The parallels between Mamdani's real-life experiences and the fictional account in the film, I argue, are pretty strong, and a look at the Mamdani text helps unpack the complexity of the Indian community's presence in Uganda that are shown in highly compressed form in the film. In the second half of the excerpt below, I discuss how Nair explores the complexity of race relations in the U.S., especially with newer immigrants complicating the white/Black binary of the American race formation.
Trade and migration between East Africa and India goes back for thousands of years; there have even been hints that Vasco de Gama, who “discovered” the sea route to India in 1468, was shown the way by an Indian trader he encountered in southern Africa. However, it was during the peak years of the British Empire that large numbers of Indians came to east Africa, mainly brought by the British as indentured laborers. One example of the work these early laborers were involved with is the East African railway, built in the late nineteenth century (Bizeck 2005: 112-113). Beginning in the early 20th century, however, a growing number of Indians came to East Africa of their own accord as traders, where they became somewhat prosperous in relation to the indigenous population, leading to growing resentment. After East African nations such as Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe became independent in the early 1960s, their new leadership initiated “Africanization” programs, designed to improve the situations of indigenous black Africans, and marginalize remaining European settlers as well as the prosperous Indian community. Arguably, the Indian community did not help its own cause in this era, as many Indians settled in Africa avoided mingling socially with local Africans, and held themselves above the local population. After Ugandan independence, some of the 80,000 Indians settled in Uganda elected not to become citizens of the new nation, preferring to remain “British” subjects. As he ramped up his anti-Indian rhetoric in the months leading up to his expulsion order, President Idi Amin capitalized on these aspects of the Indian community settled in Uganda, reserving special ire for a community that he characterized as refusing to call itself Ugandan (for more on this, see Desai 2013: 206-207). However, at the time he issued his expulsion order in 1972, the 23,000 people of Indian descent in Uganda who were certified citizens of Uganda were not exempted from the order – all Indians were required to leave the country immediately, taking no more than £50 with them in currency.
The Asian expulsion order, though shocking to the world at the time, is in hindsight somewhat understandable given the history of racial segregation in east Africa under the British. In 1971, Idi Amin Dada, an officer in the Ugandan army prior to the Coup, led a military coup against his former ally, Milton Obote, who had himself come to power in a coup just a few years earlier. Amin had, during the final years of the British Empire in Africa, been a career army officer, rising through the ranks, and becoming one of two commissioned African officers in the “King’s African Rifles.” After coming to power, Amin conducted a brutal campaign against his political rivals in other ethnic groups, leading to deaths on a massive scale – virtually a genocide, according to some accounts (See Jergenson 1984: 267-330). After concluding the civil war in 1971, he began an “economic war,” directed primarily against Indo-Africans and Europeans, who continued to dominate the Ugandan economy. By September 1972, he had ordered that all of Uganada’s Indians leave the country, and he oversaw the expropriation of their property for himself and his allies.
After expulsion, most Indo-Ugandans went, for at least a brief period of time, to “refugee” camps in England, and Mamdani’s account in From Citizen to Refugee vividly depicts the confusion and desperation they experienced in those camps in 1972 and 1973. Others went back to India, and a fair number went to places like New Zealand and Australia. A small number came to the U.S., where they quickly blended into the rapidly expanding Indian diaspora community settling all around the U.S. after the immigration reforms of 1965. Mississippi Masala tells the story of a fictional family that found its way to the Deep South of the United States, where it became involved in the hotel business.
Though there is no reason to think that Mamdani’s book is a direct source for Nair and Taraporevala’s story, through a close look at the memoir one finds a number of close parallels between Mamdani’s version of the Indian expulsion from Uganda and its depiction in Nair’s Mississippi Masala. Mamdani is not credited as a writer or contributor on the film, though Nair has openly discussed how she met him while filming the Uganda-based scenes of the film; as is well-known, she also later married Mamdani, who now teaches at Columbia University in New York. The relevance of Mamdani’s account to Nair’s film is evident from some of his personal accounts, including the following account of violence at the hands of Ugandan soldiers during the expulsion:
The first group of Asians to leave Uganda were those that went to India. From Kampala they took a train to the Kenyan port of Mombasa where a ship was to take them to Bombay. Letters from them told of being stopped on the way by bands of Ugandan soldiers, of all their belongings taken, of the men made to lie down on the ground while the women were raped. From the countryside news gradually filtered into the city telling of individual Asians who had been kidnapped by soldiers, of families who paid fortunes for the return of the male members and of other families who lost their father or brothers because they had no money to pay a ransom. (Mamdani 1973: 25)
In Nair’s film, the violence involved in the expulsion is represented by a single, tense bus-ride, where Jay’s wife Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore) is singled out and harassed by soldiers. They make her demonstrate that the audio tapes she’s carrying contain only music (the song that is played, momentarily, is a famous Kishore Kumar number particularly apposite to the diasporic context: “Mera Joota Hai Japani” [My Shoes Are Japanese]) [FIGURE 34]. Rather than subject her to violence, the soldier finally lets her go, while demonstrating unmistakably that he could act with impunity, if he chose.
What is perhaps the strongest parallel between Nair and Taraporevala’s Jay and Mamdani’s account relates to an individual named Jagdish who has a story that is strikingly similar to Jay’s:
Jagdish was one of the few people I knew who was not trapped by the social conditions he was born into; who had successfully risen above his social environment to be able to see its limitations. He revolted against the perverse nature of the society around him, especially the affluent Asian society, with its almost totally privatized existence and increasingly conspicuous consumption. […]
In the late sixties, [Jagdish started] a school for the children of farmers. Now he could realize his dreams and have his own school. Its staff and students would be multi-racial, its subject matter would be stripped of colonial content.
When Jagdish found out he had to leave, his immediate concern was to make certain the school would not collapse on his departure […] He set about training one of the African teachers, Mugoba, in the mechanics of running the school. Every morning students would ask Jadgish whether he was leaving. He would remain quiet. One day he did not go to school. Instead he queued outside the British High Commission to get his passport stamped. Mugoba took charge. The students demanded Jagdish’s presence, when that failed they took it out on Mugoba, beat him up and refused either to leave or behave. A few days later, Jagdish left for London. He told me not to go back to the school, for he did not ever want to talk about it. (Mamdani 1975: 42-43)
Jagdish’s relationship to Mugoba is somewhat reminiscent of Jay’s relationship to Okelo in Nair’s film, though the incident where Mugoba is beaten after he fails to hand Jagdish over to the rebelling students is not present in the film. In both cases, a Ugandan Indian educator who is working to fulfil his idealistic vision of a racially integrated society is forced to grapple with historical forces that make that vision an impossibility, at least in 1972.
One final anecdote from Mamdani’s book seems relevant as a way of setting the stage for a closer look at Nair’s film. It involves one of Mamdani’s colleagues at the university in Kampala where he has been teaching as a historian:
A few days later I left. My English and American friends came to Airways House to see me off. In those days, for an African to be seen with an Asian was to risk both lives. It was sufficient evidence of intended sabotage. Even two months earlier, when I had gone to see Maria, a friend at the university, she had pleaded:
‘Please, Mahmood, we can’t go out together. Don’t you know how things have changed? It’s not me, it’s the times, I’m sorry.’
As I boarded the bus for the airport and looked out of the window to wave goodbye, John made one last attempt to make light of the situation.
‘Make sure this is the last time you are kicked out of a country on charges of being a bourgeois!’
I tried to laugh. But I felt as if someone dear to me had died. (Mamdani 1975: 67)
This passage gives an unmistakable sense of an incommensurable gap between those on the receiving end of the expulsion order, and those who benefit, either as members of the indigenous population (Maria, above), or as whites who are effectively immune to the kind of persecution to which Mamdani’s community is being subjected (John). That incommensurability is also present in the opening scene of Mississippi Masala, where Jay and Okelo find their friendship affected by the changing dynamics of the political situation.
Mississippi Masala opens, like Mamdani’s From Citizen to Refugee, at the dramatic moment of the expulsion of the Asians from Uganda. The opening shots are of Kampala in 1972, with Jay (Roshan Seth), driving with his friend Okelo, stopped at a police checkpoint [FIGURE 35]. A radio voice-over establishes the historical context:
“This is Radio Uganda. Today the people of Uganda are witnessing the end of one chapter of the history of this country, and the beginning of another. Today the last of the Asians who have been forced to leave the country will have done so in order for the indigenous people of Uganda to take control of the economy.” (Nair’s Mississippi Masala)
Jay and Okelo are having an argument about Jay’s recent statements about Idi Amin to the BBC. Their dialogue resembles, in some ways, the kinds of arguments Mahmood Mamdani had with his friends and colleagues in the months before Idi Amin’s expulsion order was issued:
Okelo: “You give an interview on BBC, saying that Amin was evil. Are you mad? What about Kinnu? What about Meena?”Jay: “What should I have done? Remained silent? That is the cowards’ way.
Okelo: Don’t talk to me about cowards. That’s what you are. You’re not leaving because you’re scared to leave? You are scared of leaving Uganda.”
Jay: “Why should I go? Why should I go? Okelo, this is my home.”
Okelo: “Not any more, Jay. Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.” (Nair’s Mississippi Masala)
Like the real-life Mahmood Mamdani, Jay is a progressive intellectual – he simply refuses to keep his mouth shut in the face of what he perceives to be injustice. In this case, his statements in the media are seen by Okelo as dangerous for himself and his family, especially given Idi Amin’s propensity to summarily destroy his enemies and their families at the slightest whim.
The dialogue establishes Jay and his family as unfairly targeted by the expulsion order – they are citizens of Uganda, and also full participants in an emerging multi-racial society with their black African neighbors. Jay has come to fully identify as a Ugandan; he tells Okelo that he’s “always been Ugandan first and Indian second,” and his friendship with Okelo runs deep enough that his daughter Meena calls him “Okelo Chachu” (“Okelo Uncle”). At one point in the film, one of his friends suggests that, in his law practice in Uganda, he had been especially committed to representing black Africans (“Meet our Jay Bhai [brother Jay]. In Uganda he was the champion defender of blacks. But the same blacks kicked him out.”).
Despite the emphasis on the political situation and the darkness of the opening shots, Nair’s visual approach to representing Uganda is actually quite affirmative. The countryside outside of Kampala is also shown in daylight sweeping pans, with lush jungle hillsides and stunning views of Lake Victoria in the background. The overall effect suggests a kind of idyllic, garden-like environment. [FIGURE 36]
Though he feels nostalgia for his earlier life in Uganda, Jay’s experience of exile from the country, followed by an unspecified experience in England, has hardened and embittered him. And while he doesn’t seem to harbor explicitly racialized hostility against black Africans (or against African-Americans in the Mississippi town where he and his family now live), it’s clear that he’s most comfortable around other Indians. Okelo’s comment that Africa is for “black Africans” only has apparently continued to haunt Jay in subsequent years, making it impossible for him to trust anyone outside of his ethnic community. It is not Idi Amin who has most wounded Jay, but Okelo. The sense of loss has impacted Jay on other levels as well. Though they are no longer simple “refugees,” the family has continued to be in some sense homeless. Jay and his family have had to move so often that they remain unsettled in their new environment – they’re actually living, permanently, in the hotel where Meena works.
In addition to its foregrounding of the Asian expulsion from Uganda, Mississippi Masala is also notable for its exploration of race relations in the American south beyond the black/white axis. This is developed in Nair’s film as a theme in its own right, though at the moment of dramatic crisis the American racial problematic intersects with the lingering legacy of the Asian expulsion. Several scholars, including Jigna Desai (2004), Bakirathi Mani (1996), and Binita Mehta (1996), have commented on Nair and Taraporevala’s provocative approach to American race-relations in Mississippi Masala, and here we will try not to replicate their conclusions. Rather, with regards to the American race dynamics, our focus is on how race works, not so much between the various communities represented in Nair’s film, but within those communities. Nair’s film explores the problem of anti-black racism within the Indian immigrant community, as well as the phenomenon known as “colorism,” the prejudice for lighter skin within minority communities themselves.
The complex intersection of race and ethnicity in Mississippi Masala is evident in the Indian wedding scene early in the film. Here, a character, played by Mira Nair herself, introduces the well-known dynamic of colorism internal to the Indian community, which seems to have implicit and unconscious ramifications for the incipient romance between Meena and Demetrius: ““You think this one [Meena] has a chance. Aré, you can be dark and have money, or you can be fair and have no money. But you can’t be dark and have no money, and expect to get Harry Patel” [FIGURE 37]. From context, one gathers that Harry Patel is considered quite the catch for Meena, who described herself to her mother in the immediately preceding scene as a “darkie” (“Face it, Ma, you got a darkie daughter’).
While some observers have wondered whether the traditional Indian aesthetic preference for lighter skin is a form of internalized colonialism, many Indians understand it in the framework described by anthropologists as “colorism” – a pattern of discrimination within a non-white community where the preference for light skin is generally not a signal of preference for “whiteness” associated with individuals of European descent (Parameswaran and Cordoza 2009). All the same, because of the racial and complexional prejudices within the Indian community in Mississippi Masala, a dark-skinned African-American as a love-object for an Indian-American woman clearly places her outside of the norms of her community. The fact that the film’s romantic plot does in fact develop along these lines is consistent with Nair’s interest in transgressive romantic narratives (especially in Salaam, Bombay!, Kama Sutra, and Vanity Fair).
While socio-political and historical factors can put people in the same geographic place, ultimately what leads individuals in different ethnic groups to become truly connected—or personally intimate—is who they are as individuals. In Meena’s case, the young woman we are re-introduced to after a gap of eighteen years is shown in Nair’s film as a rebellious, strong-willed person, rather at odds with the heavily Gujarati Indian community in the small Mississippi town where she and her family live. Her relatives and family friends are counting every penny, with little awareness of the way of life characteristic of the mainstream Southern society that surrounds them. Meena, who has now spent most of her life in that society, has been toughened by her encounters, and is frequently frustrated with the diasporic Indian community’s self-absorption and conservatism. Her father, Jay, has remained somewhat aloof from Meena’s struggles to define herself; when he is first re-introduced in 1990, he is seen writing a letter to the Ugandan government outlining his losses following the expulsion order of 1972. The implication is that his heart and soul remain in his home country of Uganda, not in the new world of the multi-racial American south.
As should already be apparent, Mississippi Masala dramatizes, first and foremost, a split within the Indian diasporic community in Greenwood, between conservative, money-obsessed motel owners on the one hand, and the comparatively more relaxed and open-minded Jay, Kinnu, and Meena, on the other. At the same time, Nair and Taraporevala are also sensitive to schisms within the African-American community. Meena’s later love interest Demetrius owns a small carpet-cleaning business, and he struggles to hold his entire family on his back, as his father is makes little money as a waiter and his brother, Dexter, is unemployed. The relationship between the two brothers reflects a division within the African American community at the time over how to navigate identity in a racially-polarized society. While Demetrius works hard and feels little race-consciousness, Dexter speaks openly of “crackers” amongst his friends, and wears a large plastic clock in the manner of the black nationalist rap group Public Enemy [FIGURE 38]. However, Dexter’s attitude prevents him from connecting with anyone outside of the small group of friends (derisively described as “crackheads” by Demetrius) he hangs out with on the street-corner. Similarly, there is a gap between Demetrius’ approach to his career and the stylish – but shallow – approach taken by his ex-girlfriend Alicia LeShay, who has left Greenwood for the comparatively larger Jackson, Mississippi, to try her hand at a music career. While Meena is an outlier in her family and community in one way, Demetrius is in an analogous but opposite position within his community (he appears to be the only one in his family working hard to get ahead).
Meena is not damaged by the experience of the expulsion from Uganda in the same way as her father. Unlike the whites in Mississippi, she has no entrenched feelings about African Americans or black Africans (if anything, she has a positive memory of her “chachu” Okelo, back in Uganda), and unlike her father, she has no cynicism about the possibility of being close to members of other ethno-racial groups. The possibility of a romance with an African American is, therefore, an event that is effectively unscripted in the narratives of both her family and her community. Demetrius also offers Meena the opportunity to transgressively rebuke the local Indian community, shown in the film to be faintly ridiculous, and which at any rate doesn’t value someone like herself (i.e., a young woman who is “both dark and has no money”) very highly. Outside of the Indian immigrant community, Meena seems much better acculturated; she is, for example, perfectly comfortable in African-American social environments such as the “Leopard Lounge” nightclub she goes to with Harry Patel after the Indian wedding they both attend in Greenwood.
As minorities in a white-dominated society, Indians and African Americans have certain things in common, though Nair notes that the tensions and mutual mistrust between the respective ethno-racial groups far outweighs any provisional sense of unity that might be felt amongst these “people of color.” In a scene that perfectly exemplifies the awkwardness of the connection between the Indian-American and African-American communities in Greenwood, the Indian motel owner known as Pontiac (Mohan Gokhale) approaches Demetrius and Tyrone, who are contracted to clean carpets at his motel, about Meena’s accident.
In addition to its foregrounding of the Asian expulsion from Uganda, Mississippi Masala is also notable for its exploration of race relations in the American south beyond the black/white axis. This is developed in Nair’s film as a theme in its own right, though at the moment of dramatic crisis the American racial problematic intersects with the lingering legacy of the Asian expulsion. Several scholars, including Jigna Desai (2004), Bakirathi Mani (1996), and Binita Mehta (1996), have commented on Nair and Taraporevala’s provocative approach to American race-relations in Mississippi Masala, and here we will try not to replicate their conclusions. Rather, with regards to the American race dynamics, our focus is on how race works, not so much between the various communities represented in Nair’s film, but within those communities. Nair’s film explores the problem of anti-black racism within the Indian immigrant community, as well as the phenomenon known as “colorism,” the prejudice for lighter skin within minority communities themselves.
The complex intersection of race and ethnicity in Mississippi Masala is evident in the Indian wedding scene early in the film. Here, a character, played by Mira Nair herself, introduces the well-known dynamic of colorism internal to the Indian community, which seems to have implicit and unconscious ramifications for the incipient romance between Meena and Demetrius: ““You think this one [Meena] has a chance. Aré, you can be dark and have money, or you can be fair and have no money. But you can’t be dark and have no money, and expect to get Harry Patel” [FIGURE 37]. From context, one gathers that Harry Patel is considered quite the catch for Meena, who described herself to her mother in the immediately preceding scene as a “darkie” (“Face it, Ma, you got a darkie daughter’).
While some observers have wondered whether the traditional Indian aesthetic preference for lighter skin is a form of internalized colonialism, many Indians understand it in the framework described by anthropologists as “colorism” – a pattern of discrimination within a non-white community where the preference for light skin is generally not a signal of preference for “whiteness” associated with individuals of European descent (Parameswaran and Cordoza 2009). All the same, because of the racial and complexional prejudices within the Indian community in Mississippi Masala, a dark-skinned African-American as a love-object for an Indian-American woman clearly places her outside of the norms of her community. The fact that the film’s romantic plot does in fact develop along these lines is consistent with Nair’s interest in transgressive romantic narratives (especially in Salaam, Bombay!, Kama Sutra, and Vanity Fair).
While socio-political and historical factors can put people in the same geographic place, ultimately what leads individuals in different ethnic groups to become truly connected—or personally intimate—is who they are as individuals. In Meena’s case, the young woman we are re-introduced to after a gap of eighteen years is shown in Nair’s film as a rebellious, strong-willed person, rather at odds with the heavily Gujarati Indian community in the small Mississippi town where she and her family live. Her relatives and family friends are counting every penny, with little awareness of the way of life characteristic of the mainstream Southern society that surrounds them. Meena, who has now spent most of her life in that society, has been toughened by her encounters, and is frequently frustrated with the diasporic Indian community’s self-absorption and conservatism. Her father, Jay, has remained somewhat aloof from Meena’s struggles to define herself; when he is first re-introduced in 1990, he is seen writing a letter to the Ugandan government outlining his losses following the expulsion order of 1972. The implication is that his heart and soul remain in his home country of Uganda, not in the new world of the multi-racial American south.
As should already be apparent, Mississippi Masala dramatizes, first and foremost, a split within the Indian diasporic community in Greenwood, between conservative, money-obsessed motel owners on the one hand, and the comparatively more relaxed and open-minded Jay, Kinnu, and Meena, on the other. At the same time, Nair and Taraporevala are also sensitive to schisms within the African-American community. Meena’s later love interest Demetrius owns a small carpet-cleaning business, and he struggles to hold his entire family on his back, as his father is makes little money as a waiter and his brother, Dexter, is unemployed. The relationship between the two brothers reflects a division within the African American community at the time over how to navigate identity in a racially-polarized society. While Demetrius works hard and feels little race-consciousness, Dexter speaks openly of “crackers” amongst his friends, and wears a large plastic clock in the manner of the black nationalist rap group Public Enemy [FIGURE 38]. However, Dexter’s attitude prevents him from connecting with anyone outside of the small group of friends (derisively described as “crackheads” by Demetrius) he hangs out with on the street-corner. Similarly, there is a gap between Demetrius’ approach to his career and the stylish – but shallow – approach taken by his ex-girlfriend Alicia LeShay, who has left Greenwood for the comparatively larger Jackson, Mississippi, to try her hand at a music career. While Meena is an outlier in her family and community in one way, Demetrius is in an analogous but opposite position within his community (he appears to be the only one in his family working hard to get ahead).
Meena is not damaged by the experience of the expulsion from Uganda in the same way as her father. Unlike the whites in Mississippi, she has no entrenched feelings about African Americans or black Africans (if anything, she has a positive memory of her “chachu” Okelo, back in Uganda), and unlike her father, she has no cynicism about the possibility of being close to members of other ethno-racial groups. The possibility of a romance with an African American is, therefore, an event that is effectively unscripted in the narratives of both her family and her community. Demetrius also offers Meena the opportunity to transgressively rebuke the local Indian community, shown in the film to be faintly ridiculous, and which at any rate doesn’t value someone like herself (i.e., a young woman who is “both dark and has no money”) very highly. Outside of the Indian immigrant community, Meena seems much better acculturated; she is, for example, perfectly comfortable in African-American social environments such as the “Leopard Lounge” nightclub she goes to with Harry Patel after the Indian wedding they both attend in Greenwood.
As minorities in a white-dominated society, Indians and African Americans have certain things in common, though Nair notes that the tensions and mutual mistrust between the respective ethno-racial groups far outweighs any provisional sense of unity that might be felt amongst these “people of color.” In a scene that perfectly exemplifies the awkwardness of the connection between the Indian-American and African-American communities in Greenwood, the Indian motel owner known as Pontiac (Mohan Gokhale) approaches Demetrius and Tyrone, who are contracted to clean carpets at his motel, about Meena’s accident.
Pontiac: I want you to try something special. [Carrying two glasses of Indian tea.] Relax. Sit down. Your people are very good at sports. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Freddy Brown from Downtown. Hector “Macho Man” Camacho… (Nair’s Mississippi Masalai)
While Pontiac is performing his spiel enthusiastically, Demetrius and Tyrone laugh politely. He is trying to “make friends,” and he apparently has no idea that many African Americans might find this approach flat-footed at best, and patronizing at worst. Rather than object to Pontiac’s stereotyping, however, Demetrius objects to the inclusion of Hector Camacho in the list:
Demetrius: Macho aint black though, he’s what, Mexican?
Tyrone: Puerto Rican
Demetrius: Puerto Rican.
Pontiac: Black, brown, yellow, Mexican, Puerto Rican, all the same. As long as you are not white, it means you are colored. Isn’t that so?
Demetrius: Yeah, I guess.
Pontiac: A girl had an accident with your van. But no damage was one to your person or your van?
Demetrius: That’s right.
Pontiac: Thank God. You know the person whose van was driving was my very good friend. Also Indian. You get me?
Demetrius: No.
Pontiac: He’s also worried, because in this country, people are suing all the time.
Demetrius: Oh – I got you know. Yeah, this is good tea. [Laughing] Oh, I didn’t mean to laugh. You can tell your friend he aint got nothing to worry about.
Pontiac: [Exhales] I told him he didn’t have to worry. You are a good man. All of us people of color must stick together. [Stands up.] United we stand, divided we fall!
Tyrone: That’s right brother. Power to the people! (Nair’s Mississippi Masala)
Pontiac’s approach to Demetrius and Tyrone here is awkward on multiple levels. He tries to gloss over his ignorance of the ethnic background of American athletes by lumping all of the racial groups he can think of in one, rather odd list (“Black, brown, yellow, Mexican, Puerto Rican, all the same”). After Pontiac brings up the matter of the accident, Demetrius realizes what the conversation is really about, but again demurs from taking offense, and amicably (but ironically) says, “Yeah, this is good tea” [FIGURE 39].
Pontiac’s final plea for solidarity amongst “people of color,” despite its pseudo-civil rights era grandiloquence, does not ring true. The challenges Meena and Demetrius will face as they struggle to find acceptance for their budding romance in the remainder of the film clearly demonstrate just how false that slogan of solidarity really is.
In the end, Meena and Demetrius find they need to leave Greenwood to develop their relationship, and perhaps brighter career horizons. As Kinnu says to Jay, explaining her choice to run away with Demetrius, “She’s just like you.” If the first generation of migrants put the family in motion, quite often their children find themselves leaving the place where their parents have settled, continuing the pattern of emigration, in a kind of centripetal pattern of continuing dispersion (we also see this pattern depicted in Nair’s The Namesake). As importantly, Jay returns to Uganda, to see his former house, and to try and track down Okelo at the school where the latter used to teach. Jay feels welcome in the new, post-Idi Amin Uganda; a driver greets him warmly: “Welcome back, bwana.” But Okelo was killed by Idi Amin in 1972, and the house where he formerly lived is now derelict. All the same, the burden that has been on his shoulders since the expulsion has lifted, and he no longer feels haunted by the loss of home. Nair ends the film with Jay in a market square in urban Kampala, as an African woman dances in a crowd. As Jay is watching, a small African boy touches his cheek, suggesting the healing of some old wounds.
In the end, Meena and Demetrius find they need to leave Greenwood to develop their relationship, and perhaps brighter career horizons. As Kinnu says to Jay, explaining her choice to run away with Demetrius, “She’s just like you.” If the first generation of migrants put the family in motion, quite often their children find themselves leaving the place where their parents have settled, continuing the pattern of emigration, in a kind of centripetal pattern of continuing dispersion (we also see this pattern depicted in Nair’s The Namesake). As importantly, Jay returns to Uganda, to see his former house, and to try and track down Okelo at the school where the latter used to teach. Jay feels welcome in the new, post-Idi Amin Uganda; a driver greets him warmly: “Welcome back, bwana.” But Okelo was killed by Idi Amin in 1972, and the house where he formerly lived is now derelict. All the same, the burden that has been on his shoulders since the expulsion has lifted, and he no longer feels haunted by the loss of home. Nair ends the film with Jay in a market square in urban Kampala, as an African woman dances in a crowd. As Jay is watching, a small African boy touches his cheek, suggesting the healing of some old wounds.
