Ritual, in both serious and humorous forms, plays an integral role in The Darjeeling Limited. The film portrays one Whitman family ritual after another, especially through verbal repetition in the three brothers’ conversations. The Darjeeling Limited is structured around the familiar trope of white tourists’ “spiritual” pilgrimage to India, exemplified most recently by The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The film both exemplifies and pokes fun at this genre of travel narrative, exploiting this cliché to frame its story of family, grief, and ritual. Despite the fact that their journey by train across India begins as a cliché, the Whitman brothers do experience the transformative power of ritual when they participate in the funeral rites of an India boy.
Ritual and Pilgrimage
At the urging of their older brother, Francis, Peter and Jack Whitman travel to India. Francis is the paradigmatically naïve white tourist: he conceives of India as an exotic, inherently spiritual land that will serve as the perfect site for his brothers to rekindle their relationships and reawaken their spirituality. Francis unilaterally proposes that they pursue three objectives on their trip: to “become brothers again like we used to be, to find ourselves and bond with each other” and “make this trip a spiritual journey where each of us seek the unknown and we learn about it” and to be “completely open and say ‘yes’ to everything, even if it’s shocking and painful.”
Francis’s initial plans, however, prove an absurd failure as the brothers spend most of their time squabbling. Whenever two of the brothers are alone they share secrets about the absent brother. They do this so automatically and compulsively that we might think of it as a family ritual. Francis’s assistant, Brendan, creates an elaborate itinerary, including all of the “spiritual places and temples” the brothers will visit. At one of these sites, as the three brothers try to pray, Jack asks, “Do you think it’s working? Do you feel something?” Peter replies, “I hope so” and Francis says, “It’s got to.” The brothers find little meaning in this kind of voyeuristic, pseudo-spirituality. They are tourists rather than pilgrims, and their half-hearted attempts at prayer remain empty.
Throughout the film, the three Whitman brothers carry their father’s large set of matching luggage. The film, thus, literalizes the metaphor of “baggage” for unresolved emotional issues. They are in denial about their father’s death, so they cling to his physical possessions to feel closer to him. Peter, for instance, wears his father’s glasses, even though they are the wrong prescription for his eyes and give him headaches. Francis is annoyed with Peter for taking the glasses, telling Jack, “Those glasses belong to all three of us.” Francis feels less close to their father because Peter has those glasses. Peter also carries his father’s car keys—even though the car is thousands of miles away—like a talisman that conjures his father’s presence. Francis objects to Peter’s shaving with their father’s razor: “You don’t have permission to take his property that belongs to all of us and use it as if it’s yours.”
This emotional baggage manifests itself in different forms of destructive behavior for each brother. Early in the film, they try to dull their pain, exchanging muscle relaxer, flu medicine, and painkillers. Beyond this self-medication, the brothers follow the same abandonment behavior modeled for them by their mother. After their father’s funeral, Jack goes to Paris, staying in an exorbitant hotel. Francis tries to kill himself, but survives crashing his motorcycle. Peter leaves the country, even though his wife is seven-and-a-half months pregnant.
Peter feels conflicted about his wife, Alice’s, pregnancy. When Francis asks him about Alice’s pregnancy, Peter admits, “I guess because I always expected eventually I would get divorced, so having children really wasn’t part of my plan.” Peter cannot explain why he always expected his marriage would not last, but he attributes it to “how we were raised.” He is afraid of fatherhood because he has not allowed himself to grieve for his own father and he feels abandoned by his mother, Patricia, who becomes a nun in India after her husband’s death. Ironically, Patricia turns her own sons into orphans in order to care for Indian children. She does not even attend her husband’s funeral. Patricia repeats her habitual abandonment of her sons after they find her orphanage and confront her. After sharing a seemingly authentic conversation with their mother, the brothers awaken to discover that she is gone. Peter has a hard time imagining his marriage lasting because their mother, as Francis says, has “been disappearing all our lives.”
Patricia’s abandonment of her sons goes back to their childhood. Francis attempted to raise his younger brothers because their mother was an absent presence. Francis asks his brothers, “Did I raise us, kind of?” Francis continues this mothering behavior throughout the film, holding his brothers’ passports, ordering their meals for them, and scheduling every detail of their trip. When Francis does reveal that he is taking his brothers to visit their mother, he explains that he kept it from him “Because I’m trying to protect you from all of the painful emotions this is probably going to stir up.” It turns out that Francis is imitating their mother’s attitude toward her sons, even repeating phrases he learned from her, such as “Let’s make an agreement.” This particular phrase takes on a ritual quality, as Francis uses it to establish control over a chaotic situation and coerce his brothers’ consent. When Patricia learns of her sons’ intent to visit her, she sends them a letter to discourage them from doing so.
Francis is eager to impute profound meaning to their journey. When the train goes off track, for instance, Brendan explains that the conductor is not exactly sure where they are: “We haven’t located us yet.” Francis immediately finds an existential meaning: “Is that symbolic? We haven’t located us yet!” After a series of humorous and absurd experiences, parodies of mystical experiences in an exotic landscape, the brothers do have a genuine spiritual encounter, but not one that they could script in advance. Contrasted with the vacuous pseudo-spirituality of Francis’s initial itinerary and the asceticism behind which Patricia hides her abandonment of her sons, the brothers participate in a real ritual rooted in the communal life of an Indian village.
Two Funerals
The importance of ritual is dramatized in one of the film’s most critical sequences—the juxtaposition of the funeral of an Indian boy with the events of the day of Mr. Whitman’s funeral. These scenes have a chiastic structure, such that the events that befall the brothers when they are supposed to be at their father’s funeral are inserted in the middle of the Indian boy’s funeral.
Why are the Whitman brothers at the funeral of an Indian boy? When they see three Indian boys caught in the current of a river, Francis, Peter, and Jack rush to save them. While Francis and Jack are successful, the boy Peter tries to save drowns before he can pull his body from the river. Peter, thus, lives through his worst fear about becoming a father; he experiences the death of a young boy who becomes a surrogate for his soon-to-be-born son. The three brothers return to the boys’ village with the two survivors and the body of their friend. Despite the tragedy, the strangers are welcomed by the community and allowed to participate in the grieving process. They meet other children in the village—Peter even holds one of the infants, a foreshadowing of the moment of his son’s birth—witness the funeral rites, and are able to mourn the boy whom they never knew, yet instinctively loved.
In the middle of the funeral rites the film flashes back to the day of Mr. Whitman’s funeral. On their way to the cemetery, the brothers stop at an auto repair shop to pick up their father’s car. Peter insists that they stop for the car, even though they are already late. While this decision initially seems irrational, it reflects his impulsive desire to maintain a connection to their father through his possessions. The car, however, has not been fixed, so the brothers must leave it at the garage, taking the missing piece of their father’s luggage (discovered in the trunk of the car) with them. A phone conversation between Francis and Alice reveals that there is a tight timetable at the cemetery and they will miss the funeral if they do not arrive soon. Moreover, Alice tells Francis that his mother is not there.
After the flashback, we return to the funeral of the Indian boy. The juxtaposition reveals that only the proper ritual allows one to mourn the death of a loved one. The brothers have remained in denial about the death of their father for so long because they did not attend his funeral—they have been unable to truly express their grief. Although this ritual is rooted in a specific religious and cultural context it is universalized by the fact that the brothers neither understand the language in which the funeral is conducted, nor know anything about Hindu theology. What matters is that this ritual is authentic and communal, not how it relates to larger beliefs about God or the afterlife.
At the end of the film, the Whitman brothers finally let go of the baggage—both literal and figurative—from their father’s death. Their new train is pulling out of the station, but they cannot catch it weighed down by their father’s luggage. Each of them drops the bags, running to board the train.
