Why The Casting in Wes Anderson’s Poison is Brilliant
A Survival Story in More Ways Than One
CW: racial violence
Spoilers for Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl short films on Netflix
I had a plan to return to this blog on the auspicious holiday of Ganesh Chaturthi. I was going to talk about the new direction that Shloka Slush would be shifting into, and how just like the start of pujas in temples, it would start with Ganesha.
As the remover of obstacles, beginning with Ganesha is a way of cleaning the slate. He allows us to see a way forward when it has become blocked by the troubles and illusions of the world. After I completed the Sampurna Bhagavad Gita in Dallas, I wasn’t sure how to continue Shloka Slush. I still wanted to explore topics surrounding the Bhagavad Gita, but how could I do that when I wasn’t so immediately immersed in the text? I decided to take some time off from writing, hoping that eventually a new path for inquiry would appear. Despite my grand, thematic ambitions, I did not get a post together in time for Ganesh Chaturthi and the holiday passed. Still, just as I had hoped, a new idea emerged.
In this next iteration of the blog, I want to address the “Slush” part of the name and talk about writing, art, and the miscellaneous things that keep my restless mind turning. I may have missed Ganesha’s holiday, but I returned to writing this post on Saraswati Puja day during the week-long festival of Navrathri. It is a day celebrating the goddess of knowledge and music, a patron of the arts and a source of inspiration. It also happens to be my lunar birthday and the reason I was named Vahni, as you may remember from an earlier post (shoutout to the real fans). So, with Saraswati’s blessing, let’s get into it:
Last month, I was delighted to watch the latest release from Wes Anderson: four short films based on Roald Dahl stories. As expected, the visual storytelling was thoroughly captivating. Anderson kept the spirit of macabre imagination alive through film sequences that required the viewer to picture some of the key actions of the plot, such as when the characters describe, but do not show, how the Rat Catcher kills his rodent victims. Anderson also continued to explore an obsession from his earlier film, Darjeeling Limited, with two of the stories being set in India. While only parts of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar take place on the subcontinent, the action in Poison happens entirely inside the bungalow of a colonial Englishman stationed somewhere in India.
Posion is a gripping survival story that packs so much intensity and interpersonal struggle in very little space. The plot itself is straightforward. Mr. Timber Woods (Dev Patel) is called to his friend Harry’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) bedside. When he arrives, Harry asks him to be very quiet and make no sudden movements, for there is a deadly krait curled up on Harry’s stomach under the bed sheets. Mr. Woods calls the Indian Dr. Ganderbai (Ben Kingsley) to help his friend. The doctor decides to drip chloroform onto Harry’s stomach and then wait 15 minutes to see if the poisonous snake has died. When they finally pull back the bed sheets, they are amazed to see that there is no krait to be found. What could be a moment of levity and relief quickly turns to horror when Dr. Ganderbai asks if Harry could have imagined the krait. In an embarrassed rage, Harry yells, “Are you telling me I’m a liar? Why, you dirty little Bengali sewer rat! You dirty, brown, filthy, backwards-caste—” before he is cut off by Mr. Woods. Woods rushes after Dr. Ganderbai to console him, but the doctor drives away after exchanging a few terse words.
Unlike the other three short films, which feature stop-motion animation, purposefully visible stagecraft, and “crew members” who appear on camera, Poison plays up the stakes by keeping us firmly in the world of the story. Through tight shots and close-ups, we experience the fear and rising tension in each of the three characters, played expertly by Dev Patel (Woods), Benedict Cumberbatch (Harry), and Ben Kingsley (Dr. Ganderbai). The most intriguing aspect of the film is not the classic Anderson aesthetic, but the characters themselves. Mainly, I couldn’t stop thinking about the casting choices.
In the translation from the original written story to Anderson’s film interpretation, the plot stays virtually the same. One of the few changes that Anderson makes to the story is that he portrays Mr. Woods as Indian by casting Dev Patel in the role. Even this is a specification rather than a departure, as the original Dahl story does not describe Mr. Woods physically. Stripped of a Western reader’s assumptions about whiteness and what someone named Mr. Woods looks like, Anderson’s casting of an Indian actor makes for a more nuanced commentary on race.
In the short film, Mr. Woods is left to assure both Dr. Ganderbai, and himself, that his English friend could not possibly have meant what he said. In a version with a white Mr. Woods, his excuses for Harry’s behavior come off as a way to pacify Dr. Ganderbai and remove any lingering white guilt. In Anderson’s version, there is a pathetic quality to his words as Woods tries to justify racism against a fellow Indian and ignores the harrowing truth of what Harry’s words mean for their friendship. Anderson also extends the sparse dialogue in Dahl’s version to hone in on the cognitive dissonance of the moment. In the short film, Woods insists to Dr. Ganderbai that he did a wonderful thing and saved Harry’s life. Dr. Ganderbai tersely replies, “No I don’t think so.” Unsure of what to say next, Woods utters an “I am sorry,” to which Ganderbai simply says, “You can’t be,” before driving off. Ganderbai’s final words are delivered expertly by Ben Kingsley with an exasperated resignation that marginalized people know all too well. Sometimes, it takes too much energy to defend yourself, to assert your right to dignity and safety. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is simply drive away. There is a bitterness to Ganderbai’s words, as he likely resents the way that economic and social status have allowed Mr. Woods to escape Harry’s virulent racism. At the same time, I couldn’t help but hear a warning in Ganderbai’s farewell. As the doctor’s car becomes smaller in the distance, it is Mr. Woods who is left to return to the bungalow. He now knows the potential danger that lurks inside, and unlike the imaginary krait, this one could strike at any time. It is as if Ganderbai is saying, “If this could happen to me, then who will be sorry when it’s you?”
That may be a lot to read into just three words, but this is where the casting speaks volumes. Dr. Ganderbai is portrayed by Ben Kingsley, a light-skinned Anglo-Indian man whose given name is Krishna Pandit Bhanji. He was known primarily for playing white characters before his first feature film role as Gandhi. His performance earned him critical acclaim, and in India, the film was received with genuine love. Kingsley did hours of research for the role. He so thoroughly embodied the spirit of India’s liberator that, according to director Richard Attenborough, locals would gather to watch the shoot and many of them believed they were seeing Gandhi’s ghost. Despite this, Kingsley has been the subject of unsubstantiated internet rumors that he darkened his skin to play Gandhi. With his anglicized name and light skin, Sir Ben Kingsley certainly looks the part of a well-bred Englishman. Yet, his father was Gujarati, coming from the same region as Gandhi himself. As my mom pointed out to me, Ben Kingsley is the color of an Indian man because Indians can be any color. You only have to look to northern India to see people whose skin more closely resembles my white friends’ than my own. Questioning Kingsley’s right to play Gandhi gets us into the tricky position of having to lay down rigid rules about ancestry, color, and history. Does Kingsley’s white mother make him less Indian? What does that say about biracial people and our acceptance of them? What does that say about other desis in the diaspora, like me, who have never actually lived in India? How far back does your ancestry have to stretch to be “authentic,” and doesn’t this feel exactly like the kind of nationalist thinking that we should be resisting? Pull on those threads long enough, and you come to the realization that many of the terms we use to classify one another come from a settler-colonialist framework specifically designed to segregate us; one that cares about purity of bloodlines and a need to value whiteness above all else. It leads us to the unsettling truth that our own metrics for authenticity and power come from the legacy of white people. Identity can be used to bring people together as much as it can be wielded to tear us apart. The consequences for forgetting that can be steep.
In Poison, Kingsley plays opposite to Dev Patel, whose skin appears darker and who looks unmistakably Indian despite also having been born in England. The two feel almost mismatched for their roles. One could envision Ben Kingsley as Mr. Woods, a passing Indian man who is making his way up the English ranks, while Dev Patel could more easily fit the vile descriptors that Harry uses to degrade Dr. Ganderbai. Yet, it is Kingsley as Dr. Ganderbai whom Harry chooses to lash out at. Light skin doesn’t save him from being called dirty and brown. It doesn’t save him from having his dignity stripped away. It never does.
I remember my mom laughing whenever Indian aunties in America would worry about their daughters’ skin getting too dark in the sun. Maybe it mattered more in India, where skin lightening creams line pharmacy aisles, but in America, who would be able to tell if their girls went one foundation shade darker? White people, the ones with the most power to decide our apparent worth, would only ever see us as brown. We could delude ourselves into thinking we were accepted because we were doctors and bus drivers and hotel owners, because we added value to their society. We could fawn over those of us with “fair skin,” and perpetuate colorism in our own communities. It didn’t change the fact that Indians of any skin color could be discriminated against and yes, even become the victims of hate crimes.
In Divya Victor’s CURB, she writes about three racially motivated murders of South Asians in America. In each case, the murderers mistook their victims for a different ethnicity or religion. Navroze Mody was a Zarathushti mistaken for a Hindu and beat to death in 1987. Balbir Singh was a Sikh man murdered just a few days after 9/11 by assailants who thought he was Muslim. Srinivas Kuchibhotla was killed in 2017 after being mistaken for an Iranian. In my own family, my uncle was once called the n-word by a white neighbor. Xenophobia, Islamaphobia, and racism operate on a lack of detail. Without the small specifities that make us individuals, it is much easier to justify hatred. It is easier to hurt someone you can’t imagine having a family or aspirations or favorite foods. It is easier to call someone brown than it is to say Indian, Gujurati, Iranian, Pakistani, Bengali, or Palestinian. If even the lightest and most assimilated brown person is unsafe then, at least to some degree, all brown people are unsafe. It is not an exaggeration to say that our liberation is intimately tied to one another’s.
For Mr. Woods to truly be sorry for Harry’s behavior, he needs to do more than console Dr. Ganderbai. ”Sorry” only goes so far when what’s really needed is for Mr. Woods to break down the illusion of safety that proximity to power affords him. We can see in the final moments of Poison how **a lifetime of abuses and racist remarks have made the older Dr. Ganderbai almost numb to this most recent attack on his character, as he stares off dispassionately, while the wide eyed Mr. Woods stumbles over his words in shock. Whatever advantages the doctor has gained from his light skin are overshadowed by the racist web both men are caught in. One is just more aware of it than the other.
In the hands of two skillful Indian actors and a director at the top of his craft, the 17 minutes of Poison are a gripping and densely layered journey through fear, dominance, and control. For Brown Asians, it’s an uncomfortable confrontation of the faults in our own narratives. The scales of power can shift in a second, and as the short film so cleverly shows us, it is in our best interest to do what we can to balance them.