Cotton Mary: drama.  Starring Gretta Scacchi, Madhur Jaffrey, James Wilby, Sarah Badel, Riyu Bajaj, Gerson Da Cunha, Joanna David, Neena Gupta, Sakina Jaffrey, Gemma Jones, Firdausi Jussawalla, Mahabanoo Mody-Kotwal, Nadira, Prayag Raj, Captain Raju.  Directed by Ismail Merchant.  Written by Alexandra Viets.  Rated R. Now playing at Opera Plaza.

By the time the fifties rolled around, British colonialism had sunk its roots deeply in the collective Indian unconscious, forever altering the culture, politics and world-view of a struggling country.  Cotton Mary picks up in the later stages of the imperialist muddle, where the British have for decades clumsily laid their classist customs down on a culture already saddled with the caste system and socioeconomic self-loathing.  This latest offering from the production team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory tackles the social politics of the time, concentrating less on social mores and the gilded trappings of upperclass British society.

Lily Macintosh is among the landed British gentry, living on India’s Malabar Coast in 1954.  Her estranged husband, John Macintosh, is a BBC journalist who spends most of his time on assignment.  The film opens in the torpid Indian summer with a very pregnant Lily giving birth to her second daughter while her husband is away.  Isolated with no one but Abraham, an Indian butler who has worked for her family for over twenty-five years, she brings the underweight child into the world.  Unable to produce milk for the baby, she comes to rely heavily on the seemingly good intentions of a nurse’s aid, an Indian woman who goes by the name of Cotton Mary.  In one of the film’s more confusing moments, Mary takes the baby with the weakened mother’s blessing, assuring her that this baby is a child of God and that God will provide for her. She brings the baby to her wheelchair-bound sister, Blossom, who begins to nurse the baby regularly. 

This exchange is not only a main plot point to the narrative but also propels much of the symbolic thrust of the film: the Indian culture, arrested and undervalued as it is, is somehow feeding the British ruling class with figurative mother’s milk.  The symbol is a powerful one: enmeshing these two cultures and classes in the sickly dance of dependence that characterizes their uneasy relationship.  To allow this symbol its birth, the film asks us to believe that this woman would readily surrender her newborn over to this stranger and never question how she came by this milk for the baby.  We must make this leap of faith just as Lily Macintosh makes it; she is no longer sure of her footing in the country where she has lived for so many years as a colonial.  She doubts her very instincts as a mother and a wife.  In the absence of clarity, she hires on Cotton Mary to continue acting as the child’s only source of nourishment.

Merchant’s India is at once a dusty and lush backdrop for Anglo-Indian tension, the cinematography is vividly imagined and well-executed in both the wildness of the foliage hanging onto the British estates and the flowery cotton dresses adorning the British and Indian women.  Cotton Mary draws a distinction between British and Indian cotton, preferring the former, which she insists, is of a higher quality.  Her airs and pretensions notwithstanding, she is an eccentric woman, professing to be of half-caste status: she insists her father was in the British military.  She self-identifies as an Anglo-Indian, more Anglo than Indian in her breeding and predilections. In one scene where she is rebuking the butler Abraham’s offer of a curried dinner, the drama of impersonation penetrates deeply.  No sooner does she tell him she has no taste for that Indian curried food, that it’s too spicy and bad for the digestion, she is digging into the pots of curry secretly after he leaves the kitchen.  Attempting at first to eat daintily with a fork, she soon succumbs to the indigenous custom: scooping up fingerfuls of rice and mixing it with the curry before bringing it to her mouth. 

Cotton Mary is unswerving in its realistic proportions.  It attempts to capture the trickling down of infantilization: first from the Anglican church to the Indian people and then from their captors, the imperialistic British.  No one, it would appear, can get enough mother’s milk, not even the British themselves, who don’t seem to be able to nourish the culture they have so intimately touched.  At the bottom of it all is Cotton Mary, rendered garish and comical in her solipsistic machinations. Her web of deceit is all the more laughable as it unravels: despite all of the plotting to win a place in the upper classes, she cannot even hold on to her newly acquired household authority.  She cannot scrub off the shame that colonial rule has cast on her.

Yet, not for lack of intriguing themes, Cotton Mary falls short of a complete realization. What might have started out as a film about the dissolution of a marriage quickly enters larger thematic territory: unresolved social class struggles.  Ironically, had the script done more to illuminate these characters, the Anglo-Indian class struggle could have also been brought to bear more effectively.  We are told that Lily has relied on Abraham and his family for years but we are never shown her relationship with him very clearly.  In fact, Lily is something of a mystery: how her family first came to India and where they made their money.  If indeed she holds the fortune in the family, this dynamic could have been more fully explored in her dilapidated relationship with John. As it is, we see his womanizing but it’s unconnected to the rest of his life.  It’s no wonder that Cotton Mary can very easily negotiate the holes in this family as she can the holes in the script.  Thematically compelling and cinematically alluring, Cotton Mary never quite transcends the perimeters of its conflict.