Mira Nair: A Cinematic Journey of Culture, Justice, and the Unseen World
Mira Nair, an Indian American filmmaker, has carved a unique path in the world of cinema, blending her artistic vision with a deep commitment to social justice. From her early documentaries exploring Indian cultural traditions to her acclaimed feature films, Nair has consistently championed marginalized voices and challenged conventional narratives. Her journey, marked by both critical acclaim and personal activism, reflects a profound belief in the power of art to reflect and change the world.
Early Life and Education: A Foundation for Storytelling
Born and raised in Rourkela, India, on October 15, 1957, Mira Nair's early life was steeped in a diverse cultural landscape. She grew up in a "colonial-style bungalow, with [a] spacious veranda and terracotta-tiled floor". Her father, Amrit, was a remote character, who was "not much fun", and her parents later (around 1990) separated, after years of tension and fighting. Nair appreciated Amrit's love of Persian poetry and song, but he drove his children hard, insisting that they "spend their time usefully". Nair first attended Ispat English Medium School in Rourkela, from ages 7 to 10, between 1964 and 1967. Her family moved to Bhubaneswar, where she lived until age 18. She studied at Miranda House-a college for women at Delhi University-where she majored in sociology. While at university, she belonged to an amateur drama company in Delhi. This foundation fueled her passion for storytelling and social observation. After turning down the offer of a full scholarship to Cambridge University in England in 1976, aged 19, she moved to the US to attend Harvard University on a scholarship. She enjoyed acting and continued to perform throughout her first year at Harvard. Upon return to Harvard, she was admitted to the department of Visual and Environmental Studies based on her photographic submission. She attended the introductory photography course that was being taught by her future first husband, Mitch Epstein, in 1977, and she did some work for him on his freelance assignments. She, however, then dropped photography, preferring filmmaking. Her time at Delhi and Harvard Universities exposed her to diverse perspectives and solidified her commitment to using art as a tool for social change.
Nair's artistic journey began with acting, performing in plays by Bengali dramatist and theatre director Badal Sircar while in India. While she studied film at Harvard, Nair also became involved in the theatre program. She then transitioned to documentary filmmaking, influenced by cinéma vérité, the cinema of truth, which, as she puts it, gave her “a home of using or working in art to try to reflect or change the world.” This approach, emphasizing unfiltered observation and a commitment to capturing reality, would become a hallmark of her work.
Documentary Beginnings: Exploring Cultural Identity and Social Issues
Before venturing into narrative features, Nair honed her skills as a documentary filmmaker, focusing on Indian cultural traditions and the experiences of marginalized communities. For her film thesis at Harvard, between 1978 and 1979, she produced a black-and-white film titled Jama Masjid Street Journal. In the 18-minute film, Nair explored the streets of Old Delhi and had casual conversations with Indian locals, using a Bolex camera. After Nair graduated and moved to New York, American filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, a pioneer of the cinéma vérité style of documentary filmmaking, liked Jama Masjid Street Journal and helped Nair secure a grant for her next film. Her second documentary, So Far from India (1982), was a 52-minute film that follows an Indian newspaper dealer living in the subways of New York. His pregnant wife waits for him to return home to India. The protagonist, Ashok, slowly becomes estranged from not only his family, but also his Indian heritage. Her third documentary, India Cabaret, with cinematography by her husband Mitch Epstein, opened the inaugural Indian International Film Festival, in Hyderabad, in 1985. The film was very well received at the festival. It portrays the exploitation of female strippers in Bombay, and follows a customer who regularly visits a local strip club while his wife stays at home. Nair raised roughly $130,000 for the project. The 59-minute film was shot over a span of two months. India Cabaret was widely criticized, primarily by Indian men, who objected to the portrayal of women working as strippers or those who are forced to marry. In New York some opponents tried to block release of the film on WNET. The film was bought by PBS, but then rejected by Channel 13, the network's New York affiliate. Nair's family, especially her father, also criticized it. He said she should not have positively portrayed these women. Nair created India Cabaret to reveal the prejudice shown towards sex workers. Some feminists criticized her for filming these women through the male gaze, due to the sexual nature of the strip clubs. Children of a Desired Sex (1987) was the fourth documentary Nair directed. In 2001, with The Laughing Club of India, she explored yoga based on laughter. Its founder, Madan Kararia, spoke of the club's history and the growth of laughing clubs across the country, and subsequently the world. The documentary included testimonials from members of the laughter clubs who described how the practice had improved or changed their lives. These early works demonstrated her commitment to giving voice to those often overlooked by mainstream society.
Salaam Bombay! A Breakthrough into Narrative Filmmaking
In June 1987, with Taraporevala, Nair researched and co-wrote Salaam Bombay!, which turned out to be an enormous and exhausting undertaking. Nair sought out real street children to more authentically portray the lives of children who survived in the streets and were deprived of a true childhood. Mitch Epstein was co-producer and production designer on the film. They struggled to get financing, but eventually Nair "managed to cajole completion cash out of a French company". On 19 May 1988, three days after Nair had finished cutting the film, it had its world première at the closing gala at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. It earned a 15-minute standing ovation, and won the Caméra d'Or (the first Indian film to do so) and the Prix du public (Audience Prize). It was nominated at the 1989 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film.
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The film's success not only launched Nair's career but also underscored her commitment to social responsibility. She used the profits from Salaam Bombay! to create Salaam Baalak Trust, a nonprofit organization that works with street children in India. This act exemplifies Nair's belief in using her platform to make a tangible difference in the lives of those she portrays on screen.
Feature Films: Exploring Identity, Love, and Cultural Conflict
Following the success of Salaam Bombay!, Nair directed a string of critically acclaimed feature films that explored themes of identity, love, and cultural conflict.
Nair and Taraporevala next worked together on the 1991 film Mississippi Masala, which told the story of Ugandan-born Indians (displaced by Idi Amin in 1972) in Mississippi. Their research for the film started in March 1989, and was their first visit to Africa. Nair met her second husband, Asian Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, when she interviewed him in Nairobi after having read his book From Citizen to Refugee, about the expulsion of Asians. The film centers on a carpet-cleaner business owner (Denzel Washington) who falls in love with the daughter (Sarita Choudhury) of one of his Indian clients. The film revealed the prejudice in black and Indian communities. Mississippi Masala was heavily inspired by the history of Indian emigrants in Uganda. Her next feature, The Perez Family (1995) was not a success. Monsoon Wedding, written by Sabrina Dhawan, was filmed over only 30 days, using only a small crew, including some of Nair's acquaintances and relatives. Released in 2001, the film told the story of an Indian Punjabi wedding. In the end, the film grossed over $30 million worldwide. Nair directed the 2002 television film, Hysterical Blindness for HBO. The film is a romance set 1987 starring Uma Thurman in the lead role. In 2005, Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but turned it down to work on The Namesake, reportedly after her son Zohran persuaded her that she was the only one who could direct the latter. Based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Sooni Taraporevala's screenplay follows the son of Indian immigrants who wants to fit in with New York City society, but struggles to get away from his family's traditional ways. In 2012, Nair directed The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a thriller based on the best-selling novel by Mohsin Hamid, starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, and Kiefer Sutherland. It tells a post-9/11 story about the impact of the terrorist attacks on one Pakistani man and his treatment by Americans in reaction to them. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy to critical acclaim, and was released worldwide in early 2013. Nair's 2016 film Queen of Katwe, a Disney production, starred Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo, and was based on a biography of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi written by American author Tim Crothers. She contributed a segment to the anthology film 11'09"01 September 11 (2002) in which 11 filmmakers reacted to the terrorist attack on New York on 11 September 2001. Her film dramatises a true story, of a New York Pakistani family whose son, Mohammad Salman Hamdani, missing after the event, was suspected by police and reported by press as being one of the terrorists. Other titles include How Can It Be?
Maisha Film Lab: Nurturing Emerging Filmmakers in East Africa
Inspired by her time in Uganda during the filming of "Mississippi Masala," Nair established Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda, in 2005. This nonprofit training initiative provides emerging East African filmmakers with the skills and resources to tell their own stories. As Nair explains, "If we don't tell our own stories, no one will."
Maisha Film Lab has trained over 1000 alumni of young filmmakers from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, in Kampala,” and created a “thriving East African film culture 16 years later.” She intends for Maisha to give its students training “in a way that is excellent and deep and total, and is taught by the people who practice,” for its alumni to begin “ telling the stories that no one else can tell.” The lab's emphasis on practical training, mentorship, and cultural relevance has empowered a new generation of African filmmakers, fostering a vibrant and diverse film culture in the region. Lupita Nyong'o is an alum of director Mira Nair's film lab, Maisha. For her most recent film, the upcoming "Queen of Katwe," 30 percent of the film crew are Maisha alumni, including Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o.
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Artistic Vision and Social Activism: An Intertwined Path
Throughout her career, Nair has remained committed to both artistic excellence and social activism. She sees these two aspects of her life as inextricably linked, using her films to raise awareness about social issues and her activism to support marginalized communities.
Despite her work as an activist, Nair is careful about the characterization of the relationship between her activism and filmmaking. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, an artist, a visual person,” she explains, “not just an agitprop, not just a bandwagon, to proclaim things.” Nair said she wanted to “do what called out to me.” “And often what calls out to me is a world unseen,” she added. Throughout her career, Nair has followed that call. “I went towards the worlds that I could access that anyone else couldn’t or didn’t want to, or didn’t need. Or more importantly, they didn’t see,” she says. That work began in her documentaries; in “So Far From India,” her first documentary after her thesis, which follows a subway newsstand worker and the family he left behind in India, she captures “the pull of the dream of America in the eyes of a humble Indian family.” “Being a person who grew up elsewhere, an Indian woman, who felt very rooted in where I came from,” she recalls, “I didn’t want to ever think of myself as subduing where I came from, or my identity.” Her filmography reflects that. India is central to Nair’s work, from documentaries like “So Far From India” to feature films like “Salaam Bombay!” and “Monsoon Wedding,” which follows the shifting relationships surrounding an Indian wedding. Nair’s gaze, however, is not limited to one world. “Crossing the oceans from the age of 18 to come to this country, then back-and-forth” later in life, she is a person who has “lived in many worlds.” She believes in the ability of cinema to “reflect that seesaw between worlds in a very powerful way.”
1991’s “Mississippi Masala” is a story of interracial and intercultural love in America. It’s important to Nair that the eyes of that film are not “the eyes of an outsider looking in.” For her, “you have to be part of that world, to love it and be reverent about it” in order to make a film about it. “The commonality we shared was so deep of families being together, of even religion, for even of food,” Nair says. Even in making “Hysterical Blindness,” which stands out in her filmography for being a self-admittedly “entirely American film,” Nair believes she is expressing something universal.
Nair’s archives, a testament to her life of activism and art, have a home at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library.
Personal Life: Navigating Multiple Worlds
Nair's personal life reflects her global perspective and her ability to navigate diverse cultures. In 1977, Nair met her first husband, photographer Mitch Epstein, when taking photography classes at Harvard University. He was her lecturer, and they married in 1981 in India, in a traditional Punjabi wedding, despite Epstein being "a Jewish boy from Holyoke, Massachusetts." They were together for 12 years, of which they were married for 8. On 29 March 1989, Nair met her second husband, Indo-Ugandan political scientist Mahmood Mamdani, in Nairobi, Kenya, while doing research for the film Mississippi Masala. She had read his book From Citizen to Refugee, about the expulsion of Asians. Nair moved in with Mamdani on campus at Makerere University, where he was teaching. Her experiences living and working in different countries have enriched her storytelling and broadened her understanding of the human condition. As she puts it, she has “lived in many worlds” and believes in the ability of cinema to “reflect that seesaw between worlds in a very powerful way.”
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