A grandmother who talks to her beloved god Krishna through television, an Air India flight that explodes mid-air, arranged marriages and love matches, racism, Sikh revolutionaries, Bollywood-style fantasy songs – Canadian filmmaker Srinivas Krishna’s Masala is truly a smorgasbord of flavours.
Krishna’s anarchic, irreverent and sharply observed cosmic comedy from 1991 has been hailed as a landmark exploration of the Canadian-Indian diaspora experience. Masala is also celebrated for its fresh story-telling style and nostalgia-free exploration of immigrant realities.
Masala is among 23 restored Canadian classics that will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (September 6-15). The dynamic, satirical narrative is thoughtful too about a community that is far from its roots but not entirely at home in Canada either. The movie’s characters lead routine lives that are spiced with the absurdity of inhabiting several identities at the same time.
Krishna was 26 when he made Masala. Krishna drew on his own experience of arriving in Canada as a six-year-old boy. “The film was released at a time when most people struggled to understand what was going on – that there were Indians in this society and that the society was going to change as a result of that,” Krishna told Scroll in an interview.
In addition to writing, directing and co-producing his first film, Krishna also stars as his namesake – a former heroin pusher whose tragic past follows him around. Planes keep flying overhead as Krishna tries to walk the path of the straight and narrow.
Krishna gets comically entangled with other Canadian Indians, including his aunt’s sari store-owning husband and a postal department employee, both played by Saeed Jaffrey. Jaffrey also plays the god Krishna, with whom the postman’s feisty mother (Zohra Sehgal) has heated conversations through her television set. The cast includes Sakina Jaffrey (Saeed Jaffrey’s real-life daughter), Herj Johal and Madhuri Bhatia.
Following Masala, Krishna made a few more films (including Lulu and Ganesh Boy Wonder) and designed media installations. Since 2010, the 59-year-old self-described “lifelong innovator” has pursued a successful career in augmented reality and artificial intelligence. Here are edited excerpts from an interview about the ideas that went into Masala and its cultural significance.
Describe the personal and cultural ferment that shaped Masala.
Masala is about the fact and reality of being Indian, particularly Hindu, in Canada. That is the perspective and consciousness in the film.
The film is set at a time when the Cold War was still happening. India was still a Licence Raj. Doordarshan was still the only television channel. It was a time before WhatsApp and the internet. The landlines were horrible and you had to shout. Getting onto a plane wasn’t easy, it was expensive.
I was born in Madras in a Telugu family. My father came here in 1969, and the rest of us came in 1970. I grew up in an immigrant community with the pioneers of Indians in North America. They created the institutions and established a presence here in the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet, it wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was an intense struggle, especially in Canada, which was initially extremely hostile to Indians. There was a lot of overt and violent racism. It wasn’t so different from the British experience
I also grew up in Canada under an official policy of multiculturalism. You had on the one hand the founding nations which were the English and the French, and then there were the rest of the people who were from multicultural communities.
They would dole out grants for people to teach their children their mother tongues or build temples, churches and mosques. This was part of the institutional building that created the immigration communities in Canada.
How did you deal with being an immigrant?
It was a very rich time. People had different schools of thought on what it meant to be Indian.
People, especially women, were finding opportunities in marrying locally. They didn’t want the arranged marriages their parents were setting up for them. Others were trying to navigate this sense of tradition and adaptation.
You learnt how to manage different expectations of who you were, how you sounded, what you said. You realised that you could occupy different shoes – you could get along with everybody. By the same token, you started thinking, who am I really? That was the state of mind in which I made the film.
What were your cinematic influences?
There were some really interesting films – before Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala [1991], there was her Salaam Bombay! [1988], which introduced a certain consciousness of India to an insular US audience. There was a great film from Canada by Patricia Rozema called I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. It was cinematically pretty interesting and inventive.
Then Spike Lee came out with She’s Gotta Have It [1986] and then School Daze [1988]. His work gave me the confidence to take a shot at expressing what was going on within me, my perspective of life that was very different from everyone else’s.
Masala isn’t nostalgic. It isn’t a typical culture clash comedy. And it isn’t representative in the conventional manner, opting instead to show the lived-in experiences of its characters.
At the time, there was no tradition of Indians in Canada [in films]. There was a sense of creating a new thing.
When people make films about Indians or South Asians in the West, they are essentially Western stories. To me, they did not seem to capture the experience of coming here, living here and what it means to the community that is inside your mind. This was a place of such difference – a white country, a Christian country. Nothing that I grew up with in India was here.
The film is a classical kind of story, an avatara story, which is as ancient as we get. It’s about a character whose life comes full circle, who can’t escape his karma. These are powerful, mythical structures. Maybe that’s why the film continues to live on.
People in the film are nostalgic, but the film isn’t about nostalgia. There is also the question of whether the idea of home really exists only as nostalgia. I went to India often enough, and what I understood was that there was a big part of me that was Indian, but also that India wasn’t my country since I wasn’t a part of the journey of its people.
By navigating places of commonality with people who are fundamentally different, you become like them and unlike them too – this tension is what I wanted to capture. I didn’t seek to be representative. I started from the place of, this is who I unselfconsciously am. Nobody had done that.
How did the actual bombing of the Air India plane (also known as Emperor Kanishka) by Canadian Sikh terrorists in 1985 find its way into Masala? Film scholars have pointed out that the bomb blast permanently ruptures the idea of ‘home’.
That was a terrible thing that happened. I lost a lot of friends that I grew up with on the flight.
In Canada, the reaction of the people and the government was that it was an Indian tragedy, when most of the people on the flight were Canadians who had grown up in Canada. That reaction spoke to the deep racism that informed this country – the extreme cold-heartedness to not recognise that this was a Canadian tragedy.
That plane was full of people going to India. There were kids who would go to the Kalakshetra [in Chennai] to learn Bharatanatyam in the summer. It was about maintaining tradition, an attempted continuity between the new world and the old land. That incident and the reaction to it made me think, what is my place here [in Canada]? Either we could push against this reaction and change it or we could retreat. I wasn’t going to retreat.
I don’t judge who did the bombing or blame anybody. This isn’t a film that takes any political position on anything. It is a lila [cosmic play]. There is a god and there is an avatara story. The film is putting out a challenge – what does it mean to be genuinely Indian in today’s multicultural, modern Western society? Can you continue to invent traditions that work today?
That’s what my people have been trying to do in Canada – react to the reality here with the strength of our traditions.
What made you cast Saeed Jaffrey in not one but three roles?
I grew up watching a lot of Telugu devotional films. NT Rama Rao would play multiple characters. Masala spoke to the idea that we play multiple parts in life. This becomes heightened as an immigrant, a person in a new place trying to adapt. Saeed playing those three parts supports the attempt to manage multiple identities.
Saeed was a great actor. He also really got the script. He himself had lived it. He was one of the first Indian actors to come over to the West. He built careers here and in India. His performance was appreciated for how unapologetic it was.
Zohra Sehgal played the naughty granny for the first time in Masala.
This film kick-started her career. Saeed had recommended her. He said, we have to get Zohra, she’ll be perfect for this.
She was already nearly 80 at the time. She steals every scene she is in, which is not easy when you’re playing against Saeed. It was one of my great pleasures to work with both of them.
What do you feel about Masala when you look back on it today?
I thought it was pretty good for a first film at the time. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. We didn’t have such a big budget. I promised a Rolls Royce for a price of a Honda, and it was tough to pull off.
But there was so much joy in making the film, and so much struggle too. People really came together to make the film. Everyone recognised that it was something different. The screening in Toronto will be a reunion for everyone who worked on it.
How will audiences who haven’t seen Masala before, or newer Indian immigrants in Canada, react to the restored movie?
There is now a few million South Asians in Canada, many of them very recent. I wonder what they will think.
Most people who come here have no real clue about this place or the community before them. People think that the world is just as it is today. I can find dosas and rotis everywhere, I can speak my own language if I need to. There was a time when it wasn’t like that. If it’s like that today, it’s because people before you created that place that welcomes you so much.
In watching this film, I hope people will enjoy it. I also hope they understand that by coming here and living here, they’re going to change. In that process of change, the film asks them about who they’re going to become.
Will you insist on being the person you were when you left? Or are you going to adapt, and if you are adapting, what does that mean? Are your gods now going to populate this place too, and how is that going to work out?
What has motivated me all my life is the desire to change things. That comes from coming to this country as a child and realising that not only do I feel different, but that everyone sees me as different. Whatever I do, I want to be new.
That desire to invent has always been there. Sometimes, I am able to bring those inventions to the market and they become genuine innovations. That’s what Masala was – a genuine innovation.
