‘Mississippi Masala’ helped me define deep-seated feelings my family never talked about

by Brent G. Oneal

Growing up in the East Indian city of Calcutta was a strange dichotomy. I spoke Bangla at home and English at school and watched Hindi movies about people who were nothing like the people around me. The Bangla that the elderly said at home differed from the Bangla that the people of Calcutta said. I spoke the latter fluently but did not understand the former until people spoke slowly.

My grandparents on both sides, and my father and his siblings, had emigrated from the country that is now Bangladesh. Even though I grew up in a city where people looked (more or less) like me, ‘home’ meant different things to my grandparents and father than me. There was always an invisible longing for a place I’d never seen before and a melancholy alien to me.

'Mississippi Masala' helped me define deep-seated feelings my family never talked about

At an age when very few books told me stories of girls who looked, spoke, and saw the same world as I did, I often turned to TV and movies in search of images of myself. I wanted to find people who could show me how to understand the unique (or so I thought!) place I had in the world.

I was around 12 when I watched “Monsoon Wedding” and decided to watch everything directed by Mira Nair. Next, I looked at a pirated, discolored copy of “Mississippi Masala,” the 1991 drama about a family’s emotional and physical journey from Kampala to the American South, on a CD a friend of a friend had burned for me.

My world in Southern Calcutta was thousands of miles away from Meena’s (Sarita Choudhury), who moved from Uganda to the UK to Mississippi in 1972. The street lamps of Calcutta, with the halo growing around them at night, always led me home.

Meena’s journey was not so easy. But with her, I saw for the first time what it meant for someone to be surrounded by the elderly who are always mourning a lost home and recovering from a pain one acknowledged but never quite felt.

Denzel Washington holds Sarita Choudhury in a 1991 movie “Mississippi Masala” scene.

Samuel Goldwyn Company/Getty Images

When I looked at it in 2001, “Mississippi Masala” mentioned and claimed a feeling, a pain, that had sat on my family’s emotional mantel since the early 1900s and beyond. Growing up in a country whose history was defined by dividing walls and within a family that carries within itself waves of constant displacement, watching the film helped me understand something that my family, in their adamant efforts to “get over” and “Progress” to make, never talked about.

While the stories of Meena’s family’s displacement and mine are distinct and different, Nair’s stories lent a universality to exile long before my undergraduate studies taught me the theories about existence in the diaspora and not belonging.

Like many of us South Asian daughters — firstborn in countries that our fathers wouldn’t call home if they could help it — Meena takes on the responsibility of walking a fine line to get into newer cultures and an idea of ​​’ modernity’ to lean in without giving in completely. The need to excel, spread one’s wings, and grow is a permanent feature of South Asian childhood, as is a simultaneous need to obey, not stray too far, and serve the ephemeral entity of tradition.

I could see all that in Meena when she became a cinematic older sister who let me learn by visiting her life. Nair brings a nuance to the characters in “Mississippi Masala” that assured me that the people on the screen were real people, unlike the “stars” in Hindi movies whose lives were, by definition, meant to seem unreliable and unattainable.

There is so little free time that we – as immigrants, as women of color who don’t want to be called lazy – allow ourselves, and it becomes a heartwarming and extraordinary act to watch them experience an intimate and fleeting moment of self-care and bonding. While Meena sits by the pool at the motel where she works, her mother greases her hair, and they talk about falling in love. Within a culture not known for performing great acts of love, oiling her daughter’s hair becomes a love language for Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) and helps us understand our mothers better.

The act of seeing or being seen is essentially an act of recognizing. Within a deeply colored society like India, where the average skin tone is on the dark side, one would (still!) have a hard time finding a female protagonist who was not white. Seeing Sarita Choudhury on screen as a dark-skinned teenager emerging from a childhood where she heard things like “her face is good for a dark girl” was an act of seeing myself on screen and being seen.

Nair does this very consciously: Meena does not exist in a “post-color” utopia as a dark-skinned woman oblivious to her complexion.

Sooni Taraporevala, the film’s screenwriter, points out the color of her skin and makes Meena the heroine, rejecting any possibility of making her complexion a handicap. The fact that Meena doesn’t become an honesty cream “Before and After” commercial with an inexplicable glow-up made the film an important viewing pleasure for young women.

Actors Tico Wells, Sarita Choudhury, Charles S. Dutton, Joe Seneca, and Denzel Washington on the “Mississippi Masala” set circa 1991.

Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images

When I was 33, watching “Mississippi Masala” after its recent re-release, the nuances in the making and writing of the film became more apparent. In a post-George Floyd world, where every community must reckon with its anti-Blackness, “Mississippi Masala” doesn’t let us fool us South Asians.

Even as dark-skinned people, many Indian communities have deeply racist views. While it’s easy to blame our colonial past, our colorism has deep roots in our entrenched caste system and how it defines working and living in India and abroad.

At a time when solidarity among communities of color is essential to overthrow white supremacy, it’s embarrassing that the most well-known interracial love story between a South Asian woman and a black man dates back to the early 1990s.

“Mississippi Masala” then, in retrospect, becomes an organizing tool. It is a tool that helps us envision a kind of solidarity that nothing in our current popular culture talks about. The relationship between Meena and Demetrius, and its eventual and grudging acceptance by her parents, becomes a roadmap to help us envision a way out of our anti-Blackness that has kept us from forming a community in ways that have for far too long. Authentic and disruptive of the white-led status quo that defines the “normal” for us.

For me, “Mississippi Masala” will always be the movie where a girl who looked like me searched for her father’s life and taught me how to dissect mine—through uprisings, geographies, and histories. It taught me to sit more quietly when my mother rubbed equal parts castor and coconut oil on my scalp.

This is part of This Made Me, a HuffPost series that pays tribute to the formative pop culture in our lives. Read more stories from the series here.

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