This past summer, and the move sent a loud message. The British firebrand could no longer pretend her experiences of marginalization as a brown woman were analogous to black people. I watched this play out with interest because M.I.A. Is an avatar for a specific type of South Asian person: one that goes to great lengths to assert wokeness, tweeting vintage Pam Grier photos and retweeting Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta reaction GIFs as a way of outwardly aligning with black culture, all while failing to examine deeper prejudices. The Afropunk incident exposed a fault line in the South Asian diaspora: How long will it take before the so-called ‘solidarity’ between two groups crumbles to expose rampant, underlying anti-blackness? Early in Mira Nair’s 1991 film Mississippi Masala, a loutish, middle-aged Indian motel owner named Jammubhai asserts, “Black, brown, yellow, Mexican, Puerto Rican, we’re all the same. All us people of color must stick together.” This simplistic declaration of solidarity should give a viewer pause, but especially when considering who Jammubhai is speaking to: Demetrius is a black man — played by a young Denzel Washington — who runs his own carpet-cleaning business, and he’d just finished on the man’s motel room. Days before, Demetrius’s truck had been rear-ended by an Indian girl, 21-year-old Mina (Sarita Choudhury) who was driving Jammubhai’s car. Later in the scene the old man’s specious intent becomes obvious: When Demetrius is out of earshot, he reveals the ass-kissing was a mere ploy to evade a lawsuit. The movie, celebrating its 25th anniversary this month, is significant because it offers a of interracial relationships between two non-white characters and, specifically, between a South Asian woman and black man. But in the universe of Mississippi Masala, solidarity between South Asian and African-American communities is just lip-service on the part of the former — a form of cheap currency deployed to soothe short-term tensions. After the minor accident, Mina and Demetrius fall in love against ungainly odds: Mina’s Indian family can’t stomach the fact that Demetrius is black and the film charts the slow, painful erosion of the inclusivity myth Jammubhai tried to peddle. Today, Mississippi Masala has unfairly become something of a hidden relic,. Washington went on to become an A-List actor; Nair is better known for directing Salaam Bombay! (1988) and Monsoon Wedding (2001); and Choudhury continues to act but, regrettably, never became a star. This legacy is a shame because the film deserves a wider following for the precedent it sets regarding contemporary interracial political dialogue. Nair parsed the anti-blackness endemic to the South Asian diaspora with an honesty that public discourse on the topic has rarely, to this day, broached. Mississippi Masala begins in Uganda circa 1972., and young Mina and her parents are casualties of this policy. They’re third-generation Indians living in Kampala, and identify as Ugandan above all else. After being forcibly uprooted and landing in Greenwood, Mississippi, Mina’s parents spend much of the film pining for Uganda: 'I don't want to die in some stranger's country,' her father says. Eventually they acclimate to Greenwood, and are joined by a network of Indian family-friends who don’t interact much with the town’s black or white residents. The director Mira Nair made an unexpected discovery a few years ago: A lot of the independent motels in the Deep South are owned and operated by Asian Indians. It’s an insular community, and there’s an expectation the children will marry within this bubble. So the idea of Mina falling in love with anyone but an Indian man is unfathomable. “Can you imagine turning down Harry Patel for a black man?” a gossip says, referring to a rich Indian man who’s considered an aspirational match. From the Indian community’s remove, Mina’s romance with Demetrius is unnecessarily rebellious. And, over time, Demetrius’s family, once enamored of Mina, find this hostility burdensome. Nair’s observation of the uneven ground between black and brown communities was her entry point into the film. “I noticed the levels of difference between black people and Indians and other people of color, and the sort of solidarity between them when I first came here, for university,”, shortly after the film’s release.
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