Films, Flair and Fire: The Mira Nair Saga
“Truth is much stranger than fiction and, often, much more powerful”
When art shifts from the propaganda of being congenial to the crowd to depicting hard-hitting bare truths, it creates a whirlwind of sentiments and lends a voice to those emotions we never knew we could process. Mira Nair is a flagbearer of her kind in this sphere. Her work perhaps embodies the unique blend of gender, desire, culture, marginalities and human rights that, more often than not, borders on controversies.
Mira Nair was born on 15th October, 1957 and raised in the remote village of Bhubaneshwar in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. Before diving into film craft and carving her name as a pioneering South Asian artistic directing voice, Nair was initially interested in acting. Having once performed in plays written by Badal Sarkar, the Bengali artist, she was also involved in political street theatre, particularly in Delhi, where she attended university. After a few years, Nair pursued and received a scholarship to study acting at Harvard University. Such was her flair that she won a Boylston Prize for her performance of Jocasta” s speech from Seneca” s Oedipus. However, she soon decided that traditional theatre didn’t appeal to her. About acting, Nair once expressed, “I was frustrated that I was at the mercy of someone else” s idea. And I didn’t “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.” She then took up photography which ultimately led to documentary filmmaking.
Trained in ‘Cinema Verité’ or observational cinema, Nair sought to unveil the truth in its most untarnished form alongside crude reality with a camera. Her first attempt was a black and white documentary entitled ‘Jama Masjid Street Journal’, which she shot on the old streets of Delhi. ‘So Far from India’ (1983), Nair’s second venture trailed the life of an Indian man relentlessly pursuing the immigrant dream of a better life in New York while his pregnant wife awaited his return. This film won Best Documentary at the American Film Festival and the New York” s Global Village Film Festival.
The year 1984 saw the release of her most controversial and provocative film, ‘India Cabaret’ which followed the story of two female strippers in Mumbai and a customer who regularly visits a local strip club while his wife stays at home. In attempts to unravel stereotypes around female’ virtue’ and ‘decency’ and to understand the idea behind “the line that divides good women from the so-called not-good women in society”, as she put it, she moved in with the strippers for four months despite her family’s wishes. Her fourth and last film, ‘Children of A Desired Sex’, exposed the abortion of female foetuses resulting from society’s chauvinistic lineage reflecting preference towards male offspring.
With this, she was done with documentaries and waiting for audiences to see her work, as documentaries are rarely watched compared to commercial cinema. With an urge to do something different and have more control over the stories, she then moved to fiction. Thus, she closed the chapter on documentaries and fast forwards to her feature debut ‘Salaam Bombay’. The 1988 film reflects the everyday chronicles of slum children. Now considered a cinematic classic, it received over 25 international awards, including the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was a merger of her theatre experience and cinema verité training with a hint of her neorealist style. In 1989 she established the ‘Salaam Baalak Trust to rehabilitate the children who appeared in the film. Later in 2005, she would establish ‘Maisha’ in Uganda, an annual filmmakers’ laboratory to train young directors in East Africa inspired by the motto, “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will”.
In ‘Mississippi Masala,’ the up-and-coming director challenged the audience with her views on the evident prejudice between African-American and Indian communities cleverly projected through the story of Ugandan-born Indians displaced in Mississippi. The controversial, erotic and perhaps way ahead of its time drama ‘Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love’ had the director devoting months to the fights for its release — including the formation of a clause requiring theatres to schedule women-only screenings.
In 2001 came ‘Monsoon Wedding ‘, which in her own words, was “a Bollywood film on my own terms”. It was about the vibrant colours of the “big fat Indian wedding”, brilliantly interwoven with overwhelming emotions. Her deft cinematographic style integrated the darker aspect of child abuse into the storyline in just the correct proportion. The film won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, making Nair its first female recipient.
‘Hysterical Blindness’, next in Nair’s unconventional forays into the artistic sphere, was an emotional powerhouse centred around the protagonist who suffered from the disease of the same name. After directing William Makepeace Thackeray’s epic ‘Vanity Fair’, Nair moved on to direct ‘The Namesake’ based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. These were the kind of films that subtly questioned the various stigmas crippling our society but spoke way louder than the stereotypic cacophony of ‘masala’ movies.
Her films were distinctive from the previous one in either storyline or style, with her crisp direction and impeccable cinematography scaling new Everest” s. ‘Queen of Katwe’, produced by Disney- the house of ‘Star Wars’, and starring everything from fairy-tale princesses to animated fishes that made our childhood vibrant, was a standard movie of the production house to only the extent that it had a happy ending. What made it different was its bold, unblinking examination of poverty, violence, and racism that the movie” s protagonist faced daily.
Nair has also explored the field of short filmmaking, which she considers to be a better venture than ‘selling perfumes’. Creations like ‘A Fork, a Spoon and a Knight’, ‘How Can It Be? ‘, ‘Migration (2008)’, ‘New York, I Love You (2009)’ and ‘11’09" 01 September 11', in which 11 filmmakers reacted to the events of 9/11, were more like tools for her to reassess the creative idiosyncrasies and voice her expression of freedom and creativity.
Over the years, her art, styles and approaches have varied. Still, the essence has only rung loud and clear from the raw kinetic energy of her early documentary films that brought her out to the streets to the high-profile, glossier and untamed depictions of subjects most directors tend to leave untampered. In recognition of this zeal, she has won accolades worldwide, including the India Abroad Person of the Year in 2007 and India’s third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan, in 2012.
“Is this a film only I can make?” is a straightforward question that Mira Nair asks herself each time she chooses a project. She is an artist who grows with each successive work. She bridges worlds not only by bringing together critically acclaimed actors with ordinary humans, like the slum children in ‘Salaam Bombay’, but also by unearthing and portraying the poignant panorama of human emotions and struggles that her contemporaries would consider unmarketable. Her films are neither limited to any particular theme nor a specific form, but they are united in their earnestness to portray and champion the raw, human emotions that our world is built on.
Her films are neither limited to any particular theme nor a specific form, but they are united in their earnestness to portray and champion the raw, human emotions that our world is built on.
“Nair, like fire” is how she describes her surname, which is veracious if not befitting.
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