16 minute read
Mira Nair on her films, mentor Satyajit Ray and much more...
Filmmaker Mira Nair is the creator of stories that have led me on a journey of both self and social discovery. As a five-year-old about to make my first trip to India (Mumbai) from the US, Salaam Bombay! introduced me to the reality of the life of street children and prepared me for the heartbreak that I would encounter once I landed in the country.
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As a ten-year-old growing up in America, Mississippi Masala highlighted people of my ethnicity in a mainstream film for the first time, in a story we could otherwise never have spoken about. Lastly, The Namesake revealed internal and external conflicts as the child of first-generation immigrant parents in America. With these and many other vibrant tales of the human journey, the Odisha-born, Harvard-educated global citizen Mira Nair has taken us through a kaleidoscope of colours, images, and emotions, and now we have the privilege of getting an insight into her inspiration.
Interview by Nandita Chatterjee
Could you talk about your journey into the world of filmmaking, which started with your series of thought-provoking documentaries, from taking us through the cerebral journey of the local son to the streets of old Delhi in “Jama Masjid Street,” to the early diaspora immigrant experience of a newspaper hawker in So Far from India, ending with the uncharted journey of a John going to a sex worker in India Cabaret?
I came to making films as an exploration of truth with questions that got under my skin and would never let me go. Growing up in Bhubaneswar - a small town in Orissa, which was fairly remote, as most other parts of India - we lived cheek by jowl with those who have and those who have not. Their lives and our lives were intertwined and yet completely different from each other. That was the first major influence in my life, my interest in the other side stems from that time. I would often ask the question, “Why?” In the beginning in a childlike way, questions like, “Why does the sweeper’s child have to go back into their quarters when we have our dinner?” The world around me was constantly full of injustice and wonder. I came to the theater and started working as an actor. I worked in street theater in Calcutta with Badal Sircar and on stage in Delhi with Barry John. Then I studied sociology at Miranda House. However, I came to America on a tukka, on a scholarship, not knowing what was in store. It was my first time leaving India. When I discovered films at Harvard, the courses that were offered were the principles of cinéma verité - the cinema of truth- the cinema that attempts to capture the real world. My real world was in India and I realised that cinéma verité was a way to explore that world. In 1978 for my student thesis, my professor Robert Gardner gave me a hand sprung Bolex camera and I shot my first film Jama Masjid Street Journal - an area in Old Delhi, near where I grew up in Delhi University. What were the stories of the street as I looked through my camera instead of a veil?
This led to making my next documentary, So Far from India, which is about Indian immigrants in the U.S and the unseen, the invisible. It was about the dream of America in people’s hearts, which leads a young man from Ahmedabad to come to America. What does he give up? What does he leave behind? What does he yearn for? It’s difficult because, in cinéma verité, you don’t know what you’re going to get.You don’t know when it’s going to be effective. And this was the early eighties, where we shot real celluloid 16-millimeter film, nothing digital like it is now. It was an expensive process, not an easy one, where every frame had a price tag to it. Cinema verité is a humbling study of life and all its complexities, the extraordinariness of ordinary life. The unpredictability of it was challenging and kept me on my toes. You never knew what would happen next in that kind of filmmaking.
There was no script, yet I was armed with questions, I followed the character, and then the character’s life revealed itself to my camera, or I would hope. This was the style I enjoyed – a laborious, painstaking and risky style. It needed a lot of patience and endurance because one did not know the journey.
After that was India Cabaret, about the line that divides women considered to be good and those that were considered outside goodness. You asked why I did that? Once more, it was about questions regarding the world. Why is the world so unjust? As a woman, how do you cope with the double standards in our patriarchal society? Why do men need this kind of entertainment and then shun the women who deliver it? What is shame? Who feels it? And who doesn’t?
I lived in New York, but all my work was in India. Just coming and going gave me the ability to not be numbed by what I saw at home. I looked at it with somewhat new eyes, but eyes that were familiar with our society. Even though my documentaries were mildly successful, that they won prizes at festivals and were on television, I hankered for a wider audience. There was so little known about India at the West at that time, that I was almost looked at an educator. I never intended to be an educator. I wanted to make my films my way but reach the widest possible audience.
Then there was your debut, Salaam Bombay!… Why did you decide to debut with this film? Was the decision to use non-actors and actual children residing in the slums an effort at transcending the real into a reel without labeling it as a documentary?
I was somebody who was trying to bring my audience into a world which was incredibly entertaining as well as painful. Rekha, the centre of India Cabaret had this unique sense of humor. There was no self-pity or mera kya hoga. It was more like her saying, “Here is the world!” This was inspiring, it moved and kept me devoted to cinema verité. I will never forget opening night at the India International Film Festival in Hyderabad in 1985, where I presented the two cabaret dancers Rekha and Rosy, who were coincidently from the same city of Hyderabad. The hall was filled with 1,500 people, mostly men, who when they heard of a film called India Cabaret, thought it would be a sex fest. Instead, it was a hard core documentary told in the voices of women who tell you like it us, no holds barred. Their language itself brutal, real, funny patois, brought the house down. It was a seesaw between guffaws and an electric silence that held a mirror to our society.
That one screening changed the course of my life. Sooni Taraporevala and I were both in the audience, about to go to Orissa to begin writing our first autobiographical screenplay. But the impact of India Cabaret, in this language, the street language of Bombay patois was clearly reaching this common unpretentious audience so effectively and I thought this is what I have to do. I have to make feature films in the language of the world and the language of the street, not in the high-landed Mughal-e-Azam, but in this real language of how the street speaks.
I was already inspired by the unsentimental spirit of street kids, their insistence of having a life despite having nothing, the way I encountered them while making India Cabaret. There is a scene in India Cabaret where the chai-pau comes up with hot tea every morning to wake up the dancers with chai and a disco song. The dancers would order them around the male customers had done to them the night before. It was hilarious role reversal.
Your mentor, the late Satyajit Ray, has said, “I cannot recall ever being impressed so much by a first feature. It is completely unlike any other film ever made in India and shows complete command over every aspect of the medium.” What aspects of your journey would you say drew inspiration from his mentorship?
I wouldn’t call it a mentorship because I never got to study with him in that sense. I applied several times to be his assistant, but it never worked out for various reasons. He was very kind and accessible always. I have a theory though: when I admire an artist, I first want to make something of my own to present to them. When I finished one of my first films, So Far from India, I held the reels under my arm and walked up the stairs to Mr. Rays home, holding a 16 millimetre projector . We lowered the blinds in his veranda and projected this documentary on his wall with Mr Ray and Mrs Ray as my audience. It was clear he had never seen a cinemaverité, where nothing is manipulated and yet a story unfolds. When the film ended, with our newsstand worker returning to America without his peasant wife, Mr. Ray said to me “If you had cast a more beautiful wife, he would have taken her back”. I then understood that he didn’t realize that I hadn’t cast the girl, but it was a real story! What was quite marvelous was that we kept up our relationship over 7 years. His inspiration has served me so fully over several decades. There are several films of his that I think are absolutely perfect - the Apu trilogy, Jalsaghar, and Devi, Charulata, Aranyer Din Ratri. These films were a big part of how to make cinema for me.
Seven years later, when I asked him to open Salaam Bombay! in India he was already quite frail but promptly agreed. From a wheelchair in Nandan Cinema in Kolkata,he opened the film.
Satyajit Ray was a reserved man, he never said what he didn’t mean and he didn’t waste a word. I was so nervous while I was sitting outside in the lobby, because the projection bothered me. I suffered with the early projections of India - the film did not look as luminous and phosphorescent. I suffered outside biting my nails. But when the film finished, Mr Ray had tears in his eyes. He was genuinely overcome and told me he has never seen anything like this. When we were later nominated for the Academy Award, he wrote those lines to be used in the advertisements to promote the Academy Award. Soon after, in 1991, he passed away. I guess you could call it a mentorship if you wish, but it was beautiful to be able to offer him my films and to be able to talk to him as a young filmmaker. He treated me as a colleague in cinema.
The audience has often been mesmerised with your use of color, merging with the emotions of your films like Kama Sutra and Monsoon Wedding. Would you say it was an aesthetic effort to merge the raw emotions of the Indian people into a vision of abstract hues?
I’m currently in Budapest, pursuing a film on Amrita Sher-Gil, the great Indo-Hungarian modernist painter from India - deeply inspired by her use of colour. Before I make any film, I make these look books, in order for me to talk less and show more to my team, what I am looking for. In all of these look books, even prior to Salaam Bombay!, you will always see some portion of an Amrita SherGil painting. She is a great inspiration. I always say Amrita Sher-Gil taught me how to see. My influence of using color comes a lot from art, from painting and from the audacious use of colour that comes from Indian culture.
I am deeply nourished by contemporary photography in studying how to frame the world. Yet each film must have its own photographic style emanating from the story. For instance, The Namesake was made like a series of still photographs, more like the family albums people leave behind or carry with them when they cross oceans. Monsoon Wedding, which was more freewheeling camera in the reds and gold and ivories of a wedding. But even in Monsoon Wedding, I would often offset it with these amazing modern paintings on the wall, from Jamini Roy to Gaitonde just to show how colors can serve the emotionality of a scene.
When Kama Sutra was banned in the subcontinent, what was your greatest frustration?
The film was not banned forever. It was the Censor Board, a beast that every filmmaker in India has to deal with. The battle with the Censor Board went on for four months. Even though I won on paper in many ways, the struggle with the Censor Board began to possess my dreams. That’s when I had to stop, because I realised that this could be the ultimate victory for them. I convinced the distributors to only have all females’ screenings on Tuesdays, all across India. This was because I wanted an atmosphere of safety for women to see the film, to enjoy it because it was an erotic film not a sex film, as it was advertised to be. In many ways it was a Kamasutric film, it engaged all your senses. As far as I was concerned, I was not fully successful in making this film. It had chosen English as the language, which is alas the language I think and dream in, but later, when I dubbed it in Hindi and watched it, I enjoyed it much more in our language and regretted not making it in Hindi from the beginning. However, I was always walking a tightrope between what we create being seen by a small pocket versus reaching a larger audience.
I was a ten-year-old, U.S.-born child when your film Mississippi Masala came out. I remember being full of excitement that there was finally a film that was about people like us. But, much to my chagrin, I wasn’t allowed to watch the film, for some said that the content might influence me to run off with a black man. What would be your reaction to these regressive views, and how do you feel it has changed in the last two decades?
The film has been re-mastered and just had a huge and beautiful screening at the New York Film Festival of a thousand people sold out. It really encompasses the world with the politics of race between our two communities, the African Americans and the Indians. Mississippi Masala was enormously inspired by the racism in our own hearts in India. I mean, we have perfected, sadly, the hierarchy of color in our hearts, with being fair as lovely and being dark as not. And it was, of course, inspired by the separatism in us, like how we keep to ourselves, despite living in Africa for a whole generation, there’s barely any integration. In that sense, it was a combination of basically holding up a mirror to the complexity of all of it. It’s related to my early work in that sense of always showing the truth, but I think it came to be a lot of fun. it also allows for the love and commonalities between communities, both the African-American one and the Indian one. For this, I thank Sooni Taraporevala, who is my writer and collaborator. She has a great talent of writing characters that really show us for who we are.
The Namesake continues to be a classic for all Indian Americans, with the story resonating with our external experiences and internal conflicts. When you decided to take on Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, what was your vision when bringing it to celluloid?
I came to The Namesake from a place of grief through losing a parent in a country that was not her own, and happening to read The Namesake at that moment of terrible loss and melancholy. I just randomly picked up this book on a plane and instantly felt like I had found a sister in Jhumpa - who also understood this feeling. Her beautiful writing gave me the solace that I was looking for at the time. And within a week of reading it, I had the rights from her. We didn’t really know each other well, but we admired each other. Sooni, my writer, also loving the book in advance of my calling her even…And, in nine months, we were shooting that film! But my inspiration for that film was more to speak about the parents because I had lost my own mother-in-law, who was like a mother to me. And they had their own love stories, my father-in-law and mother-in-law, married for 59 years. That type of love story which you never see again, of people who don’t do the Valentine’s Day thing, who don’t say I love you, who don’t do any of the niceties that we associate with this generation, equate with expressing our love. But, just sitting at the kitchen table with the chai perfectly made and looking at each other is a sign of beautiful silence that speaks volumes and that is what I had the honor to be around, with my inlaws, with whom I lived for 20-some years.
Then, with Jhumpa’s beautiful heart, and I was thrilled to capture that, and I took it, I hoped to speak much more about Ashok and Ashima (the parents) than about Gogol. It was that point of view and in other adaptations, like in Vanity Fair, written by William Thackeray, who was born in Calcutta and came back to England as a 14-year-old boy, I think he always wrote about his English society with the eyes of an outsider, especially the creation expiates classic society at that… Simply because the empire was raping the colony and the money from India from such was really flooding the English society, then creating a more fluid class of people who could aspire and had the money for more that their class did not have prior to colonization. For me, that was the angle in Vanity. Many people have adapted this much more as a rags-to-riches story, but I choose to portray a conniving society climber social dynamics, so it was more about the relationship between the empire and the colony creating such a character as Becky Sharp. The point I am trying to make is that you can’t and shouldn’t translate every page.
