Lighting Out for New Territory

“Smile, cheriakutti--remember,” calls out director Ismail Merchant as he coaches 7-year-old Arshia Rafique for a scene in the latest Merchant Ivory production, “Cotton Mary.”

Merchant is speaking Malayalam, the language of the south Indian state of Kerala, where the film is on location. He is talking gently, addressing the child as “little girl” in her own tongue. Born in Bombay, Merchant speaks four Indian languages, but none from the south, and so he has made a special effort to communicate with this shy youngster.

Arshia, plucked from a schoolful of hopefuls for a small part, is trudging along a dusty path carrying a bottle of orange soda. She is about to offer a sip to actor Madhur Jaffrey, a Merchant Ivory veteran, who plays the title role. Jaffrey, wearing a bedraggled cotton print dress, lounges disconsolately, her character approaching a breakdown.

The scene takes place by old docks near location headquarters in Fort Cochin on India’s southwestern coast. A crusted ship from World War I lies tilted at water’s edge, and the crew is whispering about the body they’ve discovered tied to a piling. Auto rickshaws buzz past, and lorries lumber through the site. Curious onlookers constantly have to be shooed away.

“Cotton Mary” is the first feature from the Ismail Merchant-James Ivory team to be shot in India since 1993’s “In Custody.” It is also the first Western feature set in Kerala, and Fort Cochin received the troupe enthusiastically. A local gathering spot, Kashi Art Cafe, staged a Merchant Ivory film festival that spanned two decades of the team’s work. Starting with “The Householder” in 1963, Merchant Ivory has shot 15 films on the subcontinent, including “Shakespeare Wallah” (1965), “The Guru” (1969), “Bombay Talkie” (1970) and “Heat and Dust” (1982), all of which dealt with relationships between British and Indians.

“Cotton Mary,” on the other hand, focuses on the human residue of British (or Raj) rule, the Anglo Indians. “They walked on a very thin line,” says Merchant, 62, of these offspring of mixed liaisons. “They wanted to become English; they identified more with the English, and the Indians did not accept this false position.” The film is set in 1954, seven years after India became independent.

Merchant, who is producing as well as directing, is delighted to be back on home ground. His partner, director James Ivory, attended the first five weeks of filming. Although not directing, Ivory advised on the script and suggested a final scene. (Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the novelist who has written many Merchant Ivory films, was not involved in “Mary.”)

Alexandra Viets, 37, who lived in India as a child and more recently with her husband, wrote the play as her thesis while attending film school at Columbia University. Viets’ drama won a New York Foundation for the Arts award. It came to Merchant’s attention through Jaffrey, to whom Viets sent the script. Jaffrey and her daughter, Sakina, took part in public readings staged as a requirement of the award. “The play was well written,” says Jaffrey. “It is not a Raj story. It is not a romanticized story. It is contemporary in many ways, a drama of human relations, insecurity and aspirations.”

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In the era of British rule, Anglo Indian men often worked in the postal service and on the railways, where they rose to become engineers or station masters. Like the fictionalized Cotton Mary, women frequently became nurses, a job then considered unfit for proper Indian girls.

Anglo Indians who could afford to leave went to England or Australia after independence. Others lived on in modest circumstances, suffering discrimination that led them to intermarry and form their own communities. They developed their own culture and their own cuisine. “They even created their own accent, with a little twist of English and Indian,” says Merchant.

Cotton Mary dreams of being white and European. She fancies English cotton, unaware that this fine fabric was actually Indian cotton, produced for export. Mary is poor but makes up stories about her father’s distinguished past. She has two sisters, Blossom (Neena Gupta), who lives in an almshouse with other impoverished Anglo Indians, and Gwen (Surekha Sikri) who has a daughter, Rosie (Sakina Jaffrey), to whom Mary is closely attached.

The sisters live peacefully until an Englishwoman, Lily Macintosh (Greta Scacchi), gives birth in the hospital where Mary works. Lily can’t nurse the baby, so Mary whisks it off to Blossom, who earns a meager living as a wet nurse. The baby survives and Mary, taking credit, schemes her way into the English home as a nanny. She has indeed arrived, but in a dysfunctional household that promises disaster.

The story is “very much from an Indian viewpoint,” says Viets. “It deals with the impact that layers of history have on Cotton Mary and how she tries to define herself through this English family. She dreams of having a life that is not hers to live.”

It took about five years to refine the script. “The biggest change was the development of the English wife, Lily, into a character with her own conflicts,” Viets says. James Wilby’s role as the husband was also expanded.

Filming in India enabled Merchant to work within a budget of $3.5 million, less than one-third of what it would have cost to film in the United States, he estimates. Universal International supplied $3 million and Canal Plus in France the remainder. (Universal International plans to release the film internationally this fall. The domestic distributor has yet to be determined.)

Merchant’s first choice for the location was Goa, the former Portuguese enclave on the west cost farther north toward Bombay. At Jaffrey’s urging, he switched to Kerala, which also has a mixed heritage.

One of the most beautiful Indian states, Kerala lies along India’s western coast, extending almost to the southern tip. It is lushly forested with coconut palms, lined with idyllic beaches and traversed by waterways. The seduction of Rosie takes place on one of these waterways. A tea estate in the cool highlands of Munnar and an elephant preserve at Kodanad appear in other segments.

Fort Cochin seems more European than Indian. Old Dutch and Portuguese buildings dominate the landscape. Quiet, tree-shaded roads surround a broad parade ground that looks much like an English village green. Here, the British once staged badminton tournaments. Now it is used for hockey, cricket and other sports.

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The production office occupies a rambling structure called Bastion Bungalow. The bungalow is part of Fort Immanuel, which was constructed by the Portuguese in the 17th century with the permission of the Raja of Cochin. It sprawls along the edge of the harbor, overlooking the big, butterfly-like Chinese fishing nets that are a major tourist attraction.

“Cotton Mary” could not be set in today’s India, Merchant says. “The fabric has changed. Anglo Indians look and feel differently now.” Some made big money as workers in the Middle East during the oil boom of the 1970s, when direct flights were established between Kerala and the Mideast. “Wealth covers a lot of things,” Merchant observes wryly.

Yet white skin is still prized in India, and cosmetics counters are stocked with creams that promote “fairness.” Ironically, the Indian babies that portray Lily Macintosh’s baby girl were to be lightened digitally to look English, a process that would have enabled Cotton Mary to achieve her dreams, at least on film. Four babies were needed for the three to four months covered by the story; the last is Scacchi’s own child, Mateo.

Kerala’s climate is steamy hot, and by the conclusion of filming, the heat has risen to intolerable levels. On the day of the wrap party, Merchant starts filming at 7:30 a.m., continues all day, then works in his office until long after dark.

At party time, he dashes to his residence for a quick shower, dons a fresh silk kurta and gulps down an iced nimbu pani (limeade). Then he’s off to the party on an excursion boat that cruises the harbor for three hours.

Rather than relaxing, he dances with abandon, pours beer, hands out T-shirts and baseball caps with the “Cotton Mary” logo, and dashes down to the galley, bringing up plates of food like a waiter.

Ultimately it was the character of Cotton Mary that attracted the director and the cast to the film. Jaffrey said she found the emotional gyrations of “Cotton Mary” irresistible. “Who writes parts like that for women? Nobody.”

Like Jaffrey, Merchant was fascinated by the lead character. “It is very rare that you can find a central character of this sort--a kind of crazy, eccentric, loving person who affects so many others.”

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Barbara Hansen is a Times food writer who travels frequently to India. (Both Ismail Merchant and Madhur Jaffrey are known for their books about Indian cooking.)