A Dualist Approach to Mississippi Masala (1991)
Mississippi Masala (1991) – Dualist
I don’t know about you all, but I’ve been pretty down lately about the state of the US and world and the seemingly rampant growth of hate and fear as baseline emotions for large swaths of our population. I’m not feeling much in the celebratory mood this coming 4th of July, but there are a few things, including this week’s film, that give me hope and remind me why I care so much about America that I am so down.
I’ve written about my personal patriotism elsewhere, but suffice to say that I believe in the Great American Melting Pot. I was raised on Schoolhouse Rock. I learned very young that our strength is our diversity and while that song is obviously a gross oversimplification of how all Americans came to be in the US, the moral behind it holds true, that we are stronger and better together when we celebrate our diversity. In the face of the downright evil acts sanctioned by our government happening around the country today, tomorrow I will be celebrating what they hate and fear so god damn much: happy Americans.
So, for the 4th this year, I wanted to review a film that lifted me out of my funk a bit, reminded me what this whole American experiment is all about. And that inspiration hit when Zohran Mamdani officially won the Democratic NYC Mayoral Primary this week, and filled with this burst of entirely unexpected positive energy. Someone who campaigned on making average people’s lives better actually won an election over an establishment old head who barely campaigned, relying instead on the tried and tested methods of name recognition and billionaire friends while being white. And as Mamdani becomes someone whose name you ought to recognize, I thought this week we would take a look at his mother’s work to see a bit of the values and perspective of his upbringing through her second film, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991).
The Review Roulette wheel landed on Dualist as our approach this week, so I want to focus on those two emotional extremes: fear-mongered hateful prejudice vs. happiness rooted in love. Mississippi Masala does both of these so beautifully, with a forbidden love story between Mina (Sarita Choudhury), a 24-year-old woman of Indian descent, born in Uganda, and eventually raised in England after her family’s forced deportation under Idi Amin’s hateful regime when she was ~11 years old, and Demetrius (Denzel Washington), an African American man from Mississippi.
The film begins with scenes that are unfortunately all too familiar right now: hateful rhetoric about minorities who have allegedly “overstayed their welcome”, intimidating police with guns larger than children harassing citizens, violent heartbreak as communities and families are torn apart because of skin color. Laura Loomer, for instance, someone close enough to influence Trump, just this week issued a thinly veiled threat to every Latino person in the US, immigrant or not, echoing Idi Amin’s horrific violence against Asians in Uganda. Mina and her family escape just in time but never fully recover from their forced displacement even more than a decade on.
Mina’s father Jay (Roshen Seth) is a lawyer born and raised in Uganda who had never known another home until he was forced from his with his wife and child, scarred for years into an obsessive fight for personal justice by way of restoration of his citizenship and illegally seized property. This obsession with returning to his home country is heartbreakingly understandable and recognizable; the betrayal he feels by the only home he ever had is egregious. His pain is palpable, and his face is long with sorrow.
The legacy of hate that follows these central figures is so powerful, and the fascinating thing about this film from an American Studies standpoint is that the racist legacy of Mississippi for black Americans is taken as a given. While the context of Indian histories in Uganda is carefully explained for a Western audience likely largely unfamiliar with the history, no such explanation is needed for why or how Demetrius might relate to Mina’s family and their experiences with prejudice. As Demetrius says to Mina’s father in a tense confrontation, “I’m a Black man born and raised in Mississippi. Ain’t nothing you can tell me about struggle.” There are two significant white people in this film and each is on screen for less than 30 seconds. The first establishes that Demetrius’s father is her husband’s employee, a widower who should be resting in retirement but forced to serve white people for minimal wages. Her husband also vouched for Demetrius’s character at the bank to help him secure a small business loan that seeded his successful carpet cleaning company. The second white person is a white man who shows up briefly to use the n-word in an eager attempt to get involved in some physical violence. Those are the only white representations in this film, and they absolutely nail them as the given legacy of our own hate in the Deep South.
These legacies parallel each other as senseless, violent, fear-driven hate rooted in the basest animal instinct to blame one’s problems on the easiest targets, the smallest groups who have visible differences and who can’t fight back against an overwhelming swell of the growing cult’s brain rotting hate. These legacies are also still with us as that cult of cowards swells again against transgender Americans, naturalized Americans, immigrants visiting our nation or looking for a better life, black Americans, brown Americans, our whole beautifully diverse melting pot that they want to turn into a limp bechamel.
And that brings us to the counterbalance in Mississippi Masala; the masala itself. Mina describes herself as masala, a hot spice blend of different cultures and backgrounds from her own heritage and the places she has lived. This invocation of food parallels the Great American Melting Pot idea of the beautiful benefits of diversity, but also knocks the rating up a few bars to offer a much more adult version of the melding of hot spices.
While this film is not as on as last week’s The Long, Hot Summer (1958), it is steamy at times, but it’s mostly just sweet. The early scenes with Demetrius and Mina are tender snapshots of two people getting to know each other, flirting, connecting, and feeling out how they feel about each other. I don’t think I really buy the rushed claims of love, but I definitely buy the butterflies of that first real romance and the feeling of invincibility they bring. Their romance is so sensual and gentle and each scene builds their genuine connection so beautifully that you as the audience also forget about the legacies of hate each character is saddled with. It’s the intoxicating masala, the spice of life, that breaks through the simpleminded cult with love and sexy, sexy joy.
I think the best representation of the duality in the film is that “masala” in the title. Mississippi, like America, has both the fear-driven hate and the capacity for beautiful loving happiness baked in. It represents both the diversity of cultures and backgrounds present in America as well as the hatred those communities are subjected to. What Mira Nair does so expertly is build a story of people just living in that reality; people finding joy and happiness despite the pressures and struggles and evils of the world around them. And I think that’s a version of America much more worth celebrating tomorrow than our government’s current ideas of what it is to be American. The version where people like her son, Zohran Mamdani, win elections because they just want to help people live fulfilling lives with the people they love; not the version that just passed legislation that will line the pockets of billionaires’ pockets with even more American blood. Ultimately, what this film emphasizes in 2025 is that the Trump administration’s simplistic minds and overwhelming bigotry blind them to the beautiful reality of the diverse, spicy, sexy, sultry, complex flavors of our country and its history.
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