2.3 Articulating Space in the ‘Accented’ Style .1 Mississippi Masala (1991) - A Synopsis
2.3.1.1 Mina
In Mississippi Masala (1991), the character of Mina is shown at two stages of her life: as a child and as an adult. The life of the child is provided as a background to the life of the adult allowing for a better understanding of the construction of Mina‟s character.
Mina‟s plurality of identity at each of these stages is quite evident in the different roles that she naturally or uncomfortably assumes. As a child, she is a daughter who is obedient, slightly mischievous, observant, perceptive and scared. She is also a caring friend to the child of their domestic worker. In her interaction with Okelo, her father‟s best friend, Mina is portrayed as a kind of „surrogate‟ child who is spoilt, sad, hurt and curious.
The first borders that the young Mina crosses are physical and are characterised by her family‟s movement from Uganda to England and then to America. The effect of these changes in environment is evident in the character of Mina as an adult. Her concepts of home and identity are confused and not very coherent. This is noted in her plurality as an adult in the United States. Mina still occupies the role of a daughter. In this new context, however, she seems to have grown into a feisty, fiery, free-spirited, temperamental young woman who is dependent on and protective of her parents. She is also a worker/employee who is content with having to do a very functional and menial job for someone else. She does not seem to be very motivated in this area and is quite settled in what she does. In fact, she does not show much interest or enthusiasm when her father mentions acquiring an education.
To her mother, Mina is not just a daughter, but a woman of marriageable age. Mina, in this particular role (bestowed upon her by her mother) is quite uninterested, unwilling and very realistic about her merits as a marriageable woman. This is influenced by the most important aspect of Mina‟s plurality, at this stage in her life; her status as a diasporic being. This role or part of her identity sits very uneasily for her. She is uncertain about who she is, having had to
negotiate her Indian identity with the cultural influences of the various places in which she has resided. She sees herself as a hybrid (“a mixed masala”).
Mina‟s journey of identity is therefore reflective of this plurality. In her life thus far, she has lived in places where her physical difference has been and still is noticeable. This refers directly to Naficy‟s notion of tactile optics in „accented‟ films and the particular significance of the experience of the human body. Her body and, more specifically, her brown skin have been the ultimate signifiers of her difference from the people belonging to the other cultures in which she has lived. In Uganda, she was an unwelcome, privileged Indian among the Africans. Her life in England is not explored in the film, so it is unclear what she experienced there. In the United States, however, her difference is made evident on many levels. To the other Indians in her community, she is too dark to be the typical Indian girl and to the African-Americans, she appears to be Mexican. As a result, Mina often seems to be explaining away her difference and struggling with questions surrounding her very diverse background and identity.
In her explanations of the many sides to her identity, Mina appears to be uncomfortable in attempting to create an understanding of herself. To do so, would be to define herself, to define a position, and in defining a position that she belongs to, she would be forcing her being, on a spiritual level, and her body, on a physical level, into a mould of something that her surrounding world wants or expects her to be. She can‟t help that she‟s different and not a few shades lighter, and she can‟t help that, after all the varied cultural influences that she‟s been exposed to, she does not want to follow a tradition that is external to her lived experience. Mina seems to be culturally displaced as opposed to personally displaced. She is secure in herself and her convictions but she is not secure in her negotiated identity. This is an instance in which Nair‟s personal response to being situated in the interstices of cultures is expressed through her character.
At this point in her life, Mina crosses an important border during her journey of identity. It is indicated physically by the bus trip that she takes from Greenwood to Biloxi (Mississippi) to spend a secret weekend away, alone with Demetrius. Her border-crossing is her engagement in an interracial, pre-marital affair. The significance of this border-crossing lies in the fact that she uses her body to transgress sexual boundaries. Her body being that physical part of her being that people are trying to control by constantly attempting to define it culturally and thereby forcing it to conform to a model of something that she clearly is not or does not want
to be. Her transgression of these sexual boundaries is a metaphor for more profound metaphysical borders in her life and identity.
Her interracial relationship is a boundary because her family wants her to marry a „good Indian man‟. In doing so, Mina‟s parents would be maintaining or perpetuating good Indian values through their daughter, an Indian female. Pre-marital sex is also a boundary because to engage in an act of that nature would be to reduce her marriageability. Marriageability for an Indian woman depends on her virtue before marriage. In this regard, the stakes are higher for Mina: as discussed earlier, she is dark and has no money or wealth, so the only redeeming quality for her, as an eligible Indian woman, is her virginity.
By transgressing these sexual boundaries, Mina reclaims her body as her own space and assumes self-determination over it. She makes her body her personal space through which she can express herself or speak her being. She does not allow cultural values and beliefs to dictate to her when and how her body should be used. She is not restrained by sexual principles governing her behaviour as an Indian woman. She has defined her body and her existence on her own terms, through self-motivated actions. Her body, in its attempted containment, becomes a site of rebellion and develops into her personal home. Reflecting on Vivian Sobchack‟s argument (in Naficy, 1999), an enhancement of Naficy‟s notion of tactile optics in Chapter One (pg 25), Mina‟s body, at the beginning of the film, can be understood as her house. She was uncomfortable with India being her cultural referent because she had no context in/from which to understand it, and she was similarly uncomfortable within her Indian body because it symbolised ideals that she was not accustomed to. India and her Indian body were „houses‟ to her Indian heritage. They housed her ethnicity and cultural inscription. There seemed to be little room left for her personal fulfilment or a self that was truly hers, unmediated by imposed external forces. It therefore became imperative that she discover for herself a home that allowed her freedom of choice and expression. She found that home in her body once she acted on her impulses and fulfilled its needs. And, now that she has made her body her personal space, she will never be culturally displaced, no matter where she finds herself geographically, because her home lies within her.
After her border-crossing, Mina‟s life choices are based on her own reflection, needs and desires. For instance, she chooses who to love and spend the rest of her life with. She makes a very liberated decision to leave her family because she understands that this will help her grow. She also exhibits the ability to confront her parents and justify the reasons for her
action and her wanting to leave. Ultimately, Mina comes to terms with who she is and discards notions of who or what she is not.
Her plurality, by the end of the film, is not vastly different in the roles that she plays, but is substantially different in how she plays those roles. As a daughter, she is rebellious and independent. She is now a partner and lover who is expressive, free, uninhibited, explorative and sexually knowledgeable because she is speaking out against and pushing the boundaries of her previous identity/plurality through the fulfilment of her personal desires and urges. Nair reveals, at this point, that a woman‟s sexual knowledge is not necessarily destructive, as has been portrayed by mainstream Hollywood and popular Indian filmmaking. Sexual knowledge can also lead to the accessing of a greater sense of being, as in the case of Mina‟s character.
Mina‟s journey thus becomes one of cultural self-discovery in which she crosses a border into her own sense of being. Naficy speaks about hybridity - in conjunction to plurality - being a large concern of diasporic filmmakers because of their own struggles or difficulties with reterritorialisation in the host society. This notion of hybridity is quite evident in and relates directly to Mina‟s journey of cultural self-discovery and sense of being. By the end of the film, Mina exerts this hybridity as the only way she knows how to exist. She acknowledges her Indian descent, but she also acknowledges that it is not all that she is. She is American as well and thus integrates aspects of the western experience with her physical existence as an Indian woman.