YOU WON’T beLIeVe Where YOgA geTS US! FILMMAKer MIrA NAIr ON IYeNgAr YOgA, A COrNerSTONe OF her CrAFT by Richard Jonas For acclaimed director Mira Nair, Iyengar Yoga is more than a personal practice. “It’s a cornerstone of my professional life,” she declares. Creator of such lush, evocative films as Salaam Bombay!, Monsoon Wedding, and The Namesake, Nair credits Iyengar Yoga as a font of her creativity. “The practice teaches you the art of resistance and the art of surrender,” she says. “If you can’t approach an asana in one way, Mira Nair you try to approach it in another. Every time you get a new teacher and every time you hear a new direction—even with a pose as common as Trikonasana, something you think you know—suddenly an instruction opens a new door and the pose comes in a different way. Yoga quietly reminds you that learning never ceases.
Later still, she moved to Cape Town, South Africa. “I was being a good wife to my husband, who was director of African Studies at the University of Cape Town,” she remembers. “I had heard of a great [Iyengar Yoga] teacher called David Jacobs. He was slightly mythic: he was supposed to be really rigorous and strict. It took me six months to get up the nerve to go.
“That is a big lesson in any creative work, but especially in making films. You have to really glean and get from your actors and your crews the best they can do, the work that suits your vision. You can’t demand, you can’t holler, you can’t force. Every single person is a finely tuned instrument, and you have to find the way to make that instrument play for you. Yoga has taught me: if you don’t find one way, you find another.”
“Once I found David, I just felt that the rigor of Iyengar Yoga was the thing for me. That pretty much changed my life. Since then [1996], I’ve been singularly devoted to Iyengar Yoga, and have made it a part of my professional life as well.”
“Every single person is a finely tuned instrument, and you have to find the way to make that instrument play for you. Yoga has taught me: if you don’t find one way, you find another.”
In fact, Nair has had Iyengar Yoga teachers conduct classes on the sets of each of her films since Monsoon Wedding. The teachers’ names appear in the final credits, along with hairdressers, accountants, and location managers.
Yoga has even influenced the rhythm of her films, Nair says. “Once I am keyed into the rigor of yoga, to the spine and core of it, it allows me a much greater looseness in other ways—but without the rigor, the looseness is nothing. And that interrelation between rigor and looseness is what creates rhythm.
From the beginning, her teacher from Bombay, Ashwini Parulkar, taught on Nair’s sets, and continues to do so. Others who have worked on Nair’s sets include Jacobs, Intermediate Junior III; Megan Inglesent, Intermediate Junior II, of the United Kingdom; Yvonne De Kock, Intermediate Junior III, of New York City and South Africa; and James Murphy, Intermediate Senior I, Director of the Iyengar Yoga Institute of New York.
“I think my films are very economical and visual,” she says. “But I am always working to find the balance, paring down something so that it can then be further amplified. Iyengar Yoga is a lot like that. It’s so much about the foundation. When you are at home with the foundation, you can experience the ecstasy.” Her discovery of Iyengar Yoga was a transformative moment, Nair remembers. In her native India, she practiced yoga irregularly from the age of seventeen. “I first taught myself through a book of 24 positions,” she explains. Later, she practiced the Sivananda method. 11
Fall 2009 / Winter 2010
Yoga Samachar
