and baked-in contradictions. Black Americans and South Asian immigrants in the South are both marginalized under white supremacist society but in different ways. And sometimes, the social confines of racial hierarchy are erected and policed by people of color themselves. Nair’s film grapples with the ugly assumptions and potential for understanding between the two groups—all while weaving a vibrant narrative about the phantom pain of displacement, the intricacy of Black and South Asian (non) solidarities, and how boundary-crossing love fights to prevail.

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Mississippi Masala’s portrayal of a Black and South Asian romance—and its blunt refusal to center whiteness within a narrative of interracial love—is rare to see today, much less in 1991. Nair, who moved to the United States in the 1970s to attend Harvard University, knew she wanted to use the medium of filmmaking to explore the subject of race while decentering a white perspective. Getting a film with two nonwhite leads financed was no easy feat; when film industry executives asked Nair to rewrite the script to include a white main character, she refused and instead promised them that “all the waiters in this film will be white.”

In Nair’s resulting cinematic world, we instead receive the gift of a free-spirited female South Asian protagonist who takes up enough space to be both a beloved daughter and a desirable, sexually autonomous being. Mississippi Masala, which has just been remastered and re-released by Criterion Collection, is certainly a historic achievement for on-screen representation and Black and brown filmmaking. But projecting (albeit gorgeous) Black and brown characters on our screens was far from the film’s only objective. Nair’s genre-bending second feature film sought, instead, to explore the thorny subject of racial relationality within the United States, which in turn reverberates into a wider global context. Histories of colonization established a white supremacist world order; yet, complexities emerge in the interstices, the in-betweens, the plethora of racial and ethnic identities not fully captured within the invented binary of Black and white.

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Nair uses the central narrative of Mississippi Masala to explore the “hierarchy of color” she observed while studying in the United States, which mirrors and replicates itself in different iterations across time and space. She does so by telling the story of a Ugandan-Indian immigrant family, a history that is not widely known. We learn in the film that, in the time of the British colonization of India, the British sent South Asian laborers to Uganda to aid in the construction of the Uganda Railway. In 1972, after almost a century of Asian presence in Uganda, the Asian minority was expelled from the country by the military dictator Idi Amin. Asians had prospered in Uganda, typically holding a higher class status than most indigenous Ugandans. Amin accused the South Asian community of acting as “bloodsuckers,” calling for their lands and businesses to be dispossessed and returned to the stewardship of the Ugandan government. South Asians were ordered to leave the country within 90 days of Amin’s decree, resulting in unfettered chaos, violence, and the sudden displacement of thousands. And, like the various threads of displacement caused by British colonialism, this became yet another chapter in South Asian diasporic history that has untold ripple effects to this day.

Notably, Nair’s film opens not in 1990s Mississippi, but in Kampala, Uganda in 1972— right in the panic, unrest, and disorientation in the immediate wake of Amin’s decree. Military men armed with rifles inspect passing cars, and radios buzz with the unrelenting sound of Amin’s voice in the backdrop as Ugandans say rushed, tearful goodbyes. Already, Nair’s visual language is saturated with color and sense of place—the audience catches the Ugandan-Indian Loha family’s final glimpses of the exceptionally verdant Ugandan mountainside, the silent softness with which they view their everyday environment—their home—knowing they may never see it again.

After tense goodbyes, tears, and harrowing threats of violence, the Loha family (alongside hundreds of other South Asians) boards a plane. The opening credits hint at what’s to come—names are superimposed over a world map which pans slowly from Uganda… to England…and finally to Mississippi. Mississippi Masala’s playful compression of time and space—achieved through the sometimes jarring juxtaposition of shots that vary in geography, temporality, sound, and mood—is what allows the audience to see the scope of this diasporic narrative. Sudden, disjointed jump cuts defy linearity, allowing the audience to, alongside the characters, pick up the pieces of the past and reckon with them. Resurfacing remembrances become a form of history-telling. Past is interspersed with moments of contemporaneity, the two developing in parallel; we gain tidbits of important historical context before being tossed back into the modern day that was fashioned in their wake.

Nair entwines what is past and what is present in ways that are sometimes comical, and at other times deeply moving, bending not only time but also genre. Incorporating typical Western-style narrative tropes— like the forbidden desire between two star-crossed lovers—and using the medium of memory to unveil details of the past, the film plays like a romantic comedy, a tragicomedy, and a historical drama all at once. Its protagonist, Mina (Sarita Choudhury), is a discerning, somewhat rebellious 23-year-old who cleans the rooms of an Indian-owned and -operated motel in Greenwood, Mississippi. She was only a young girl when her parents, Jay (Roshan Seth) and Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) fled their homeland of Uganda, leaving behind not only property but also their chosen family—in particular, Jay’s lifelong friend Okelo (Konga Mbandu), whom a young Mina lovingly called “Okelo chacha” (or Uncle Okelo). Now, all grown up, strikingly beautiful, and distinctly American, Mina, like many South Asian American women, must navigate the mores and expectations of her Indian community while at times strategically defying them. Her selfhood is mediated between kinship and rebellion, familial obligation and self-assertion. Meanwhile, within the context of Greenwood, Mina’s multi-hyphenate identity—Ugandan-Indian-American—is misunderstood by folks who are Black, white, and Indian alike. How does one navigate these slippery in-betweens that elude definition? Through layered, humor-laden storytelling and sultry visual language, Mississippi Masala asks us to leave room for nuance and contradiction.

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The strengths of Mississippi Masala lie in its hyper-specificities, rendering a once hidden legacy of British colonialism distinctly legible to its audience. The consequences of colonialism are dizzyingly complex, and the history of Asians in Uganda is no different. Complicated hierarchies informed by white supremacist colonial structures were functioning in the sociopolitical backdrop of Uganda pre-Amin, just as they were and continue to be around the globe. Though the initial migration of South Asian laborers to Uganda was coerced by the British empire, later classes of Asian migrants to Uganda functioned as compradors. A mediating force between ruling whites and subjugated Black Africans, some South Asians maintained close ties to colonial rule. The Ugandan Asian minority had also managed to control a majority of the economy.

These historic dynamics underpin our understanding of Jay, a descendant of South Asian laborers who likely migrated to Uganda in the 1890s. Working as a well-to-do attorney in Kampala, he had spent his career defending Black Ugandans. He viewed himself as “Ugandan first, Indian second,” knowing no country other than the one of his birth. Still, he wielded class privilege over the indigenous population. Jay’s character illuminates contradictions that abound within the displacements of colonialism—colonized subjects, though they did not possess full agency, were transformed into settlers.

Nair portrays Jay’s natal connection to Uganda through overwhelming flashbacks to boyhood, flooding the screen with innocent moments shared between two young boys, one brown and the other Black, dressed identically, splashing each other in a river flanked by plumes of greenery. Okelo, Jay’s playmate, is more than just that—a chosen brother. Remembering these old times is painful for Jay. When Amin came to power, Jay was well into his 30s. He openly resisted the dictator’s ruling despite the threats to his life. “This is my home!” he vehemently maintained. “Not anymore,” his brother Okelo replied. To Jay’s dismay, Okelo echoed one of Amin’s central sentiments—“Uganda is for Africans. Black Africans.” Jay perceived these words as a betrayal from his brother, and they would continue to haunt Jay for decades after they were spoken. In his final moments in Uganda, Jay cried silently, gazing tenderly across the landscape. Yet, he refused to look Okelo in the eyes when it came time to say a proper goodbye. He snatched young Mina out of her Uncle’s arms bitterly.

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Uganda was Jay’s home, sure, but he had to face that it wasn’t his homeland. Jay, once an important figure in Kampala, is now unemployed in Mississippi, hanging around the family liquor store, convinced that he has fallen from grace— all because of political factors out of his control. “From where to where we’ve come, Kinnu,” mutters Jay despondently, eyes glazed over.

Though (and perhaps because) he maintains a hardened silence when it comes to the past—especially refusing to speak of Okelo— he is debilitated by his nostalgia. Jay spends his days mailing painstakingly written letters from Greenwood to Kampala, convinced that the new Ugandan regime will hear his case and restore his confiscated property and money. Like many South Asian men, Jay locates his selfworth and forges his identity in his ability to provide for his family. His emotional retreat from them, then, is underpinned by a vast guilt that stretches out in front of him like an ocean in all directions. At a tense father-daughter dinner, he implores Mina to consider college rather than “wasting” her life cleaning bathrooms at the motel—a higher education they both know he cannot afford. “It makes me feel I failed you as a father,” Jay admits.

Jay never anticipated this reality of Mississippi bayous, motels, and liquor stores, and, desperately, he clings to the possibility of returning to how things used to be. He is tormented by the phantom pain of his own displacement which never leaves him be, much like the persistent dull ache of a severed limb. Drunk in a motel room, Jay phones Kampala. Why? “To tell the person who is living in my house to get out!”

Ironically, that’s quite similar to the ideology behind Amin’s expulsion of Asians back in 1972. Jay himself was not a member of Uganda’s indigenous population despite his familial roots in the country, though he struggles to reckon with this. Complexities and ironies aside, the pain of diaspora as expressed through Jay’s character—through his underlying shame, his fervent desperation, and his toxic stoicism— is very real. Any diasporic subject could tell you so—but in this film, Nair makes it visceral.

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Boundaries of hierarchy can only endure, as Mississippi Masala suggests, if we maintain them. And through ignorance, misunderstanding, and fabricated ideas of racial difference, they are certainly maintained in Greenwood. In her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent, American journalist Isabel Wilkerson made the argument that a caste system, an artificially constructed and subsequently policed hierarchy, though often applied solely to India, also describes the inner workings of American systemic racism. Though nonwhite members of the caste system all share a common oppressor—white supremacy—non-Black people of color have, throughout history, emphasized their proximity to whiteness and distance from Blackness to forge a relatively privileged identity. This dynamic was at work in Uganda and is reinscribed in Mississippi.

In Greenwood, Black 20-somethings go to the club to do the electric slide and South Asian children run amok playing Cowboys and Indians (and Confederate-flag-flying white folks want nothing to do with either of them). While there are moments of solidarity between the so-called “colored” people in Greenwood (“United we stand, divided we fall!” exclaims one Indian uncle), the Indian community maintains an internalized sense of superiority over Black Americans—an uncomfortable truth that is exemplified by their collective reaction to a budding romance between Mina and the handsome, charming Black carpet cleaner Demetrius (Denzel Washington). While at first Demetrius is hung up on his ex and Mina is asserting her own youthful defiance, the two become entangled in a semi-clandestine affair that thickens with sultry desire.

The growing relationship between Mina and Demetrius unravels both the pressures they face within their own communities and the misunderstandings that divide the two racial groups. Mississippi Masala candidly showcases the colorism and classism that, in my own personal experience, is endemic to South Asian culture. Both are ugly outgrowths of anti-Blackness—which itself is borne out of the white supremacist world order that conflates proximity to whiteness with goodness and worth. Meanwhile, in Mississippi’s Black community, the immense weight of respectability politics hangs heavy in the air. Straight-laced and polite, Demetrius never missteps—he simply can’t afford to as a Black business owner in Mississippi. As Demetrius learns the hard way, Black people in Greenwood must bend to white conventions in order to be legible or even tolerated. Young and caught up in the tangled mess of navigating their respective realities, Mina and Demetrius find some semblance of refuge in each other. They both must mediate their identities in the context of the American racial hierarchy—a system that exists in the wake of the violent histories of white domination, of colonization and enslavement.

Perhaps it is in a misplaced act of escape that the two lovers fall into each other’s arms, attempting to use romantic love as a means to free themselves from the norms and expectations of their social and racial positionalities. However, I don’t read their relationship as a story of true love so much as a conduit through which Nair probes at American racial dynamics. The so-called love between them cannot simply be a love story. It cannot remain—like it can for white characters—a sequence of whispered latenight phone calls, exposed belly buttons, and pink-skied romantic rendezvous. After a trio of Indian uncles violently discovers the interracial romance, Greenwood erupts in condemnation, which is meted out by boundary-policing figures Black and Indian alike. Mina is chastised by her family for “bring[ing] shame” upon them, while the Black community condemns Demetrius for thinking he’s “big” and forgetting his “place.” Characters spanning across the film sit by their telephones, exchanging disapprovals disguised as gossip—Demetrius’s ex feels that he has “let down … [his] entire race,” fearful Indian aunties hurriedly make plans to send their daughters to India, and white bankers seriously reconsider Demetrius’s business loans. Most importantly, Indian motel owners rush to find new carpet cleaners, effectively destroying Demetrius’s business.

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“There is so little love in the world. And yet, so much,” writes Jay to Kinnu after he is finally able to visit Uganda again. Sometimes love transcends boundaries. Other times, it fails. In Mississippi Masala, a film that feels so real, so textured, and so tangible, there must be room for love to do both. While Mina and Demetrius run away together in a Romeo-and-Juliet-esque act of social suicide, Jay returns home and finds closure. I will be the first to admit that Nair’s narrative fails to showcase true Black and brown solidarity—no racial divides are overcome, no misunderstandings fully healed. No matter where the lovers flee, white supremacy is still ubiquitous and caste still dictates social life in the United States. And the Uganda of Jay’s recollections is long gone—in the 20 years since his expulsion, the home he dreamed of returning to no longer exists. The traumas of displacement and racial subjugation still loom. And yet, by acknowledging the truths of their dynamics and the fullness of their capacities to love, Nair’s characters are able to move forward.

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The title of this film sat dormant in the back of my mind for over a decade before I was compelled to search for it. Watching it for the first time felt like hearing my own name, like entering a jasmine-scented liminal space somewhere between my childhood home in Mobile and my grandparents’ lush courtyard in Pakistan. Now, made available again 30 years after its release, it can create this sense of returning home for generations of diasporic folks like me. Nair’s Mississippi Masala is far from a perfect story about love transcending the realities of race. But perhaps, somewhere within its messiness, the film invites us to imagine how it is possible—if we can learn to see each other more completely—to create an alternative future where love prevails.

IMAN HUSAIN B’23 hopes to always smell faintly of jasmine.