Borrowed Plumes: A Drama on the Crisis of Immigrant Identity

Ritu Kamal Singh’s Borrowed Plumes is a 22-minute drama about the immigrant existential crisis of being neither white enough nor brown enough. It brings protagonist Mita against both a hostile white society and an alienated family, while her personal ambitions teeter precariously on her ability to find meaning within this matrix.

The film opens with a statement: I’m not a fan of Bollywood—. Mita (Singh) is rehearsing in the mirror for an audition, trying on different variations of the sentiment until one of them feels at least close to correct. The dissatisfaction in her expression makes it clear that approximate is the best she is expecting to invent. Dissatisfaction is the general mood in Mita’s life as an Indian immigrant in America. Her nuclear family’s excellence at absorbing and projecting Americanness have fostered a void. She feels out of place—a feeling of wrongdoing really—for being the one to have laboured over the pullav that her husband (Bhavesh Patel) and son (Bansi Pande) deem a bad fit (too messy) for their model American day at work and at school. It puts Mita on the defensive. She must figure out her case and argument on the fly. Though the crisis has clearly been simmering for years, it is now, with an audition that impels her to reckon with her Indianness, that matters have begun to come to a head.

Every plot point and shot choice emphasises the sense of expectation, assimilation, and the fear of being the odd one out. The audition is a robust metonymic device to distil and display the tensions at the heart of the film: the expectation to deliver a performance according to set parameters. Deviate and you risk sanctions. It is a swirl of mutually constitutive troubles: the tragedy of heterosexuality, the tragedy of the American dream, and the burdens of acceptable, recognisable sentiment.

Bollywood, itself the product of economic liberalisation and the aim to appeal to the Indian diaspora, is held up as the litmus test of Indianness, as well as the outward, white society facing appearance of it. It asks of Indian immigrants, Are you or are you not embarrassed by Bollywood? And the question can also be changed to become Are you or are you not a good wife and mother? while the arbiter changes from white society to your own community. Mita and others like her feel the dreadful weight of not just answering in only one direction, but also meaning it.

Mita pushes at those questions. With the device of her audition, she tries to make sense of the expectations laid out for her. At home, and despite some bad, messy choices, she reaches a point of equilibrium in the family.

It leads to a strong third act even if its launch is beholden to the Bollywoodised notion that the zenith of Indianness is a family-wide practice of religion. Bansi Pande shines as the film sagely ascribes worth to the child of the family. Pande and Singh put together a very natural mother-son bond; there is no artifice in it. In turn it brings grace and insight to Mita’s ongoing crisis and she finally locates meaning that is not just approximate, but precise.

Borrowed Plumes plots the coming of age of a middle-aged woman, the reckoning with a settled middle-class life that has hidden but never attempted to resolve until now the tensions within immigrant life. The tensions between being and becoming.

Watch Borrowed Plumes Short Film Trailer