Mira Nair

Indian-born American film director and screenwriter

• Born: October 15, 1957
• Place of Birth: Rourkela, India

Mira Nair is a prominent Indian American film director and one of the world’s best-known female filmmakers.

Full name: Mira Nair

Area of achievement: Film

Early Life

Indian-born American film director and screenwriter. Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, in eastern India, the youngest of three children in a family of Punjabi descent. Her father, Amrit Nair, was a civil servant; her mother, Praveen Nair, was a social worker. Nair, who attended an Irish Catholic missionary school in Simla (now spelled Shimla), developed a passion for drama during her youth. When she was sixteen years old, she participated in protest theater in Calcutta with the Bengali playwright Badal Sircar. At Delhi University, where she majored in sociology, Nair joined an amateur theater group run by expatriate British director Barry John.

While at Delhi University, Nair felt the need to expand her educational opportunities. She applied to European and American schools and left Delhi University in 1976 for Harvard University, which awarded her a full scholarship. At Harvard, her passions shifted from theater to photography and then to documentary filmmaking, which she saw as a merging of her interests in theater, the visual arts, and sociology. For her senior thesis project in sociology, she made Jama Masjid Street Journal(1979), a documentary exploring the lives of traditional Delhi Muslims.

Life’s Work

After graduating from Harvard in 1979, Nair continued making documentaries. So Far from India (1982) examines an Indian newspaper seller in New York City who is separated from his wife in India. The film won prizes for best documentary at the American Film Festival and the Global Village Film Festival in New York. India Cabaret (1985) follows the lives of two strippers who worked at a seedy Bombay nightclub, while the dilemma of pregnant Indian women who learn they are carrying female fetuses is the focus of Children of a Desired Sex (1987). These films established Nair as a leading documentary filmmaker. India Cabaret, which celebrates the strength and humor of its subjects, won awards at film festivals and was shown on public television in the United States.

Desiring more creative control over her work than documentary filmmaking gave her, Nair decided to make a feature-length fiction film. The result was Salaam Bombay! (1988), which she produced, directed, and co-wrote, and which established her as a major filmmaking talent. The film won several sought-after awards, including the Camera d’Or prize for best first film and the Prix du Public, both at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, as well as an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

Nair followed this triumph with her first film in English, Mississippi Masala (1991), which portrays a Ugandan-born Indian family who move to Greenwood, Mississippi, after being expelled from Uganda. While her father (Roshan Seth) runs a liquor store, a young woman (Sarita Choudhury) cleans motel rooms and falls in love with an African American (Denzel Washington), earning her family’s disapproval. The cultural and generational clashes in Mississippi Masala are similar to those in several of Nair’s other films, including The Perez Family (1995), her first film to deal with non-Indian characters. This film, which stars Alfred Molina, Marisa Tomei, and Anjelica Huston, presents a group of unrelated Cubans who pretend to be a family to receive better treatment from the US Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Nair returned to India for Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), inspired by the ancient Indian text about human sexual behavior. The film was shot under a different title to avoid government censorship and was later banned in India because of its nudity and strong sexual content. Set in sixteenth-century India, Kama Sutra is the story of Tara (Sarita Choudhury), an upper-caste princess, and Maya (Indira Varma), Tara’s best friend forced into the role of her servant. To get revenge for being treated as an inferior, Maya seduces Tara’s husband, Prince Raj (Naveen Andrews). Although critics gave the film mixed reviews, Kama Sutra is notable as Nair’s most explicit look at sexual passion, a frequent subject in her films, and also stands out for its vivid colors and striking images. The film won an Independent Spirit Award (1998) for the cinematography of Declan Quinn, Nair’s frequent collaborator.

The equally colorful Monsoon Wedding (2001) has been Nair’s most popular film. Nair and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan juggle a large cast of characters as the Verma family prepares for the wedding of daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to Hermant Rai (Parvin Dabas), an American expatriate she has just met. Their arranged marriage is complicated by Aditi’s affair with her married boss (Sameer Arya). Family tensions arise, and secrets are exposed in the days before the wedding. Among Nair’s films, Monsoon Wedding is distinguished by its complex and sympathetic treatment of a large cast of characters. In 2001, Monsoon Weddingwon the Golden Lion as the best film at the Venice Film Festival and was also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for best foreign language film. It earned $30 million, the most money ever made by an Indian film.

Nair followed Monsoon Wedding with Vanity Fair (2004), a large-scale adaptation of the William Makepeace Thackeray novel. While the film was not a critical or commercial success, the story of Becky Sharp (Reese Witherspoon), a young woman in early-nineteenth-century England, gave Nair the opportunity to expand upon the narrative methods of Monsoon Wedding, as numerous characters and subplots are interwoven. With bright reds, yellows, and oranges, Vanity Fair has the color palette of Nair’s Indian films.

The family and generational misunderstandings of Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding are also on display in The Namesake (2006). Adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, the film tells the story of Gogol (Kal Penn), a first-generation American of Indian descent, and his struggle to maintain his American identity at the expense of his Indian heritage. Gogol eventually travels to India to discover his true self. The film won the Dartmouth Film Award and the Pride of India Award. Nair’s next film, Amelia (2009), the story of pioneering pilot Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), became her biggest failure, ignored by filmgoers and considered disappointing by reviewers.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), based on a novel of the same name by Mohsin Hamid, was considered a return to form, gaining wide acclaim when it was released at the Venice Film Festival. Nair then directed The Queen of Katwe (2016), based on the life of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi and starring Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo.

Nair has also directed several short fictional and documentary films and two made-for-television films, My Own Country (1998) and Hysterical Blindness(2002).

In 2020 Nair's period miniseries, A Suitable Boy, streamed on Acorn TV. Based on Vikram Seth's 1993 best-selling novel of the same title, the series is set in 1950s Brahmpur, a fictional north Indian city. Nair earned plaudits from reviewers, including Roxana Hadadi for RogerEbert.com (3 Dec. 2020), who wrote, “Mira Nair’s strengths as a filmmaker are on full, dazzling display” in the series. In 2022, Nair directed one episode of the Disney+ series National Treasure: Edge of History. In 2024, Nair served alongside Lena Waithe and Shaunak Sen as jurors for the Sundance Film Festival.

Nair’s first husband was Mitch Epstein, her Harvard photography instructor. Epstein, who became a well-known photographer, was director of photography for So Far from India and India Cabaret, as well as cinematographer for Salaam Bombay!and Mississippi Masala. Nair’s second husband is Mahmood Mamdani, a political scientist and professor, with whom she has a son, Zohran. Nair and Mamdani lived for a time in the Ugandan hilltop house seen in Mississippi Masala.

Significance

With a consistently challenging body of work, Nair has firmly established herself as one of the most important female directors in the world. Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake can be seen as a trilogy exploring how Indians and Americans of Indian extraction struggle to find their identities while often being at odds with their families, their cultures, and even themselves.

Bibliography

Eichenbaum, Rose. The Director Within: Storytellers of Stage and Screen. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print.

Hadadi, Roxana. “Mira Nair’s Charming A Suitable Boy Miniseries Will Transport You.” Review of A Suitable Boy, directed by Mira Nair. RogerEbert.com, 3 Dec. 2020, www.rogerebert.com/streaming/a-suitable-boy-tv-review-acorn-tv. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.

Hazleton, John. "Sundance 2024 Jurors Include Mira Nair, Lena Waithe and Shaunak Sen." Screen Daily, www.screendaily.com/news/sundance-2024-jurors-include-mira-nair-lena-waithe-and-shaunak-sen/5189115.article. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

"Keep Your Voice Alive while Entertaining: Mira Nair." Indian Express. Indian Express, 7 Mar. 2016. Web. 23 June 2016.

Lowenstein, Stephen, ed. My First Movie: Twenty Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print.

"Mira Nair." IMDb, 2023, www.imdb.com/name/nm0619762/. Accessed 31 Aug. 2024.

Muir, John Kenneth. Mercy in Her Eyes: The Films of Mira Nair. New York: Applause, 2006. Print.

Nair, Mira. "Director Mira Nair on Who Decides What's 'Marginal' and Why People Should Tell Their Own Story." Interview by Emily Wilson. TruthDig. TruthDig, 22 May 2016. Web. 23 June 2016.

Nair, Mira, Matthew Faulk, Mark Skeet, and Julian Fellowes. Vanity Fair: A Mira Nair Film; Bringing Thackeray’s Timeless Novel to the Screen. New York: Newmarket, 2004. Print.