Mississippi Masala: The Ocean of Comings and Goings

Nair first engaged with the questions at the heart of the film when she came to the United States from India to study at Harvard in the mid-1970s. As a new arrival to the country’s color line, she has recalled, both its Black and white communities were accessible to her, and yet she belonged to neither. The experience of being outside that specific American binary would be a formative and fertile site of dislocation for the young filmmaker. Nair trained in documentary under the mentorship of D. A. Pennebaker, among others, and her first films were immersive explorations of questions that haunted her own life. The pangs of exile and homesickness for lost motherlands became the foundation of So Far from India (1983), and the boundaries of “respectability” for women in Indian society the subject of India Cabaret (1985). Salaam Bombay!—made in collaboration with her fellow Indian-born classmate, the photographer and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala—carried her Direct Cinema training to extraordinary new heights. Working, from a script by Taraporevala, with nonactors on location in the streets of Mumbai, Nair found a filmic language that could merge the rigor of realism with the haunting emotion of fiction. It would become the creative model for Nair and Taraporevala’s translation of the real-life phenomenon of Indian-owned motels in the American South into a spicy cinematic blend of migration, rebellion, and romance.

Even as Jay dreams in sepia-toned memories, the film itself never descends into saccharine longing or scored sentimentality. The rigor of the research and on-location filmmaking in both Mississippi and Kampala is reflected in an unvarnished and immersive visual style. While Nair herself clearly understood the fabric of the lives of the Gujarati Hindu families she was portraying, she has discussed how Denzel Washington became a critical collaborator in ensuring that southern Black life was rendered with equal attention to detail, cultural specificity, and dignity. The result is a film whose homes and communities are etched with a palpable sense of reality.

All of Mississippi Masala’s disparate threads are bound together by a distinctly sultry southern love story, which naturally remains the best-remembered feature of the film. The meet-cute of Mina and Washington’s character, Demetrius, is quite literally a traffic collision, a not-so-subtle suggestion that, without a bit of movie magic and melodrama, these two southerners might never have been maneuvered into the exchanged numbers and glances, and palpable wanting, that still burn the screen today. The film is fueled by the gorgeousness and megawatt charisma of both its stars, the young Washington paired with Choudhury in a prodigious debut as a woman at the edge of adulthood—her mane of wavy hair, their sweaty night of dancing to Keith Sweat, aimless late-night phone calls, dark skin in white bedsheets, secret meetings, consummated desires.

In the background of the R&B song of young, electric love are the film’s quieter, deeper notes on migration. A string leitmotif by the classical Indian violinist L. Subramaniam recurs whenever the vistas of Lake Victoria across the family’s lost garden in Kampala appear on-screen in brief flashbacks. Nair’s mastery with music has only deepened with time, resulting in films that integrate archival and original music with a free-form alertness that is distinctly her own. Both for the African American people living amid strip malls in the dilapidated neighborhoods of a region to which their ancestors were brought by bondage, and for the Indian families forced by Amin to flee their homes, exile is expressed in stereo. As Jay pines for the country he lost, Demetrius’s brother dreams of visiting Africa and saluting Nelson Mandela—disparate but recognizable longings and family histories shared over a southern barbecue, American bridges.

There wouldn’t be racial borders, however, if they weren’t policed, and the policing authorities here come from across the racial spectrum. When Mina and Demetrius’s relationship is discovered by nosy Indian uncles, those boundaries flare up. From the Black ex-girlfriend who asks why the good Black men can’t date Black women, to the Indian uncles who barge into Demetrius and Mina’s hotel room, to the gossiping aunties who during phone calls mock Mina’s rebellious scandal, there is a veritable chorus of condemnation. It is portrayed with great comedic timing and wit, including from Nair herself, who delivers some of the sharpest lines of disapproval in the role of “Gossip 1.” But the implications of those judgments remain unfunny by design. The film’s remarkable achievement is the way it never buckles under the thematic weight of these uncomfortable truths. Nair always delivers her cerebral punches with a lightness and warmth that are precisely calibrated. These are the markers of a filmmaker in full control of the tone, color, production design, and, always, music to accompany the emotional demands of her material, and that facility has only gotten sharper in such masterpieces as Monsoon Wedding (2001).

One of Nair’s first films, So Far from India, was filmed between New York City and Gujarat. It opens with a folk musician in the streets of Ahmedabad, a sequence that serves as a prelude to the film, about an Indian immigrant and the wife he has left behind. Nair, as narrator, translates his singing about the ocean of comings and goings. With Mississippi Masala, Nair positioned herself as both a great chronicler and a great navigator of that vast ocean of comings and goings. America is one of Nair’s homes, and she has made several films about the immigrant experience there, including her adaptations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2006) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). Each has sought to look at the country through the eyes of those usually on the margins in order to dramatize and problematize the idea of the American dream. It is these poetic and cinematic ruminations on identities in flux that feel like her most enduring, almost personal, gifts to hyphenated viewers like myself.

When I was younger, I thought Mississippi Masala embodied Mina’s rebellion, the promise of independence, and the freedom to choose whom and how to love. But now, twenty years after I first saw the film, at university, Jay’s longing for home and his incurable displacement feel equally, achingly resonant. With the limitations of America laid bare by the gift of adulthood, migration is no longer only a hurtling forward toward the rush of freedoms; it is now also the unknowable costs borne by my parents, the homes and selves they left behind.

The film’s closing credits, braiding Jay’s return to Kampala with glimpses of Mina and Demetrius kissing in the warmth of the southern sun, capture Nair’s exquisite feat of balancing—and blending—in Mississippi Masala. For a film traversing so many geographies and registers, there is finally a seamless harmony between father and daughter, between tradition and future, between here and there. As seen anew in restored colors, Mississippi Masala endures not for its spicy and pungent aromas of cultural specificity or representational breakthrough but for this profound commitment to multiplicity. It is a timeless song for and to those who live—and love—in multitudes.