In 1909, D.W. Griffith wrote and directed a short, silent film entitled The Hindoo Dagger. During this period in his career, Griffith was steadily churning out hundreds of short films, several of which centered around a variety of racial and ethnic “others,” from the “Red Man” to Jewesses, Zulus to “Chinks.” Griffith would become even more notorious for his racial ideologies five years later, with the release of The Birth of a Nation, the sprawling epic about Restoration-era U.S., which has been both praised for its technical mastery and denounced for its outrageous racism. NPR described the film as “three hours of racist propaganda,” which was used as a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool and was partially responsible for the Klan’s revival in the early 20th century. Griffith would continue his exploration of racial themes in 1919’s Broken Blossoms, subtitled “The Yellow Man and the Girl,” about an older Chinese man (played in yellow-face) who befriends and attempts to aid a young and troubled white woman to tragic ends. When I learned that Griffith had tried his hand with an Indian theme, I was intrigued and drove out to the Library of Congress' Paper Print Collection, where a copy of the film still exists.1
What was so “Hindoo” about The Hindoo Dagger? Not very much, it seems, at least not at first glance. As Nitin Govil explains, early American films deployed the word “Hindoo” as a way to signal “alterity” and “ethnological interest,” evoking a set of associations about India as a land of the occult and supernatural.2 A description for The Hindoo Dagger during its release describes it as such:
The name Hindoo is sure to conjure up in our minds thoughts of mysticism, fetichism, thaumaturgy, and occult art, and with reason, for Hindustan is, without doubt, the birthplace of all such weird practice. Hence it is that anything coming from the Hindoos is regarded as possessed of certain phylacteric and talismanic powers, and it was not strange that Jack Windom should experience a sensation of awe at the reception of the Hindoo dagger from his old chum, Tom, who was traveling in India.3The alleged origins of the Hindoo dagger, however, is where the film’s association with India ends. Instead, The Hindoo Dagger involves a love triangle (or better put, a love “square”) between a husband, wife, and her two lovers, which eventually leads to a murder-suicide. The film opens with protagonist Jack Windom receiving the titular dagger from his friend, who has been traveling in India. Soon after, Jack discovers his wife embracing another man, whereupon he stabs her as she attempts to escape. Shocked by what he has done, Jack drops the dagger, and flees the crime scene. The wife’s lover, who was hiding in the wings, discovers her wounded but alive, and brings a doctor and nurse to heal her injuries.
Soon, a similar scene repeats itself. A year has passed and the wife’s lover (who is now presumably her husband) comes to discover that she has been cheating on him with a third man. The second husband attacks her, and stabs her multiple times until she dies. Then, in a twist, Jack Windom returns to the home, entering the crime scene he had left behind. When he enters the bathroom, he finds his wife exactly as he had left her. Horrified by the scene, Jack plunges the dagger into his heart. The film ends with Jack’s dead body falling over his wife’s corpse.
At least a few newspapers seemed to either dramatically misread the film’s plot, or falsely advertise the film. The Anaconda Standard described the film as the story of “a Hindoo’s love affair, [which] shows some of the superstitions of this peculiar people.” Other newspapers seemed confused about how to classify The Hindoo Dagger, describing it as a “good laughable comedy,” “a drama of the Orient and a very comic film,” or simply a “domestic tragedy.” Despite the false advertising, The Hindoo Dagger was nevertheless one of the first in a series of early American films that drew on exotic tropes about India and Indians. In 1902, Thomas Edison had produced Hindoo Fakir, a short film that featured an Indian magician, performing a series of tricks with the aid of trick photography. By the 1910s, the “fakir”
had become a term that described a host of figures, from Hindu yogis to Sufi dervishes, as well as street performers, magicians, and, con-artists.4 Sheet music for songs like “Hindu Man” and “My Hindoo Man” described the fakir, in his “turban crown,” who came from the “home of ‘ologists’ … palmologists, and flim-flam.” Soon films like The Love Girl (1916), Upside Down (1919), and Sucker Money (1933), featured the recurring figure of the Hindu prince and swami, who would later be revealed as a fraud or con-man. As Philip Deslippe explained in Tides, even associations with yoga conjured fantastical notions about the “unnatural hypnotic sway” that yogis could have on their followers.All this suggests that even if the “Hindoo”-ness of The Hindoo Dagger was ornamental, it wasn’t altogether insignificant. Film scholar Homay King argues, “Oriental objects and symbols” were used in classic Hollywood onwards to symbolize “the limits of deductive reasoning and rational inquiry.”5 Similarly, despite the “Hindoo dagger” being Indian in name only, it catalyzed the disastrous and murderous events in the film. As a term, “Hindoo" signified not only “alterity,” then, but signaled a threat to the home, allowing the protagonist to enact murderous desires while the blame was placed squarely on the instrument brought over from India.
1. Aside from The Hindoo Dagger, Griffith’s only other foray into Indian themes was The Brahma Diamond, also released in 1909, which featured a more complex plot and was set in India. Only an incomplete version of the film has survived, but a summary written by film scholar Kristin Thompson (The Griffith Project , Vol. 2) describes a caper, in which a tourist attempts to steal a diamond known as the “Light of the World” embedded within the forehead of an idol. A very similar plotline appears in the Essanay film The Brand of Evil (1913), which follows an adventurer who steals a precious stone that forms the eye of an idol in India; as a consequence, he is cursed by a Hindu priest, and his hand begins to wither away. Both of these films seem to center around the legend of the Koh-i-noor diamond, a powerful and popular narrative that circulated as a means to describe India’s splendor.
2. Govil, Nitin. Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture Between Los Angeles and Bollywood. New York: New York University Press, 2015. 173.
3. Moving Picture World. Volume IV, January-June 1909. Ed. J.P. Chalmers. New York: World Photographic Publishing, Co. 177.
4. Gan, Vicky. "Early Films (Including One by Thomas Edison) Made Yoga Look Like Magic." Smithsonian.com. 18 November 2013.
5. King, Homay. Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. 56
Manan Desai is Assistant Professor of Asian/Pacific Islander American Studies in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan.
