In September 2001, a day before she won the Golden Lion for Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair stood on the balcony of a 16th century building on the Grand Canal in Venice, watching the Regata Storica, a historical recreational parade of the boats of the Doges, with a newly-made Italian friend. The Italian friend, who later became my husband, described Mira as a kind of Pied Piper, collecting relatives along the way from the Lido, to the Rialto Bridge, and finally to his aunt’s apartment, where Mira with her entourage watched the parade on a jubilant afternoon. Anyone who meets Mira for even a short while will recognise that there is something joy-grabbing about her. That her nickname is Toofani will not come as a surprise.
When we met recently at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Mira recalls that time in Venice with pleasure. She speaks about Monsoon Wedding with the affection one reserves for a first love. “I was so happy to be there,” she says. “I made the film as an intimate family flick, an experiment, and the unexpected thing was that it just played and played for months in any country it was showing.” Fitting that Mira won the highest award for the film in a country that shares a similar obsession with family. And also, that she won in Venice, the city of bridges, because bridges are what underpin the geography of Mira’s life.
The three landscapes
India, Uganda and North America are the three landscapes she moves between, and Mira tells me she holds them all through engagement. Not by treating one as a garden, the other as a school, and the other as a career-making place, but through real engagement.
“I like to be of use in life,” she says. “When I fell in love and moved to Kampala, while I was making Mississippi Masala in 1989, I had a foot in Hollywood, and every few and far between script that Hollywood would dig up about ‘Africa’, as they called it, they would send me, and it had nothing to do with my world there, nothing to do with the dignity of where I lived and the struggle and the beauty of our people. I thought I should be of use. I’ve taught what I know in different parts of the world, so why not here?”
Staying focussed
This is how Maisha Film Lab, Mira’s mentorship programme in Kampala began. It now has over 700 alumni and 30% of her last film, Queen of Katwe, featured alumni. Chinua Achebe quoted that great proverb: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunters.” Mira is more blunt: “African stories must be told by Africans, and must be told beautifully and excellently with craft at its highest level and not apologetically. We must tell our own stories, because if we don’t they’ll definitely f*** it up.”
“They” here, is Hollywood, the powerhouse which Mira is part of, but of whose dominion, she is wary. In this preserve of predominantly old white men, which Mira jokingly refers to as the Geriatrics Club, Mira is a rarity. A brown woman holding her own since 1988. She tells me there have been no overt gurus, no bridge-makers that paved the way, but there have been people who led her along, like her sitar teacher, Chakravarthy, on his bicycle and dhoti, in Orissa, when she was a 12-year-old studying the raga, yaman. “He told me very early on I had to focus on one thing to be excellent. He knew I was interested in performing and theatre and writing, and he said you know, for our music it will take 20 years to make the right note, so realise what you wish to do.”
People around
There was John Bissell, creator of Fabindia, who began with a little shop in Greater Kailash in Delhi where Mira used to sit among all the beautiful things. He encouraged her to apply to colleges in America. There were teachers like Richard Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, who taught her how to use the camera to capture the extraordinariness of ordinary life. But mainly, Mira has kicked open her own doors.
Part of her success as a filmmaker has been her ability to find openings, to make connections in a visceral, authentic way.
While she was making Vanity Fair, Mira’s mother-in-law died unexpectedly because of malpractice in a hospital, an event that plunged her into deep melancholy. It was in this state that she opened Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. “I just felt like I had a sister in this world in Jhumpa. I felt the solace in The Namesake, of reading what it felt like to lose a parent in a country that was not her home. I read it on a plane and as soon as the plane landed I called Jhumpa, who I knew a little, and asked her for the novel, and she so beautifully gave it to me... I swear to god, within nine months, as if like a baby, we were shooting the film.”
Swapping places
Part of the book’s appeal was that the story lay between places — Kolkata and Cambridge. In the film, Cambridge is shifted to New York because Mira knew how the bridges of Howrah and George Washington could provide the emotional chasse for her film. “I understood that I would speak of living between worlds through these temples of steel, these bridges. And I think once a director knows how to make something work in a visual way, as well as the emotional way, it’s like that. It was a privilege of inspiration, from pain, from a deep sense of loss.”
When I ask Mira what she makes of all the rumble in Hollywood with the avalanche of sexual assault revelations, she tells me the real watershed moment for her was the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015, which exposed the deep lack of diversity on screen, followed by the exposure of unequal pay between men and women. The subsequent #MeToo and #TimesUp campaigns are only further evidence of how women have been treated.
“Hollywood simply has the power to put it on people’s lips,” she says, “and it’s good that it uses that power in this way. Better this than the cloak of silence that it’s been for five decades, and the silence that is still in India.”
Living in the margins
Mira believes things are more fortressed in India because the nexus of power is held by 30 people. They can be held ek mutthi me, she says, clenching her fist. Cricket, big business, media, politics. “I live in the margins of it. I see the patriarchal attitudes of how men talk to women… not women like me, because I’ve already appointed myself as a sort of leader, but I see what goes on. For me, the street has always been very interesting, so I talk to chowkidars of the mansions of big people, and the things they’ve told me over the years, what happens inside these houses, who comes in and goes out, no one will know that stuff.”
This relationship of the street is what Mira circles back to. “When I first moved to Kampala,” she tells me, “the only relationship I had was with shamba boys, the ones who make little nurseries on the street, because it was a bombed out post-civil war scenario, and I was getting interested in guerrilla planting because the equator runs through my garden. So I’d go plant trees in unexpected places, like on the highway, and in cemeteries and slums... Now with making Queen of Katwe and Maisha, I get my car washed in Kampala and the car washer, will say, ‘Aren’t you the one? Aren’t you that certain one?’ And I say, ‘I am the one.’”
The writer’s latest book is a collection of poems, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods.