Brown Phase
“Feels like decrypt Hispanic Americana,” my friend said as we entered downtown San Antonio. We first stopped at a beer garden that sat by a less traversed section of the San Antonio river walk. I made my customary comment about how San Antonio seems more diverse than Austin, then wondered how many times I’ve walked the riverwalk and said the same thing. Later in the night, in keeping with the theme of diversity, my friend, who’s Hispanic, suggested that we watch The Party by Peter Sellers. A movie in which Sellers plays an Indian actor in full brown face. He plays Hrundi V Bakshi, who finds himself in a fish-out-of-water situation when he gets accidentally invited to a party at a big wig producer’s house. He then politely sabotages the party with one gaffe after the other.
I cringed and reluctantly chuckled for the first five minutes at the thick accent and the extreme brown face. But about 15-20 minutes in I had reluctantly begun to appreciate Peter Sellers for his craft. I could not find anything wrong with the accent. I know several older Indian men who spoke with the exact enunciation of T’s and O’s. He played the character with a diminutive body language where he looked small, whatever character he stood next to. It is well known that it takes a decade or two for the spine of the population to recover from the brunt of colonialism. We only started standing straight in the 90s, post-liberalization of the economy (what a coincidence).
Most of the comic moments in the movie find Hrundi Bakshi in circumstances that make you cringe and wish sincerely that this polite man eventually wins. I think the movie would get reduced to a string of cringeworthy moments if Hrundi Bakshi was played by an Indian or brown actor instead of Sellers in brown face. Brown face in this movie, does the same job as the documentary point of view does for The Office. It gives you enough distance from the characters to laugh at the circumstances instead of cringing or feeling sorry for their predicament. A more modern version of this can be seen in Succession, where all the family trauma that unfolds is wrapped in the lavish lives of billionaires. Without that, the drama-comedy would turn into a tragedy.
The other reason brown face works is because of who I was watching it with - an Indian woman and a Hispanic guy who are all “in on the joke” because of the common knowledge that brown face is not acceptable anymore, and any such content we discover feels closer to pseudo-nostalgia than to exploitation. Perhaps we would not have laughed at this hard if it was still a common technique.
Being a movie from the 60s, it lacks any kind of self-referential irony that is common in television and media now. There is a sincerity to it that when compared to the current era of television feels less sinister and more innocent. The irony instead exists in the context in which it is being watched by an Indian immigrant who moved to the US and finds much of the movie relatable. The complete loss of social status and markers when you move to a new country and start from zero is depicted excellently by a British comedian in the brown face and appreciated by an Indian immigrant - so much irony that it might all collapse in on itself and I might start talking like Hrundi Bakshi.
P.S: Been informed by a Letterboxd review that this movie was popular in India — “I’d like to point out a few of things. Firstly, this film was hugely popular in India at the time of its release, so much so, that the prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, a reported fan of the film, once quoted one of the film’s famous lines: "In India we don't think who we are, we know who we are!" Peter Sellers’ portrayal of Hrundi V. Bakshi has supposedly, and subsequently, inspired characters in Bollywood films such as Namak Halaal, and even Mr. Bean. I’m not condoning minstrelsy by any stretch, but as with most things in life, context is important, and things should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. This is no Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”