TOI correspondent in Washington: Thirty-five years after Mira Nair, then pregnant with Zohran Mamdani, brought Mississippi Masala to screen, exploring the unlikely romance between an Indian woman and a Black man in America’s Deep South, America’s poorest state has scripted a plot twist that Hollywood might have considered improbable: electing its first Black US senator in more than 150 years.In a remarkable real-life sequel, Democrat Scott Colom, a civil rights attorney, has defeated Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith, by a narrow 4600 votes margin to become Mississippi’s first Black US senator since Reconstruction, when the beaten Confederacy was briefly undergoing a democratic transformation.The symbolism is difficult to overstate: Mississippi has the highest proportion of Black residents of any American state, approaching 40 per cent. Yet the state has not elected a Black senator since Blanche Bruce, who entered the Senate in 1875 and served until 1881. Hiram Revels, the first Black American senator, had also represented Mississippi, in 1870. What followed was nearly a century of segregation, poll taxes, literacy tests, lynchings and violent resistance to Black political participation as Mississippi became synonymous with some of America’s ugliest racial chapters.There is an Indian connection to this history that goes beyond Nair’s movie, which explored the unlikely relationship between Mina (Sarita Chowdhury), the daughter of Indian immigrants expelled from Idi Amin’s Uganda, and Demetrius, an African American carpet cleaner played by Denzel Washington early in his career. In 1935, Howard Thurman, the African American theologian and civil rights intellectual who grew up in the segregated South, travelled to India with a delegation and met Mahatma Gandhi in February 1936. Their discussions about racial oppression, freedom and non-violence helped transmit Gandhian ideas into the American civil rights movement. Thurman subsequently influenced Martin Luther King Jr., who drew deeply from the Gandhian philosophy of non-violent resistance.Even more strikingly, Indian freedom fighter and social reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay spent 18 months travelling across America between 1939 and 1941. On a journey through the segregated South, she encountered the indignity of racial segregation on an American train in next door Louisiana, where a conductor challenged her presence in a whites-only carriage. Refusing to move, she recognised a kinship between the struggles of African Americans and Indians against systems of racial and imperial domination. Her observations, later recorded in America: The Land of Superlatives, offer a remarkable Indian perspective on the American South.Colum is very much in that Gandhian mold. A civil rights lawyer, municipal judge, and three-term District Attorney, he was given no chance in the election considering Trump had won the state by a whopping 23 per cent in 2024 and Hyde-Smith had won her previous election by seven points. Virtually every poll had classified her seat as safely Republican. But he refused to budge.In fact, such was Hyde-Smith’s hubris that she declined repeated invitations to debate Colom, sneering that he would not be able to fill a room if she was not present. Trump himself may have sensed some trouble though when polls showed the race narrowing in the final days, making his first visit to Mississippi in seven years to campaign for her. “I’m here because Cindy’s doing great, but I just got to make sure. I can’t take a chance,” he said.On Wednesday, Colum took his chance and drove Hyde-Smith out of the Senate with a stunning victory that was built on kitchen table issues rather than bloviating about ballrooms. A 7th generation Mississippian, his campaign masterstroke was a 30-sec ad built around Hyde-Smith’s response to complaints about soaring beef prices: consumers, she suggested, had plenty of other proteins to choose from. Colom’s ad, echoing the “let-them-eat-cake” smackdown, featured incredulous Mississippians delivering the devastating rejoinder: rather than choose another protein, they would choose another senator.On Thursday, Democrats were dancing in the aisles even as MAGA minions were panicking at the prospect of Colum becoming a “national threat” to the Republican Party as one Fox News commentator put it — bigger than Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Colom himself offered a characteristically restrained response to suggestions that he could become a national political star: Mississippi first; no masala please.