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“I think films have to reach people and really grab them. That’s what I hope to do when I make a film - to get under your skin and really make you think about something, and have a transporting time that takes you somewhere.”
- Mira Nair
One of the most celebrated Indian directors of our time, Mira Nair is a visionary equipped with a passion for Cinéma Vérité. Born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, to Amrit Nair, an IAS officer, and Parveen Nayaar a social worker, Nair kept shifting home base because of her father’s career. Her infatuation with film eventually began in college at Miranda House, Delhi while she majored in Sociology.
Nair has stated in various interviews she was drawn to acting at first but then shifted to directing for the control and creativity that executing ideas and interpreting them inhibits. She tells Point of View Magazine,“I was frustrated that I was at the mercy of someone else’s idea. And I didn’t care about the narcissism of it. I wanted to be able to interpret the world, rather than be a cog in the wheel of someone else’s vision. That led me to documentary.”
Mira Nair’s filmography starts with her lesser-known directorial debuts as a student such as Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979) which talks about the traditions that revolve around Muslim communities and Children of a Desired Sex (1987) which narrates India’s patriarchal society and the effects of it. Her first documentary was India Cabaret, which explored the stereotypes of women as well as the lives of strip-tease dancers who earn a livelihood for themselves. Nair’s flair for capturing India’s essence in relation to marginalization is a re-occurring motif in many of her films.
With Salaam Bombay, Mira Nair earned her first nomination for an Academy Award for Best International Feature Film and explores the life of Krishna in the slums of Bombay. The documentary chronicles the lives of young street children, who were actually children from neighboring slums hired as actors, unpacking the plight of India’s urban street children who work meal to meal. The marginalized in Mississippi Masala (1991) starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhary are an interracial couple. Rural Mississippi contrasted with a Ugandan-born Indian family trying to navigate America and it’s racial landscapes, at the same time Nair tries to capture flowering young love.
In Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, featuring Indira Varma, Rheka and Naveen Andrews, Nair is exploring the sensual pleasures of the body while critiquing the power dynamics between a woman and a king. Her concern with diaspora intensifies with adaptions such as The Namesake, originally written by Jhumpa Lahiri and adapted by Mira Nair into film includes the multifaceted experience of a young Bengali couple coming to America with a strong sense of heritage and how identity morphs or assimilates according to the new-age American society while their children are growing up and experiencing the world. Nair’s take on family values, immigration and adaption is tender and moving. Her most recent film was 2016’s Queen of Katwe, a biographical drama film telling the story of Ugandan girl named Phiona who lives in Katwe and ends up becoming a Chess Grand Master.
Mira Nair’s history as a film-maker is peppered with awards. Her sincerity towards creating novel cross-cultural films that depict diaspora and family in a loving way to showcasing the harrowing lives of children born in the red-light district of Bombay in the late 1980s is a testament to Nair’s scale of storytelling. With movie magic, Nair’s method of telling stories with human connection as a central element touches hearts every day.
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