The Face in the Mirror: Black Narcissus

Note: This movie, like many films of its era, contains a distressing amount of brownface — we’ll get into it in more detail later. I will also generally be using the colonial British language used in the movie when they come up (such as Calcutta instead of Kolkata and the description of Mopu Palace as a “harem”) for the sake of consistency.

There’s a recurring theme in Western literature that can be summed up as “white people go to an unfamiliar land and lose their whole minds.” Black Narcissus takes that theme and merges it with “person of faith goes to an unfamiliar land and is tested.” (This isn’t the last time they’ve overlapped, of course, and it probably wasn’t the first; hell, there are similar stories out there in real life.) But there’s more to it than that; there’s culture clash, the price of isolation, and a not-inconsiderable amount of erotic tension.

Five Anglican nuns who have been living and working in Calcutta are assigned to teach and provide healthcare in Mopu, a fictional community not far from Darjeeling. The assignment will not be easy; Mopu is isolated, and their new nunnery is placed at the precarious top of a mountain. Sister Clodagh will be the youngest superior nun in their order, and her inexperience will prove an additional challenge. But the landscape itself provides the first challenge.

Mopu Palace (which the locals call “The House of Women”) was a former harem, and was built for isolation. Its buildings tower over the local settlement and are constantly battered by howling winds. The walls are covered in paintings that range from “tasteful nudity” to “as much as the film’s producers thought they could get away with.” The plumbing barely works and the altitude is so high that the sisters feel it. When they first arrive, the women all break out in rashes. As Dean, the local general’s agent, describes it: the place is “not a comfortable spot.” (Prior to the arrival of the nuns, the local General brought a group of monks to Mopu Palace, who didn’t even last half a year.) The only person who seems at all comfortable on the mountainside is the holy man who lives on the edge of the grounds, unmoving and unspeaking. Sister Clodagh wants to remove him, only to be informed that even if the local community would accept it, the General wouldn’t: the holy man is his uncle, a decorated war veteran, and is the reason that the General even owns the land he’s given to the nuns.

Add to this inhospitable, always-cold structure one bossy local caretaker, two attractive young people falling in love, and Dean’s insistence on wearing shorts that show off much of his thighs and shirts open to the navel (when he bothers wearing a shirt at all)…the sisters never really had a chance.

Mopu Palace manages to find every nun’s vulnerabilities. Sister Clodagh remembers her life in Ireland, with an ill-fated affair with a young man struggling with family responsibilities (an explicit echo of Sabu’s Young General, who had been studying in Cambridge before a family death brings him home). Sister Philippa, assigned to plant a thriving vegetable garden, plants a riot of flowers instead, and tells Clodagh that she has been remembering what she joined the order to forget. She has decided there are only two ways to remain in Mopu:

“You must either live like Mr. Dean or like the holy man. You must give in to it…or ignore it.”

The sisters try to create balance within themselves and with the local people, but their small efforts in this area seem to make things worse: the girl they take in becomes besotted with the Young General that the nuns had reluctantly decided to teach, and when Sister Honey decides to treat an ailing baby, the community blames them when he dies. Sister Briony is a relative source of sanity, but it’s clearly not easy for her. Even Dean, who seems to have happily “gone native” with a pet monkey and servants, becomes affected by their struggles; the slow transformation of his relationship with Sister Clodagh from strife to mutual care is a source of solace and stress to them both.

Meanwhile, Sister Ruth unravels. She neglects the children’s lessons so she can spy on Dean through the windows. She helps a bleeding woman herself, rather than getting their medic, and so she enters one scene covered in fresh bloodstains. She orders a dress and makeup from Calcutta and plans to leave the order altogether (to be fair, that’s probably the most sensible choice that anyone makes in this movie). But Ruth is too far gone. She refuses to go back to Calcutta, and refuses Sister Clodagh’s final offer of companionship. She even rejects Dean’s offer to get her safely to Darjeeling. Sister Ruth chooses, in the end, to be well and truly alone, and it unmakes her.

The use of color here is exquisite: Sabu arrives in almost all white, echoing the white and cream habits the nuns wear, but his turban and earrings glitter with jewels in contrast with the nuns’ simple crosses. The next time we see him he is in green and gray, wearing emeralds and a turban with a European pattern, and he continues to add color over the course of the film. When he bothers with a shirt, Dean wears a spectrum of colors from ordinary brown to red, as do most of the local men and women. The ingenue, Kanchi, wears turquoise and bangles and deep, rich colors. When the nuns finally leave, the flowerbeds are a riot of color and life. But Dean is now a more subdued man, wearing subdued colors, his shirt buttoned up to the neck.

The movie ends with a parade of locals carrying the nuns’ many belongings, as the rains fall at last and Dean watches them go. He’s been in his own sort of isolation, and he chooses to remain there; but as he tells Sister Clodagh, he’s gained a few new ghosts as a result of their stay.

Black Narcissus has the usual casual racism to be expected from its era, though the white characters come in for their share of criticism as well. (Some of the more virulent racism comes from the nuns and not condoned, and the sisters’ unwillingness to learn the local language, relying only on a young man to be their translator much of the time, clearly makes their situation worse.) But the local people are often described as childlike, and their behavior portrayed as irrational. Much of the population (which I believe is supposed to be Indian Gorkha, but, um, yeah) are played in brownface, the worst caricature being May Hallatt’s Angu Ayah, the eccentric local caretaker of the palace. She’s genuinely hard to watch. But there is one striking detail that breaks those prevailing stereotypes: Sister Clodagh’s lord ruined her and fled to the United States. But the Young General¹ compares his own love story with that of The King and the Beggar Maid, a folktale where the lovers not only marry, but are buried together in the same tomb. (So much for civilization.) There’s also a particularly nice character moment at Christmas, where Dean and the Young General both interrupt the singing of carols: Dean, who has been drinking, deliberately knocks over a stand holding the sheet music on the way in and The Young General carefully picks it back up and settles it in place.

Aside from the rather odious Ayah, no one feels exactly where they should be. Kanchi doesn’t come to the school for education but because there’s almost nowhere else for her to go (she’s described as an out-of-control girl who ought to be married, but she looks and acts like an ordinary teenager who’s seen some shit). The locals have to be bribed to visit the school and clinic. Sabu had been studying at Cambridge and at one point produces a handkerchief scented with Black Narcissus, not an exotic Indian scent but something he purchased at the Army-Navy store in London. But in the end even he gives up on, in his words, “being clever,” and returns to a way of life that more closely matches the world he comes from. The movie ends with almost everyone back at where they started, and the tentative alliances made during the nuns’ stay broken.

I don’t think the message of Black Narcissus is wholly that some things should never mix,  but I do think the movie advocates for a certain amount of care. Alongside that culture clash, there’s a strong subtext that no one should be living up at Mopu Palace; it’s too cold and inhospitable for anyone. A harem is a place of exotic Oriental storytelling, but it’s also often associated with women’s repression and even imprisonment. Watching Ruth try and fail to find liberation within its cold stone walls, you know she’s doomed, even without the horror-movie staging and lighting that turns her red dress so dark it’s almost black.

In the end this isn’t a movie about India or the Himalayas at all; the inhospitable climate could be the Ivory Coast or Cambodia or the North Atlantic or even space.² It’s about entering somewhere unfamiliar and realizing that the face in the mirror is the most dangerous one of all.

Many summaries of this movie (and the novel) talked about it as being set in the final days of British control of India, which is true, but the historical context is more interesting than that simple statement. The novel was published in 1939, as World War II broke out. The Indian Independence Act was passed just two years after the end of the war, in February 1947, and received Royal Assent in July. The film Black Narcissus was released in England in April. It was released in the United States on August 13, 1947, two days before Indian Independence Day. The subtext — and even the text — of this novel and its adaptation changed under the feet of the people making it.

Author Rumer Godden grew up in colonial India (mostly in what is now Bangladesh); in her autobiography she said that Black Narcissus was inspired in part by an abandoned gravestone she and her childhood friends found in the countryside: the only inscription was “Sister Ruth.” She disliked this movie so much that she swore she’d never sell the rights to another work. Fortunately she didn’t hold to it and let Jean Renoir make The River, which she quite liked, among other adaptations. She died in 1998 at the age of 91.

Of course, it’s also impossible to talk about Black Narcissus without taking a moment to appreciate Sabu, who has the easy charisma of a born movie star and plays one of the most grounded and engaging characters in the film. In contrast to the lost souls of Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now, he’s delightfully ordinary, a cheerful, kind soul whose love story sheds a little light in the darkness. (He’s still hit with the Exotification Stick, but not as hard.) He likely would never have been the star he should have been in the West, but his death at 39 from a massive heart attack was still a huge loss to cinema.

1. Yes, that’s the only name his character is given. Sigh. ↩︎
2. Though it works well as a theme, this just underlines the casual racism of the narrative. Chinua Achebe wrote about how this erasure and exotification  specifically works in Heart of Darkness, but a lot of “Westerner in a strange land” stories fall victim to similar issues. Even works that are more sympathetic to the native or indigenous peoples usually center the newcomers. (One counter-example that I read in high school is Margaret Craven’s lovely I Heard the Owl Call My Name, which definitely still focuses on a white protagonist, but the narrative as a whole is far more empathetic and thoughtful.) ↩︎