Lesbian Desire in Picture Claire

Abjecting the Anglo-Indian Identity in Cotton Mary

The Heritage Film as Abject Text

I want to argue that the heritage text is an abject one, whose ideology masquerades under the guise of the aesthetic performance of the costume drama. Mike Budd has said that "classical narrative is not a neutral means or instrument of communication but a material, ideological activity designed to hide the work and technique that produces its pleasurable effects of omniscience and realism. Similarly, I believe, the heritage text can be understood as a containment text for colonial rhetoric. I want to focus my attention on a lesser known heritage film by the production team of Merchant Ivory Productions, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, because of its intentional foregrounding of an anticolonial discourse. Cotton Mary (1999), however problematic in its representation of the Anglo-Indian identity, nonetheless disrupts the successful ‘lineage’ of the heritage film by highlighting the problem of the contemporary Anglo-Indian identity. Its entry into the world of the heritage film came at a time when the popularity of heritage films was in decline in the late 1990’s. Of the more well-known films by Merchant Ivory Productions, Howard’s End and Remains of the Day, Cotton Mary’s reception was fraught with controversy and poor box office receipts. I would also like to discuss the ways in which Cotton Mary as a cinematic text literalizes the following statement by Homi Bhabha:

The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural politics of difference become the closed circle of interpretation. The Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse.

As the figure of the Other, and as both a cultural and biological hybrid, the character of Cotton Mary in the film is meant to symbolize the critical after effects of the British postcolonial reign, and India’s struggle for economic independence. I would suggest that Cotton Mary’s downfall instead reflects a recognition of the Anglo-Identity as abject, and that her fate (her plight and ensuing madness) is both a recognition and form of resistance of that state. In other words the character Cotton Mary is emblematic of the struggle of the decolonized Anglo-Indian state, and a recognition of the contemporary Anglo-Indian identity as abject. I do not suggest that this view is an intentional one by the filmmakers; on the contrary, part of my argument is invested in the knowledge of the film’s director as a native of Bombay, as one who contributes to this state of abjection, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Set in 1957, seven years after Indian’s independence from England, the film clearly intends her character to be an allegory of the postcolonial state of India. I would like to suggest, however, using Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, that this endeavor is not wholly effective, and moreover, raises other concerns for the film. Though Mary’s character embodies the struggle for identity discussed by Frantz Fanon, ultimately this is overshadowed by the problematics of the film, which I would like to suggest, is brought upon by the film’s refusal to portray its characters, Anglo-Indian, and British alike, in anything less than stereotypical terms. Comparing Mary’s post-colonial struggle with two other famous instances, the literary figure of Caliban, and the character of El Hadji in Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, I hope to highlight some of the film’s problematics in its representation of the Anglo-Indian identity.

Frederic Jameson has said that "all third world texts are necessarily… ‘allegorical’. Their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel." What about first world films produced by third world directors? Is there enough textual and rhetorical evidence by both the film and the filmmaker that in fact that was the intention-then the question of how well the film succeeds as allegory must also be addressed. For example, in order for a film to function as allegory, it must incorporate several properties, or characteristics. One of which-viewer identification-is key. This point is perhaps most important when considering the degree of viewer empathy for the title character. Unlike El Hadij in Xala., however, the film unsympathetically portrays Cotton Mary as one whose central identity operates from the standard of her British biological and colonial heritage. Of course it may not be quite the same thing to compare the views of a British film with an anti-imperialist third world view. But this difference in itself is significant. The problem arises when it ignores four hundred years of Anglo-Indian history and intact community. This may be the root cause behind the protests by both Indian and Anglo-Indians in parts of India that successfully lobbied for and eventually succeeded in having the film banned. Jameson also says that third world cinema necessarily projects a political dimension in the form of national allegory: "the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society". It is in these words that seem to hold the key for me as I struggle to understand my fascination with this hybrid heritage film and the relevance of the social plight of the contemporary Anglo-Indian. The other issue I will discuss is the relevance of the history,period, or heritage film on present day current social events. These two, hybridity and viewer reaction are obviously linked.

Andrew Higson suggests that its ambivalent reception is one of the key characteristics of the heritage film, and one could certainly ask: Is Cotton Mary a critique or denouncement of postcolonialism? Even as the viewer is besotted by the spectacle of Mary’s continual attempts to "become" just like her English boss, Lily-she has to remind herself that the spectacle of Mary’s downfall is solely to highlight the difficulty of the postcolonial identity. But this realization by the viewer (and this critic) naturally brings questions of how these films understand, portray, and depict issues of nationalism and cultural identity? Cotton Mary is unusual in that it marks a departure from the usual Merchant/Ivory production because it obviously spends less time aestheticizing its own ideology. As Andrew Higson has discussed, heritage films are ambivalent and thus can be read in many ways. They are at the same time nationalist texts, and critiques of imperialism. It is in this ambivalence that Cotton Mary offers an interesting look at Marcia Landy’s earlier "disjunction" between the expectations of the text and the commonsensical knowledge of the audience. Later, I want to explore this concept by incorporating factual history of the Anglo-Indian with the commonsensical knowledge upon which I believe the film depends.

The cast is comprised of well-known actors-Madhur Jaffrey (as Cotton Mary) has been starring in Merchant Ivory productions for thirty years and is one of India’s most respected actresses. The production crew is multicultural, as are the producing team of Ismail Merchant, born in Bombay, and James Ivory, born in California. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a respected writer and author, writes most of the screenplays. The film Cotton Mary unlike Howard’s End (1992), and Remains of the day (1991), was not based on literary works, but was adapted from a screenplay by a fledgling writer friend of Madhur Jaffrey’s daughter, Alexandra Viets. Viets, whose father was a diplomat, lived in India for seven years. In an interview she mentions how she was always appalled by the treatment of the Anglo-Indians. As the daughter of an American diplomat living in a foreign country in a relatively privileged environment, her perspective of the Anglo-Indian state is from the back-seat. Edward Said nonetheless reminds us how difficult it is even for professional scholars-those who supposedly "know" better-to refrain from orientalizing representations of the east.

The Heritage Film and the Use of History

Marcia Landy argues for the reevaluation of the popular text, or at least the definition of the term itself. She asks: "If what we mean by popular is the text’s ability to muster commonsensical knowledge even while it is critical of that knowledge, to involve the spectators in an affective response even while the film is critical of that affect, then the film is not popular, though it does not follow that t is avant-garde." I include Landy’s comment because I want to highlight the use of the term "commonsensical" as it relates to a discussion of the use of history in Cotton Mary, more specifically, how "popular history, as opposed to ‘official’ history, unwittingly exposes an inevitable disjunction, between on the one hand, the expectation that the text arouses, and, on the other, the contingent nature of audience expectation and knowledge". Landry suggests that Schindler’s List’s "relies on common sense to dramatise its relation to history of the Holocaust", for example. Reliance on common sense deprivileges uses of knowledge, however, according to Landry. This might be similar to the strategy that Cotton Mary invites: by announcing its intention as a critique of colonialism, it becomes capable of thus imposing stereotypes of identity.

This might have worked had it not been for the controversy the film created upon its release as Mark Faassen recounts:

In March 2000 a film premiere in Delhi drew a startling amount of collective backlash and indignation from one of India’s tiniest and often unseen minority communities. Within a week of its opening, Anglo-Indians across the country organized a string of protests, calling for the film to be banned or censored because of its cliché d images of the community: aspiring to be white, lacking dignity and self-respect and attempting to ingratiate with Europeans.^[4] Beatrix D’Souza, an Anglo-Indian MP from the state of Tamil Nadu, vowed to raise the controversy in Parliament and insisted that, "We are a 500-year-old community which is dynamic and evolving and growing. They should realise we would not have lasted this long time, with a separate identity, if we did not possess certain basic values, such as having a strong family structure."^[5] Similarly, D.K. Francis, the president of the Anglo-Indian Association of South India affirmed that, Cotton Mary is terrible in denigrating our entire Anglo-Indian community. Every one of us is furious.^6] The film was later withdrawn from theatres in the states of Kerala and West Bengal due to local Anglo-Indian pressure.

　

Most of the controversy centers around the film’s title character, Cotton Mary, so named apparently for her unabashed proclivity for English-only cotton fabric. Addressing the controversy in an interview, Ismail Merchant responds:

The film rather a paradigm of the effects and after effects of colonialism -- both on the colonized and on the is by no means meant to be a naturalistic picture of India or of Anglo-India but colonizer. It tries to give an impression of what happens when one civilization attempts to impose itself on another. I might point out that the British characters in the film also suffer a distortion of their characters and their values as a result of being in a country where they do not belong. I regard my film as a protest against any kind of colonialism or imperialism anywhere in the world.

Like Ousmane Sembene’s film Xala (1974), Cotton Mary interrogates the decolonized identity. Both characters (El Hadji and Mary) come to a realization of their uncertain place in the culture. The crucial difference, however, is the problematic characterization within the film. Where El Hadji’s fate is looked at with sympathy (the viewer can scarcely stand to witness the onscreen spitting ritual), Mary’s descent into madness seems to happen none too soon for the viewer, or for her fellow characters:Lily, who has recently fired her from her job as nanny nurse, and to Mary’s own family, including her sister Blossom, whom she has effectively ostracized during the course of the narrative. As Hadji’s family bears witness to his humiliation, nonetheless, the unity of their communal identity-whatever remains of it- is affirmed. Cotton Mary, in contrast, self-ostracized, remains on the margin of both communities, British and Indian.

Films such as A Passage to India (1984), Gandhi (1983) are non-critical colonial nostalgia films, different from Claire Denis’ Chocolat (1990), for example, Cotton Mary forces a much more ambivalent tone. Andrew Higson suggests that while heritage films encourage reductive readings (it is easy to pick and choose the colonial vs. the anti-colonial sentiment), they can nonetheless become sites of resistance against the too reductive or too critical readings. This might partially explain why Ismail Merchant seemed so surprised at the extreme reaction of the film’s reception with Anglo-Indian audiences.

Cotton Mary, even as a film, ‘filmed in present about events in the past’, is an example of Homi Bhabha’s ‘margin of culture’, and is organized along the same binaries (British/India; Pure Bred/Half-Bred) that refuse the potentiality of "cross-cultural identity". Mary has a choice between two worlds: British and Indian. In this way, any real Anglo-Indian identity or agency becomes subverted, which again may explain some of the reaction to the film.

Cotton Mary is set in the South Indian province of Kerala, in 1957, several years after India’s independence from Britain. The film’s opening sequence features the figures of two women, wearing the pale grey nurse’s unform. One is Mary (Madhur Jaffrey) and the other, her niece, Rose (Jaffrey’s real-life daughter). At the hospital they meet Lily MacIntosh (Greta Sachi), who has just given premature birth. Mary attaches herself to Lily, vowing to help her feed the baby, since Lily’s milk has not come in. Unbeknownst to Lily, Mary secretly takes the baby to be fed by her sister, Blossom, who lives in an alms house for the poor. Later, when Lily is released from the hospital, she asks Mary to help her look after the baby. Once there, Mary begins to ingratiate herself into the English family, never failing to remind them, that as a daughter of a British officer, she, too, "is like them." The melodrama of the film escalates with Mary’s subplot to oust the longstanding Anglo-Indian butler, Abraham, from his position. Eventually, Mary gets a job for her niece, Rosie, who has an affair with John, Lily’s husband. From thereon, the plot revolves around Lily’s depression at not being able to nurse her baby, and Mary’s escalating obsession to mimic Lily in all respects. When she is ‘found out’ in the end, for having stolen from Lily and lied about Abraham, she is fired from the household. Her desent into madness escalates, until at last, she is led away from her former life by the hands of a small Anglo-Indian child, to live presumably with Blossom and the rest of the Anglo-Indian community.

The film visually depicts this wavering from full blown colonial mimicry to rejection of all things colonial. One of the subplots involves Mary’s desire to become just like Lily. In one of the first scenes of the film, she tries on Lily’s shoes, exclaiming that "they are just my size". Throughout the film, she continues to dress and act like Lily. This desire to fully become her British half is exposed of course in the film’s diegesis, in the way in which in each of these attempts and gestures, Mary is thwarted. For example, in one scene, after she has gone to the Indian market to purchase a beef tongue for the master-"who loves tongue and curry"-she enters the beauty parlor all the British ladies frequent. As she stands in the entrance, the Indian receptionist, is visibly surprised at Mary’s request to have her hair done. The other British ladies whisper as she walks past them to take her seat in the parlor. After awhile, they begin to ask "what’s that smell?", referring to the tongue that Mary has left wrapped in the baby pram. Mary angrily responds by fetching the wrapped tongue, unwrapping it and swinging it under the noses of the British women, who become completely disgusted. This act, or gesture by Mary, however, fails to achieve its intened effect-which is to highlight the hyprocrisy of the British tastes. Yes, while the Bristish master loves his "tongue and curry", the British women pretend as though they haven’t come across the item before. The cinematic gesture succeeds in furthering her status as other, but fails in achieving any viewer sympathy for Mary because of the extremeness in her reaction.

Seeing the Film through the Lens of the Contemporary Anglo-Indian

One of the concerns of the film is that it completely ignores the agency of the Anglo-Indian community. This representation doesn’t allow for the agency of real-life Anglo-Indians, who having lived in the margins outside of two societies, British and Indian, have established their own sense of community:

…the Anglo-Indian culture emerged solidified over a period of several centuries. Naturally in the formation of their community patterns, some outside model or reference was necessary, and this became the British rather than the Indian. Because of their political, economic and social dominance, the British provided perhaps a more tempting model. …It should also be noted that early Anglo-Indians were ostracized from many interactions with their indigenous heritage because of the rigid caste and community mores. Thus Anglo-Indians had no choice but to build their separated communities and at the same time turn to their British fathers for cultural traits.

Even the transferred culture of England into India developed into its own hybrid culture as the displaced English could not fully reproduce all the Englishness of their home country. Inevitably Indian cultural remnants from the use of Indian curry to Indian cloth begin to weave their way into the everyday cultural experienced by the British.

Contemporary Anglo-Indians experience their Anglo side through a complex and mediated way, largely through "referenced imagery": press, satellite television, and cinema. This mediated link to England reinforces these ties, and also the sense of marginality contemporary Anglo-Indians experience. Films which feature Anglo-Indian characters such as Cotton Mary in such an undignified, deglorified, reduced and marginal state contribute to the sense marginality. Shohat and Stam remind us of the power in representations: "Poststructuralist theory reminds us that we live and dwell within language and representation, and have no direct access to the "real". But the constructed, coded nature of artistic discourse hardly precludes all reference to a common social life. Films which represent marginalized cultures in a realistic mode, even when they do not claim to represent specific historical incidents, still implicitly make factual claims" (Shohat and Stam, 178).

Shohat and Stam elaborate further:

"It is not enough to say that art is constructed. We have to ask: constructed for whom? And in conjunction with which ideologies and discourses? In this sense, art is a representation not so much in a mimetic as a political sense, as a delegation of voice." (180).

Mary’s narrative parallels the plight of Caliban in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Both have been conditionally admitted into the colonial world only to be eventually cast from it. For Caliban, entry into the world of his master is gained upon learning the language of the master, Prospero. As Fanon and others have suggested, the tyranny of colonialization is generative: the thing which oppresses them can then be used to overcome their oppressors. It never quite works out this neatly, however, as can be evidenced throughout in representations of literary figures, such as Caliban, and filmic representations, such as El Hadji and Mary. But where Caliban, who has internalized his identification as a colonial subject, would place himself in the throes of his master, Mary rejects her British subjectivity altogether. Rejection of her British side comes at a cost, and here the film is ambivalent in its intention. Even after watching the film several times, I am perplexed by the film’s unsympathetic and cruel depiction of Mary to such a degree that there is no room for the viewer to sympathize with her plight. Even as we understand how she struggles against her marginality, her actions in stealing from Lily, and lying about Abraham, is hardly justified.

The film manipulates the commonsensical knowledge the ordinary viewer has of both the British and Indian relations, and especially the condition of the Anglo-Indian in post-colonial India. In retelling the relations in ths way, the film participates in its own orientalism-Mary is outcasted and ostracized by the film itself. Her voice never lowers to anything less than a shrill. There is no kindness done to her by the camera’s gaze which follows her every odd gesture and caricatured mimicking of Lily. It implicates her as the dangerous other, the slave gone mad. It is at this point in the film when Mary confronts Lily. This would have been the moment for her to reclaim her dignity, but the film doesn’t allow it. Instead, in another exaggerated and inappropriate gesture, and in an attempt for the film to further mock the hypocrisy of the British, Mary wraps her head with her scarf. The viewer understands just how Catholic Mary is, so the gesture becomes a confusing and meaningless one for the film.

 

One of the questions for the film is to what degree does the film rely on viewer’s knowledge of the Anglo-Indian history? If one of the motivating forces of the film was to critique the Anglo-Indian plight in India-why not choose a contemporary setting and time? One of the obvious reasons for this is that the aspiring scriptwriter was attending a workshop sponsored by Merchant Ivory Productions and no doubt was encouraged toward writing period scripts. I would suggest, however, that a better explanation can be found by considering potentiality of history to films altogether. In his analysis of Lord Jim, Frederick Jameson talks about the melodrama as a ‘containment strategy’ that "recontains the content of the events of Jim’s narrative by locating ‘responsible parties’ and assigning guilt: "We must turn to the mechanisms that ensure a structural displacement of such content, and that provides for a built-in substitute interpretative system whereby readers may, if they so desire-and we all so desire, to avoid knowing about history!-rewrite the text in more inoffensive ways."

Invisibility 1954, Kerala, Malabar Coast, India

-I had this kind of dream child.

-A baby child.

-It was small

-What color was it?

-It was white.

-Come on. It was only a dream.

The opening dialogue between Mary (Madhur Jaffrey) and her niece (Jaffrey) of Cotton Mary (Ismail Merchant and Madhur Jaffrey, 1999) between Cotton Mary and her niece, foreshadows the demise of the main character and also implicates the film’s intention as an allegory of the postcolonial relation between England and India in 1954, seven years after the British have left India. But as the film (and its marketing blurb: "haunted by the specter of colonialism") makes evident , the British influence continues to wreak havoc with the postcolonial Indian identity. Ismail Merchant confirms his intention: "When I was young, a lad in school -- in college in 1954, 1955 -- I had come to know a number of Anglo-Indians, including one who was my teacher in ballroom dancing. I became fascinated by their approach to things. They were all the time hoping to go to England, as opposed to staying in India, because it was the country they identified most with. I felt sad because you want to keep your friends. But they left. I was 17 or 18. Those impressions, which are made in those days, are the ones that last your lifetime. So I was very pleased that I had the opportunity to do this."

The Ambivalent Representation of Mary

Is the film a colonial tale, or an anti-colonial tale? Mary is the Caliban figure visually displayed, the infertile Ruth. Like Caliban, Mary is depicted as the long-suffering symbol of colonial entrapment, the embodiment of the repressed native gone insane. Initially, she mimics the British-she is, after all half-British, "I am just like you", she tells the British wives. She mimics the colonials, assuming their identity at the expense of her own Indian heritage. Yet the British model to which she aspires is made in the film is monolithic. When Cotton Mary finally realizes the inadequacy of her model, she begins to shed the assumed pastiche of British manner. But rather than becoming a source of strength (this recognition of the flawed Brit) instead it begins the slow destruction of her other self-the Indian half. This is most exemplified (and most viscerally experienced by her character) in the scenes in which her Indian friends and family begin to reject her. Yet, she first rejects herself. The message of the film is made excruciatingly clear by her descent into insanity-if she cannot have her British half she cannot have anything at all. She cannot rely on her Indian heritage. It, along with the British half, fails her.

It is the recognition of her status as the other, and as abject that drives Mary mad, as expressed by Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject: "I am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death." In this way, however, the ending of the film can be seen as a triumph for her Anglo-Indian identity if a failure for her own psyche. Mary, as allegory of the hybrid de-colonized Indian psyche epitomizes Kristeva following point:

If it is true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that is none other than the abject. The abjection of the self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundation of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded.

The state of abjection, like the state of hybridity is an ambivalent one, non-static and fluid. Its boundaries are porous and permissive, open to external influences, dependent even, upon those same influences. Early in the film, Mary openly transgresses the boundaries of social protocol, insisting to a table full of English mensahibs that she, too, is one of them: "My father was a British officer." They don’t believe her, of course, and neither does the viewer. We are not surprised when it is revealed by Blossom that her father, was in fact, the British shoe polisher for the British officers. Later, transgressing into the public sphere, she enters the beauty salon used solely by the same group of English ladies. Mary is not unaware of the spectacle she causes. She cannot ignore the chorus the other Indian girls chant when she walks by them. She glorifies in her differences. What significance, if any, lies in the fact that the film is directed by the Indian half of the Merchant/Ivory production team? After, all the film makes an attempt to disclose the tensions arising from the decolonizing state after the British have left Indian. For example, the subplot involving Lily’s journalist husband revolves around not simply his affair with Mary’s niece, but also his investigation of the recent murder of an English man by an Anglo-Indian. This is not central to the plot, or narrative, however, and is mostly forgotten by the viewer as the film focuses on the melodrama of Mary’s ‘mad descent’. Does Mary’s descent disrupt the colonial discourse of the film, or affirm it? Homi Bhabha discusses the "problematic of seeing/being seen" in colonial discourse whereby "the subject finds or recognizes itself through an image which is simultaneously alienating and hence potentially confrontational". Mary’s moment of recognition, and her literal confrontation with Lily represents this recognition of her identity. When she confronts Lily, she is brash and abrasive. There are no more pretensions that she might be "one of them". She understands that she can be neither part of them nor her Anglo-Indian friends and relatives. In this moment and scene she inhabits a liminal space of knowing: Kristeva’s space of the "deject":

The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing…Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaeann, he divides, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separation.

This, however, is not wholly negative as it marks a moment of truth for her. But I would also argue that this moment is not inconsequential as it also highlights the other main problem with the depiction of the Anglo-Indian identity as one that has been mainly formed by the filmmakers based on commonsensical knowledge of the history of the Anglo-Indian. By placing Mary outside the attainment of either of the two identities-British or Indian- the agency formed by the real-life Anglo-Indian community that has been in existence in India for over four hundred years becomes completely discounted.

Mary’s transformation reveals the uncertainty, rather than the reliability of her Anglo-Indian identity. On the one hand, it was an interesting if short-sighted gesture by the filmmakers to cast Mary in so unfavorable a light. She is not a sympathetic character, intentionally or not. They have not followed traditional Hollywood narrative in providing such an uncomfortable unhappy ending for her character. What do we make of Lily’s reverse turn of fate? The film tracks the parallel paths of the two women-as Mary falls, Lily ascends. England leaves, India falters.

　

The Film’s View of the Feminine, and other Gender Issues

Cinematic and real-life constructions of women have centered around the male version of women. Lionel Caplan, in his excellent examination of the changes in representations explores the stereotype of the Anglo-Indian woman as one who is oppressed, passive, and wanton. The Europeans viewed them as "unfree and oppressed", while the Indian nationalists, in defense of their nation against the British, "assigned to women the all-important protection and nurturance of the nation’s spiritual identity and culture". Caught between two competing discourses, the Anglo-Indian woman became intertwined in a "sacrificial complex" that included a recognition of their "humility, passivity, suffering." Thus, the two spheres, economic, controlled by the British; and domestic, controlled by the Indian (male) remained divided because of the political need by the Indian nationalists to retain autonomy from the British rule. In this way the image of the long-suffering Indian woman became a much used trope in colonial and Indian Nationalist discourse. It is not difficult to see this carrying over to cinematic representations. Purnima Mankekar talks about how this led to competing discourses arising from women-oriented narratives that struggled against the postcolonial state’s "attempts to reshape gender politics within the Indian family".

Mother India (Bharat bhi mother ke barabar hair (India too is like a mother).

The presumed sterility of Cotton Mary is significant when considering how deeply ideals of motherhood are inextricably linked to issues of nationalist ideologies for Indian films and television. The myth of Bharat Mata (Mother India) was and is a critical component in anticolonial discourses: "During colonial rule, nationalists spoke of how the mother(land) had been ravished by the British, and the sexual imagery implicit in this trope was central to the way in which ‘emasculated’ Indian men were inspired to militant nationalism" In order for the trope of motherhood to work, however, she must be shown as asexual. This claim, however, doesn’t equate to a notion of powerlessness, or non-agency. The opposite is true, in fact. It is the fact of the asexuality that becomes the source of the agency in portrayals of motherhood. What is the source of agency for the character Cotton Mary (Madhur Jaffrey) in the film? How is the maternal metaphor used in the heritage and history film? What is its role in an allegorical reading? The link between motherhood and India as a nation is an often used trope in films and literature. The title of the film Mother India (1952) allegorizes itself, for example. This is often used in both films and television, according to Purnima Mankekar. In the same interview mentioned earlier, Ismail Merchant defends the film by highlighting what else it offers-a close look at mothering:

(Merchant said that no other film in recent times had dealt with the women's issues, including breast-feeding and the depression that follows pregnancy).

"The child in film (Scacchi's baby) is saved by an Anglo-Indian (played by Neena Gupta) who breastfeeds him," he said. "In India a mother or ma is a sacred symbol. And ma gives life to a baby and a human being -- and milk which right from beginning gives sustenance and gives life to a child."

Blossom, as bearer of life sustaining milk for the baby, Baba, no doubt has been accorded privilege of ma. But how privileged a state is it to be wheelchair bound living in an alms house? What about Cotton Mary? She is unmarried, and presumably sterile.

Jesus. Please help me.

-I have her, madam. I will look after her. I’ll feed her.

The mother tries to feed the crying and hungry baby. The indadequacy of the white mother is revealed; she must be helped in nourishing the baby.

Lily’s inability to lactate her premature baby is significant in consideration of the Cotton Mary’s presumptive pathos. There is a parallel plot ongoing: Mary’s descent into madness (or, the discovery of the truth about herself, however one views the confrontation with one’s identity) coincides with Lily’s awakening of her own identity. The coming of her milk is used as a metaphor for the awakening of her sense of self. No longer will Lily ignore her husband, John’s, infidelities. By the end of the film, Lily sheds the complicity and passivity, and pretension. The ambivalent view of the colonial, its complicity and racism, is visually perceived through Lily. She holds the colonial gaze, rather than her husband, John. In their chapter "Tropes Of Empire" Ella Shohat and Robert Stam talk about the "ambiguous role of European female characters":

…In the imperial narratives, furthermore, a Western woman can be subordinated to Western man and yet exercise dominations over non-Western men and women…In many films, colonial women become the instrument of the white male vision, and are granted a gaze more powerful than that of non-Western women and men…(she) is endowed with an active (colonial gaze).

Lily’s character is resplendent with all the familiar tropes of the typical English wife: she is ignored, underappreciated, passive, married to the boorish English husband. Yet she is clearly in charge of her household. At one point in the film, she fires her long-term loyal butler, Abraham, after Mary has helped him. When Mary brings her niece Rosie to interview for a job, Lily callously tells her to go, to leave her alone. Later, when Lily finds Mary distraught and upset, she seems "puzzled". The film would like us to see Mary’s revenge, however, in the scene in which she mocks Lily and finally disclaims her ties to both the English household and its nation.

Cotton Mary is established as liar and thief from the outset. She is made to appear greedy, and worse, an Indian post-colonial turncoat; a British wannabe.

Rather than "mocking" the British power", however, the films’ depictions of the two women reinstate it. By the film’s end, Lily’s milk has come in. She leaves her husband. For Mary, it is not only her British half which she rejects, but her Indian self as well. She is, after all, still Anglo-Indian, marginalized and relegated ideologically and diegetically to the alms house. The ‘ambivalance’ Higson talks about begins to lesson for the viewer at this point. Even when interepreted as no doubt the allegory for which it is intended, the film strikes an uneven and reductive chord about postcoloniality. The British leave; the Indians (Anglo-Indians), naturally, fall apart.

The film Cotton Mary raises questions about the condition of post-colonial hybridity, especially if it is the title character, herself, who is meant to allegorize the political and social climate of 1954 decolonized India. How can issues of nationalism and hybridity become linked, and/or reconciled? The state of hybridity should be looked at as a process, no doubt arising from the interaction of the colonizer and the colonized. So, even if the beginnings of this state of hybridity (in this case cultural hybridity) began in this way, its state, as always non-static and changing, absorbed other influences which also contributed to this "state". The discourse of hybridity the film projects seems to presume a fixed definition of hybridity, without consisdering or accounting for the shifting subject positioning that inevitably must be created (in order to have survived four hundred years of colonization, for example). In other words, it would be technically impossible to try to pinpoint the ontological beginnings of the cultural, and perhaps even biological, hybrid. The filmmakers, of course, are operating within the assumption that the above feat doesn’t matter. They are counting on the hybrid narrative as part national narrative that is already intact. Ousmane Sembene’s Xala, like Cotton Mary, is a film which examines the after-effects of colonialism, yet Sembene reaches beyond the "binary structures of melodrama" in suggesting that the "real problems of the (Landy 33).

Fanon has said that the artist, who "has decided to illustrate the truth of the nation" "ultimately intends to embrace are in fact the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all.   Perhaps Merchant’s desire was to liberate the hybrid from the eyes of the western tendency for pathologizing the hybrid. His placing of a hybrid was intentional to draw attention to what he sees as a failure of his country to address the plight of the hybrid. It is not dissimilar to how Marcia Landy appreciates Ousmane Sembene’s treatment of memory in Xala: "The recognition of failure is a precondition for learning from the past, and Sembene explores the ways that short-term failure may in the long run be productive. Speaking to the question of failure in relation to the historiography of colonial India, Ranajit Guha writes ‘it is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come into its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as the working class…which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of India’. Heritage and melodrama films might be an overlooked realm for critical study. But if this is only barely discernible by even the most astute lookout, what good does it do? The depiction of Cotton Mary is an overwrought, dramatized, pathologised and obvious symbol of postcolonial pathos: but should any of this matter? That the film was banned in many parts of southern India should, however.

As Shohat and Stam remind us, however, "celebrations of hybridity are themselves mixed. On one level, the celebration counters the colonialist fetishization of racial "purity"…The hostility to miscegenation was ensapsulated into perjorative terms such as "half-caste", "mongrelization", and "mulattos" (seen as necessarily infertile). All post colonial identities can be troubling, but the postcolonial hybrid identity is even more problematic, according to Shohat and Stam, because of the uncertain agency involved. The Anglo-Indian identity was especially troubling for the British because it "concretized the reality of the encounter between British and Indian".

The role of the maternal is critical in the film. A good mother can nurse her baby, a bad mother cannot. Mary is giving a maternal identity at the beginning of the film, only to have it taken from her by the end of the film. The linking of this fact-the descent into madness, and the giving up of the baby, is interesting when considering how important the maternal metaphor is to the national identity of India. To wit the following dialogue: 

-This is God’s child, madam. This is a child from God, Madam.

-What are you talking about?

-God sends this type of child to show you what is love, Madam.

-Don’t lose your courage, Madam. Don’t listen to anybody. These Indian nurses don’t know anything. I am half-British. My mother was from …I am more like my father. (She shows her pendant with pictures of her parents).

-She gives her some concoction.

-What’s your name?

-Mary, Madam, Cotton Mary.

What is so provocative in the characterization of Cotton Mary? Is it, as Ismail Merchant insists, a story about a critical moment in time for the Anglo-Indian identity? That this particular moment, of course, happens to include madness at its ultimate moment might be purely coincidental. Merchant suggests that madness can be found anywhere: "in Christian, Hindu and Muslim" experiences, for example. This ultimate moment of knowing-the discovery of what happens when one faces the ultimate test posted for oneself is similar to the moment of colonial confrontation Jamaica Kincaid describes in her essay "On Seeing England For the First Time":

The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart-the idea of thing, reality of thing-the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness. This space starts out empty, there is nothing in it, but it rapidly becomes filled up with obsession or desire or hatred or love-…(Kincaid 367).

For Cotton Mary, the desire to embrace her British lineage at the expense of her Indian self created in her all these things-obsession, hatred-and love for the infant child she saved.

The State (of Mind) of Post-Colonial India: The Ontology of the Hybrid as an Impossible Condition

Homi Bhabha has said of the performance of the colonial text:

The Colonial signifier-neither one nor other-is however, an act of ambivalent signification, literally splitting the difference between the binary oppositions or polarities through which we think cultural difference. It is in the enunciatory act of splitting that the colonial signifier creates its strategies of differentiation that produce an undecidability between contraries or oppositions (Bhabha 182-183).

If the film is intended as allegory of the Anglo-Indian experience, its first misstep is the decision by the filmmakers to use an Anglo-Identity to symbolize the uncertainty of the decolonized identity as its token emblem of decolonization rather than the pure bred Indian. Its more critical error, however might be that it depicts a stereotypical and ahistorical account of the Anglo-Indian identity, one that is too dependent upon its colonial heritage as the centrally controlling mechanism through which its members operate and actuate their own culture and community. Frederick Cooper in "The Study of History" suggests that post-colonial studies have become increasingly fixated on the notion of the colonial power as all too consuming and influencing. The concern with this decontextualizing realm of study is that it subsumes all colonial legacies into one great colonial legacy versus one marginalized community experience. So even though Homi Bhabha has contributed such useful concepts such as hybridity (his version of it, at least), for example, these discourses ‘may say too little (about the different forms in which hybridity appears) or not enough (about the specific conjunctures in which hybridity or dualism gain ascendancy):

Enlarging the field should not dilute the importance of European colonization in its earliest or most recent manifestations, but rather produce a more compelling account of its mechanisms and its limits, including the mechanisms and limits of modes of representations. One can recognize that all colonizing systems created a tension between the incorporation of a conquered peoples into a singular imperial system…Such a tension, and the conflicts it provoked, was built into the institutions of empires, given their geographic dispersion, extended chains of command, incorporation of regional economic circuits, local systems of authority and patronage, and often the presence of religious or ideological affinities embodied in the values not just of a subjugated community but of an alternative version of universality.

　

To bring the discussion back to the film example at hand, the following review can be said to be an example

Of the very thing which he cautions against:

This riveting drama of a half-mad Anglo-Indian woman and the shattered Memsahib whose life she tries to take over is a triumph for director Ismail Merchant. Set in India after the Raj, it's both a psychological horror story and an unsparing portrait of the way colonialism corrupts everyone it touches, the ruler and the ruled.

As these examples suggest, the humanist, 'quality' tradition of film-making to which Cotton Mary belongs places limitations on its strategies for dealing with its subject. While its makers clearly understand that the problematic Anglo-Indian identity represented by Mary has historical causes, the film can only show effects; in place of a collective problem of cultural identity, it explores an individual character. This approach risks inviting a reactionary reading by audiences. There is little to prevent us from responding to Mary as mad or evil rather than understanding her malaise as the product of a larger social problem. Nor does the film - structurally, a cuckoo-in-the-nest or nanny-from-hell narrative - prevent a snobbish, or even racist, reading of her behaviour.

Adrian Carton argues that contemporary Anglo-Indian representations continue to perpetuate the myth of the Anglo-Indian identity as one centrally connected to its British half:

Although "Anglo-Indian" history may have come of age, it continues to be articulated in universalistic and almost nostalgic or sentimental tones as an offshoot of the British experience and the divergent and often conflicting vignettes of hybrid identities are subsumed under the banner of universalism and an eternal Anglo-Indian ethnicity which remains fundamentally rooted in the historical narratives of the raj.

These narratives, according to Carton "render the community as an anthropological anomaly, as a tragic and "culturally lost" ethnic phenomenon with a shared sense of marginality and pathos."

Caplan talks about the post-colonial depictions of Anglo-Indian women in contrast to the reality of the women’s lives. Many depictions "reproduce earlier British stereotypes of their sexual proclivities. Even Indian cinema itself reinforces these by always portraying the Anglo-Indian woman as loose, overly sexualized:"If they want to portray a prostitute in a Hindi or Tamil film, she is always Mary or Annie or something, and a pimp will always be Danny. So they push it on to Anglo-Indians. There is a kind of tarnished image.." Caplan talks about the perception of the Anglo-Indian woman in private and public contexts:

In contemporary urban contexts, the Anglo-Indian woman is seen to be not only the family’s provider but its ‘protector’ as well. Although the Anglo-Indian household is generally described by scholars as nucleated (e.g. Gupta 1968: 19; Bhattacharya 1968); individualistic and independent. There are strong familial relations in the family. The mother-daughter bond is seen as the strongest.

In the film, Mary’s niece, Rosie, has an affair with Lily’s husband, John. When Mary finds, out Rosie is bitter and defiant. The depiction of her in the film reinforces the image of the Anglo-Indian as wanton, and sexually permissive. She is cruel to Lily’s other child, Theresa, leaving her alone while she has sex with her Indian boyfriend. But she is the one to voice her visible mistrust, bitterness and dislike of the British. When asked to look after Theresa, she complains to Mary:

-So much fuss over these people.

-Child is special. Nothing is going to happen to this child. God will show me the way.

-I think he wants to sack me. Everyone’s always after me.

-Yes, everyone’s always after you.

-One lily white girl.

The dialogue reinforces the image of Rosie, who has placed an ad in the newspaper, "One lily white girl" seeking an Indian man, as shallow and promiscuous-"Everyone’s always after me".

In the film, Mary ‘s sister, Blossom, as well as the other Anglo-Indians, live in the alms’, or poor house. Here, they have established a type of woman’s community: they are always shown sitting, usually in a circle, talking, or listening to music (an odd assortment of American folk songs). One of the subplots of the film revolves around Blossom’s desire for the white mistress, Lily, to visit her, to publicly thank her for wet nursing the baby, Baba. In one outlandish scene, Mary tells them that Lily will visit next week. But it is Mary, poorly disguised as Lily, who visits them. It is clear by the way in which the camera captures the reactions of surprise and dismay on the faces of the others in the room, that we are meant to understand just how far gone Mary has become. They no longer bother to talk behind her back-they openly whisper in her face. Blossom and Mary have an explosive argument in which Mary tells her: (you are nothing but a half-, a cripple, etc). The words are unnecessarily cruel. Any remaining sympathy the viewer might have for Mary is effectively erased at this point, if it hasn’t been before. The question continues: why would the filmmakers purposely cast the character in such an unfavorable light? The intention of the scene was to highlight the self-hatred the Anglo-Indian feels,but it backfires yet again for the filmmaker.

Like Xala, language is used to signify power. "El Hadji …embodies the neocolonized attitudes of the African elite so vehemently denounced by Fanon." (UE 192). Mary speaks only English. Her sister and friends speak " ". In one scene, Mary denounces Indian food as not fit to eat. When she is alone, however, she eats in the traditional Indian manner, shoving food into her mouth with her hand. She is interrupted by Lily who catches her eating. The film portrays her like an animal, shoving food by the fistfuls into her mouth. Her humiliation is furthered onscreen when she is interrupted by Lily who walks into the kitchen, witnessing her repulsive display of eating. Not only is she "caught" by Lily, in doing something that is natural and traditional, she is also caught by the viewer whose perspective of the scene is one-sided, privileging Lily’s gaze.

The "ideological point of view" privileges Lily, not Mary. Mary is not shown in a sympathetic perspective, while Lily certainly is.

　

 

In the case of "Cotton Mary", the nostalgia longed for is a return to colonialism. This is made clear and evidenced by the transformation of Lily’s character near the end of the film-from that of stereotypically described neglectant inept (and non-lactating) mother to one who is composed, serene and nursing her baby at the end of the film. Cotton Mary is once again relegated to the margins of both societies, English and Indian, led by the child of India who speaks an Indian dialect. The colonial message is mixed here. As an allegory, Cotton Mary represents post-colonial India, while the child represents the burgeoning new India, similar to the one depicted in the film, Mother India.

These films operate for the audience within the expected modes offering traditional Hollywood narrative (the madwoman in the attic) intended for the ubiquitous postcolonial audience: "Here the nostalgic motive in fact encodes in symbolic forms the political unconscious of a white supremacist culture, the unspeakable desire to return to the Eisenhower era, a time prior to mass mobilization in the name of civil rights against racist and sexist power hierarchies." (44). Magro and Douglas suggest that Jameson’s model could be reversed: "Accordingly if films about the future can convey the past metonymically, then films set in the past can be decoded as metonymic representations of present cultural and political debates. In other words, the historical milieu of these productions provides an alibi for the industry that produces them them; a director can always argue that she is not providing a forum for regressive politics, rather ‘that’s just the way it was back then’. Such a move brings to the fore the issue of history and its relationship to contemporary culture. The question that is brought up is "how history functions as a sign in cinema and in popular memory" (44).

The Heritage Film as Postcolonial Nostalgia

"To be profitable in America, British filmmakers are expected to produce texts in which the representation of the national past conform, at least in part, to stereotypical ideas about a ‘heritage’ denied to American citizens by the youthfulness of their country. Pictorial treatments are often in a painterly style One concern in labeling films as "heritage" films is that designating them as "heritage" fails to take into account the possibilities the film text might present (118).

Maria F. Magro and Mark Douglass call this a "cinematic elision of history". In the way that the English Patient oversimplified complex political and social histories by being "displaced onto the upper class white male characters", Cotton Mary does a similar thing. It undermines the real, complex and tragic history of relations between the English and the Indians, and worse, fastens onto the most marginalized identity of the all-the hybrid Anglo-Indian woman. Here, though it is not the main focus of this paper, gender must be examined, especially in the binary and stereotyped female characters: there is the lily-white English wife (aptly named "Lily"); the half-mad (half-bred) maid, Cotton Mary (so named because of her apparent propensity for English Cotton over Indian wool); the oversexed " ""; the lactating nursemaid wheelchair bound; and a gaggle of upper class English mensahibs. Each, apparently, has her own place. A discussion of gender for this film would entail a necessary spilling over into the other Merchant/Ivory films. The conversation, however would be brief, and would go something like this: A spoiled English girl, unfulfilled; Her equally spoiled, but slightly less cynical distant relative; the randy English aristocrat, etc.

They call it an "ethical complacency" (46).

Huggan argues that this fashioning of India - "indo-chic" - is not a naive Western construction. It is a product of "the globalisation of Western-capitalist consumer culture, in which 'India' functions not just as a polyvalent cultural sign but as a highly mobile capital good" (Huggan, 2001:67). However, the underlying point in Huggan's argument about exoticism and the commodification of India is that it is a highly effective instrument of imperial power.

Claire Monk in her work on Heritage films and spectatorship admits her own curiousity and enjoyment:

My initial text-based work focused particularly on the 1980s Merchant Ivory Productions E. M. Forster adaptations, A Room With A View (1986) and Maurice 1987). Above all, it sought to analyse and critique the concept/construct of ‘heritage cinema’ and the discourses which had emerged around it (as much as around specific film texts) in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the media and (later) academic domains, and to locate the emergence of these discourses within the viciously combative Thatcherite political, ideological and cultural climate of the time.

For Bhabha, "colonial mimicry disrupts the colonizer’s narcissistic aspirations and subjects Englishness to a profound strain". The imitator subverts the authority of the original, and the "relation of power begins to vascillate". The ambivalence that undergirds this procedure destabilizes both English and Indian identity.

The film highlights the failure of India to come to terms with its own power in its decolonization. The problem of post-colonial Indian are expressed onto the shoulders of the Anglo-Indians, whose economic state have left to live in the alms house. Cotton Mary is Mother India, an infertile Ruth to the fertile White woman (England). Her England is flawed however, non-lactating, failing in her maternal responsibilities. What can be made of the film’s ending, in the white woman’s triumph over her hybrid maid? Is this a misread critique against England, or an astounding statement of denial by a filmmaker of his own country’s ability to recuperate its own fertility? Is Merchant a "westernized Indian filmmaker" complicit in the stereotypical representation of his own culture?

 

Is it (the ending of the film) a questioning of the colonial gaze, and the redirecting of the Indian gaze at its former master? How does the film contribute to the Indian national identity? What is the relevance of the period films to contemporary social identity concerns? Why the film’s harsh denouncement of her Indian heritage? Is the film an example of a post colonial mimicry as Bhabha talk about? Merchant tries to imitate the English model?

Caplan’s study remarks upon the contrast between colonialist depictions of Anglo-Indian women and contemporary depictions of the community itself:

The British, who were largely responsible not only for helping to bring this ‘immediate’ community into existence, but for creating the economic, social and political conditions which subsequently shaped its fortunes, fashioned a set of wholly negative images in the course of the nineteenth century. The women’s speech and dress, and most particularly, their "promiscuous’ behavior and sexual allure, which the colonizers saw as threatening the increasingly rigid social boundaries they were seeking to erect, were especially targeted in these stereotypes…

Wright says that "Anglo-Indians in India are more British than the British". The state of having lived in marginality (embracing a culture that considers her inferior, and rejecting one to which she feels is inferior to her) can lead to psychological consequences. These include "ambivalence, role strain, self-hatred, inferiority complex, egocentrism, aggressiveness, and withdrawal". Mary exhibits all these and one more: madness. Perhaps the rejection of the film by the Anglo-Indians in India and around the world can be understood differently. Perhaps the filmmaker, a full-blood Indian from Bombay, has failed to initiate his sensitivity chip in making the film. Would the reaction have been any different had the lead role been played by an Anglo-Indian actor than an Indian actor?

Given the above definition, the film is accurate in its visual depiction of the "psychological consequences" experienced by the Anglo-Indian. Placing Mary within a binary of choices fails to consider the potentiality within the longstanding Anglo-Indian community to create their own moments of solidarity and power. It doesn’t take into account the "cultural and political energy and creativity of the colonized masses" that Frantz Fannon believed in, for example. It doesn’t consider any such "alternative discourses" or "subaltern practices" for that matter, either. It leaves the Anglo-Indian residing not even within the margins, but without any space at all. It infantilizes her almost completely. This imagery-Cotton Mary as deempowered infant- is evident in many scenes throughout the film. The final scene in which a broken, dispirited Cotton Mary is led by the hand of a small Indian child speaking Hindu " " suggests that her state has been reduced to such a point that even a child now has more power than she. Or, alternatively, as the two figures are filmed with their backs to the audience it could suggest the beginning of something new-a complete break with the old colonized ways-and the beginning of a new start.

Cotton Mary’s descent is witnessed. The film bears witness to her descent into madness. There is no power or authority of Cotton Mary’s character. She is a shell, the symbol of a land made infertile by the exploitation and abuse of the colonized other.

She laments:

-I talked to matron

-She was looking for you

-Every day she was looking for you

-Every day she was looking for me

-You weren’t there, Rosie, I saw. You weren’t there.

 

When she arrives, the other Indian women make fun of her, singing out to her as she passes:

-there’s a hole in my pocket, dear liza. Dear liza.

-You took the baby to Blossom.

-Why not? She’s my sister.

She hides that she is taking the baby to her sister to eat.

When she arrives back, the mother wants to know what she feeds her.

-Look here, madam, we have our ways.

The mother doesn’t question how her child is being fed.

-The dr. wants to talk to you.

-It’s very complicated.

-Why does he want to talk to me? I can’t do anything about it (The ineffectual British male? He is viewed as precoccupied and uncaring). She cries-What are we going to do?

-I’ll look after you, Madam.

-Can you come with us?

-Of course, Madam, nothing can stop me.

Blossom sits in a wheelchair. Look, there’s Mary.

-My life is with this child.

-You’re going home with the English child, with the English household?

 

Is this a post-colonial fantasy?

It is in this sense that such representations as of of "Cotton Mary" miss the point and become enmeshed in the historical myths that continue to portray Anglo-Indians, as a term to describe those of mixed-race, as an adjunct of the British domiciled community, when this may be only one narrative of a much larger and more complex historical landscape.