Copyright Lang Communications, Inc. Mar 1993A stunning dark-skinned man and woman appear on-screen. He is African American, and his dark skin is accentuated by his loose white clothing. In his arms he holds a woman of South Asian descent; large eyes, sensuous lips, and flowing black hair are topped by an African-print cap. They are in a cotton field. They are celluloid images.
A few weeks after Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala played to packed houses on my New England university campus, I managed to shock a restaurant full of waiters. I had decided to drop by a campus restaurant with my friend Ron for some coffee and poststudying chitchat. Although I, unlike Nair's actress Sarita Choudhury, have cut short my raven tresses, and Ron would never win a Denzel Washington look-alike contest, that evening felt strangely reminiscent of Nair's film by mere virtue of the fact that I am of Indian descent while Ron is African American. This similarity did not escape my food service friends. Every waiter felt compelled to take his turn filling our water glasses.
It's not as if my kidneys weren't grateful, nor as if I have never been hovered over by waiters. I would have probably banished the incident from my mind by now, if it weren't for the unexpected emotions it elicited. Rather than feeling angry, I felt proud; as if I were flaunting something daring in the face of society. I remember talking a little louder, smiling a little broader, all for the benefit of my captive audience. Having seen Sarita and Denzel dance around a Mississippi cotton field only a few weeks before, I was aware of the ethno-chic visual impact Ron and I made together. To my present chagrin, I remember pulling my glass-embroidered Indian shawl just a little tighter, and being glad Ron had worn his Panther-style black beret. I was undoubtedly experiencing "Masala-itis," a disease whereby the complexities of racism, sexism, and homophobia disappear, and one feels the sudden urge to exotify oneself.
I do not mean to place the blame for my own embarrassing behavior at Nair's cinematic doorstep, but her movie is a perfect springboard for discussing the politics of sexuality as it affects women of South Asian descent coming of age in the United States. Despite its popularity, Mississippi Masala is hardly an accurate depiction of South Asian American women's sexual coming of age. Very few of us disengage from our families and communities to dance around cotton fields. Mississippi Masala and its accompanying disease, Masala-itis, suggest that South Asian American women specifically, and women of color in general, can find apolitical space away from their heritage and communities, while retaining some sort of international ethno-exotica. But women of South Asian descent in the U.S. cannot afford to become divorced from our sources of strength, or become seduced by Masala-itis, the newest rage in ethno-hip-hop tokenism. A glass-embroidered shawl is little protection against a racist environment.
Unlike Mina, the female protagonist in Mississippi Masala, I did not grow up in the cinematically beautiful hills of Uganda. I was born in the Midwest of the United States, a white German American environment of block parties and roller-skating, Girl Scout troops and lemonade stalls. My parents are well-educated professionals who immigrated to this country to attend graduate school. This makes me a second-generation Indian American, a member of an upper-middle-class "model minority" just coming of age.
Like other immigrant communities, we are caught in a tug-of-war between heritage and environment, family and friends. Issues regarding sexuality are of particular contention: immigrant parents and children battle about dating. (Here, Mississippi Masala is not far off the mark.) In a fervent attempt to resist the racist forces of assimilation, immigrants try to inculcate their children with values and cultural norms. One part of this process of cultural preservation includes controlling miscegenation among the second generation. Like Mina, many a tear-streaked woman of South Asian descent has cried, "I love him, is that so wrong?"
The issue is not that Nair forgot to portray intergenerational conflicts. The problem is the lack of context. For instance, there are almost no white people in Nair's Mississippi. Indeed, Mina seems to encounter little or no white racism during her lifetime; the only race relations at work in the film are between and among people of color. Unfortunately, life is not so simple for most South Asian American young women. Most of our interracial interactions are with white people, while our interactions with other people of color are heavily influenced by the racist hegemony in which we struggle to survive. As children of the "brain drain," some second-generation Indian Americans are afforded class privileges, grow up in white towns, go to white schools, and have mostly white friends. We have become the white man's pet by taking on his prejudices against our Latino and African American sisters and brothers. On weekends, we are bombarded with culture by our parents; as young women, we are expected to be the guardians of all that is Indian in clothing, food, speech, and custom. This cultural juggling act is not without negative effects. We are brown-skinned women whose sexual self-concepts are heavily influenced by the white environment in which we have come of age.
As a child, I believed myself to be intolerably ugly. I know now that I was not the only little brown girl to be ashamed of her skin color, her name, her difference. I was not the only person asked if she rode elephants, or slept in a tepee, or ate snakes. Mine was not the only skin to be rubbed by little white hands to see if the "tan" would rub off. The insidious victimization robbed us of the power to identify it as racism. This onslaught is exacerbated by our own communities.
For instance, an Indian woman in Mississippi Masala comments that a marriageable girl can be poor and fair or rich and dark, but not poor and dark. Although dark-skinned Mina seems nonplussed by such beauty standards, this two-pronged attack has influenced my South Asian sisters and myself. If it had not, I cannot imagine why so many of my lighter-skinned sisters would find pride in "passing" for Italian or Greek. On the other end of the spectrum, those women who socialize with African American or Latino communities often pass themselves off as black or Latina. Either way, it is a denigration of self in an attempt to become acceptable.
Nair's film conveniently ignores this aspect of socialization to focus on the Indian woman as the exotic Easterner. For example, although she is a working-class woman from an insular community, Mina dresses and behaves like a cosmopolitan sophisticate. She tosses her long hair about, and in one scene dresses in traditional salwaar kameze and a glass-embroidered Indian shawl. It is highly unlikely that a real-life woman of Indian descent would wear Indian clothing outside of community functions, particularly during a rendezvous with her boyfriend on a Mississippi beach. Real South Asian women know that ethnic garb may be de rigueur in cities and on liberal college campuses, but it is an invitation to racist insult and assault in most areas of the United States. Yet the film panders to audiences' Masala-itis, which is nothing but racism grown up. White children who once asked about tigers and turbans have become adults fascinated by saris and the practice of suttee. Non-South Asian men and women have made dating South Asian women a fad, like learning the sitar in the Beatles era. In this Shirley MacLaine-esque fascination with reincarnation and karma, the South Asian woman is an easy target for exotic fantasies.
The unfortunate part of Masala-itis is that it affords a much-longed-for recognition, however transitory or superficial, to a community of women who have grown up battered by racism and self-loathing. The problems introduced by a negative sexual self-concept are exacerbated by Indian cultural taboos against discussing anything sexual in the home. Although a young woman may decide to become sexually active for positive reasons, she may also see it as a form of assimilation, an attempt to please white peers, a protest against the desexualizing "model minority" myth, or a rebellion against parents. Yet another issue she might face is sexual assault, both inside and outside of the Indian American community. Coming out as a lesbian or bisexual is even more problematic. In the war between familial taboo and social reality, young South Asian American women are too often left emotionally and socially defenseless in regard to all issues of sexuality. Mainstream support systems, including campus outreaches and community health centers, do not address our particular concerns. Furthermore, there are daughters of immigrants who lack the support of aunts, older cousins, and neighborhood friends they might have had in South Asia--all of which leaves us at risk of emotional and physical battery. Not all of us can frolic with Denzel Washington as the credits roll by.
Women of South Asian descent have no one to look to but ourselves. We cannot hope to cut our ties with our immigrant parents and run into the cotton fields with our lovers. Neither can we afford to remain silently self-loathing.
We cannot let Masala-itis sugarcoat our reality into one of exotic ankle bells and colorful African-print caps. Our beauty must come from a critical understanding of the forces at work around us. Our beauty cannot afford to be celluloid; it must arise from within our individual and among our collective selves.
Sayantani DasGupta is an Indian American feminist. A recent graduate of 
Brown University, she is currently a free-lance writer. Her future plans include going to medical school.
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