Mira Nair

• 1. Introduction

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  Mira Nair finished cutting Salaam Bombay! only three days before the film had its world premiere. The date was the 19th of May 1988, and the setting was the closing gala of the Cannes Film Festival. When the screening ended, the audience rose and applauded for fifteen minutes.

  The woman behind that film was born on the 15th of October 1957. She is an Indian American filmmaker whose career has brought two prizes from Cannes and four from the Venice Film Festival. Her work has also drawn nominations for an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards, a Golden Globe and two César Awards.

  How does a girl from a strict Indian household become a director who films immigrants, exiles and children living on the street? Why do so many of her independent dramas head straight for political themes and controversial topics? And what happens when a celebrated filmmaker makes pictures that audiences simply do not come to see?

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• 2. An Overlooked Childhood

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  Rourkela, India, was where Nair was born, to a social worker named Praveen Nair and an Indian Administrative Service officer named Amrit Lal Nair. She has two older brothers, Vikram and Gautam. The family is Hindu and of Punjabi origin, and it later settled in Delhi. Her grandfather changed the family name from Nayyar, although one of her uncles still uses the older spelling.

  She remembers a colonial-style bungalow with a wide veranda and a terracotta-tiled floor. Her father was a remote figure, described in her own words as "not much fun". He loved Persian poetry and song, yet he drove his children hard and insisted that they "spend their time usefully". He argued often with her brothers, and her parents separated around 1990 after years of tension and fighting.

  Nair felt that her family valued her less than her brothers because she was a girl. Over time she came to see this as a kind of luck. The boys endured their father's pressure and constant watching, while she was left alone to follow whatever interested her. Her mother Praveen shaped her independence, confidence, fearlessness and social awareness.

  From 1964 to 1967 she attended Ispat English Medium School in Rourkela, from age 7 to 10. The family then moved to Bhubaneswar, where she lived until she was 18. At Loreto Convent, Tara Hall, in Kaithu, Shimla, she developed a fondness for English literature. As a teenager she taught herself to type and to play the sitar, and she also painted, wrote poetry and acted in local theatre. She never confronted her father at home, but her early documentaries would later take aim at several of his attitudes.

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• 3. Stage Before Camera

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  At Miranda House, a women's college within Delhi University, Nair majored in sociology and joined an amateur drama company. There she worked with the Indian theatre director Barry John. She performed in Equus and Habeas Corpus, and she played Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. She also took part in political street theatre in Calcutta with the Bengali playwright Badal Sircar.

  In 1976, at age 19, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University in England. Her explanation was blunt: "I had a chip on my shoulder about the Brits". She went instead to Harvard University, again on a scholarship. Sooni Taraporevala, who would become a close friend and a frequent collaborator, was a classmate there. Nair kept acting through her first year.

  During that first summer break she travelled to New York City and worked with the American dramatist Joseph Chaikin. She also met Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the founders of The Living Theatre. Back at Harvard she took a summer course in photography, and then she cross-registered for a film class taught by Richard Leacock at MIT. That class pushed her toward documentary filmmaking in Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, and she graduated in 1979.

  Acting never fully left her. At Harvard she won a Boylston Prize for performing Jocasta's speech from Seneca's Oedipus. In a 2017 interview with Image Journal, she explained why she chose directing over every other art form: "That's why I am neither a photographer nor writer, I like to work with people, and my strength, if any, is that. Working with life." Her first real test of that strength was the thesis film she made in Old Delhi.

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• 4. Early Documentaries

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  Jama Masjid Street Journal, made between 1978 and 1979, was Nair's thesis film at Harvard. She shot it in black and white with a Bolex camera, wandering the streets of Old Delhi and chatting casually with local people. The film runs 18 minutes, and its title comes from a Muslim community near the Jama Masjid, a large mosque in the city.

  The cinéma vérité pioneer D. A. Pennebaker liked the film after Nair moved to New York. He helped her secure a grant for her next project, So Far from India, completed in 1982. This 52-minute documentary follows Ashok, an Indian newspaper dealer who lives in the New York subways while his pregnant wife waits for him in India. Ashok drifts away from his family and from his heritage. The film won Best Documentary at the American Film Festival in Wrocław, Poland, and at New York's Global Village Film Festival.

  India Cabaret, with cinematography by her husband Mitch Epstein, opened the inaugural Indian International Film Festival in Hyderabad in 1985. Nair raised roughly $130,000 and shot the 59-minute film over two months. It shows female strippers in Bombay being exploited, and it follows a customer who visits a strip club while his wife stays at home. The film mocked the hypocrisy of male ideas about virtue, and it provoked a storm.

  Indian men were among its loudest critics. In New York, some opponents tried to block its release on WNET. PBS bought it, but Channel 13, the network's New York affiliate, rejected it. Her father said she should not have portrayed the women in a positive light. Some feminists argued that she filmed them through the male gaze. Nair said she had set out to expose the prejudice shown toward sex workers. The film still earned the Blue Ribbon award and two awards for Best Documentary.

  Children of a Desired Sex followed in 1987, made for Canadian television. It examined how amniocentesis was being used to determine the sex of fetuses. It focused on women living in a society with a strong preference for sons, and it showed the dilemma they faced. Her documentary work came back around in 2001 with The Laughing Club of India, which looks at laughter yoga. Its founder, Madan Kararia, recounts how the clubs spread across the country and beyond. One memorable segment shows factory workers in Mumbai laughing together during their coffee break.

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• 5. Salaam Bombay

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  June 1987 found Nair and Taraporevala researching and co-writing a feature about children surviving on the streets of Bombay. It proved an enormous and exhausting undertaking. Nair sought out real street children so that the film could portray more authentically the lives of boys and girls who had been denied a true childhood. Mitch Epstein served as co-producer and production designer.

  Money was a constant struggle. In the end Nair managed, in her words, to cajole completion cash out of a French company. The result was Salaam Bombay!, which won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes, the first time an Indian film had done so. It also took the Prix du public, the Audience Prize.

  The film was nominated at the 1989 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. It also received nominations for a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, a César Award and a Filmfare Award for Best Director. It did not do well at the box office, but it still won 23 international awards. Nair also won the New Generation Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association in 1988.

  She did not forget the children on the screen. In 1998 she used the profits from the film to create the Salaam Baalak Trust, which works with street children in India. Her next collaboration with Taraporevala would take her to Africa for the first time.

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• 6. Migration and Belonging

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  March 1989 marked the start of research for Mississippi Masala, and it was Nair's first visit to Africa. The film tells of Ugandan-born Indians who were displaced by Idi Amin in 1972 and ended up in Mississippi. A carpet-cleaning business owner, played by Denzel Washington, falls in love with the daughter of one of his Indian clients, played by Sarita Choudhury. Nair was struck by the way Ugandan-born Indians often aligned themselves with white people, especially given the worse treatment endured by Black Ugandans. The film exposed prejudice in both the Black and the Indian communities.

  Critics received it well. It earned a standing ovation at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival and won three awards at Venice, including the Golden Osella for Best Original Screenplay, shared with Taraporevala. It was also nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film.

  Monsoon Wedding was filmed in only 30 days with a small crew that included some of Nair's acquaintances and relatives. The screenplay was by Sabrina Dhawan, and the 2001 film told the story of an Indian Punjabi wedding. It grossed over $30 million worldwide and held the record as the highest-grossing Indian film in North America until 2017. At Venice it won the Golden Lion, which made Nair the first woman to receive that award. It was nominated for a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe. A musical adaptation, directed by Nair, ran at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre from the 5th of May to the 16th of July 2017.

  She reacted to the attacks of the 11th of September 2001 in a segment of the anthology 11'09"the 1st of September 11, in which 11 filmmakers each responded to the event. Her piece dramatises the true story of Mohammad Salman Hamdani, a son of a New York Pakistani family. Police suspected him and the press reported him to be one of the terrorists after he went missing. When his body was found months later, it emerged that he had rushed to the scene to help people escape the wreckage and had been killed himself.

  The Reluctant Fundamentalist, from 2012, is based on Mohsin Hamid's best-selling novel and stars Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber and Kiefer Sutherland. It follows a Pakistani man after 9/11 and the treatment he receives from Americans in reaction to the attacks. It opened the 2012 Venice Film Festival to critical acclaim, though it did not do well at the box office.

  Queen of Katwe, a Disney production from 2016, stars Lupita Nyong'o and David Oyelowo. It draws on a biography by the American author Tim Crothers about Phiona Mutesi, a Ugandan chess prodigy. The film earned much acclaim, but it grossed $10.4 million against a budget of $15 million.

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• 7. Misses and Refusals

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  Critics were unkind to The Perez Family in 1995. Its producer said it had "too much plot", and one critic wrote, "It looks like a musical after all the songs have been cut out." Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love followed in 1996, and it also bombed. Nair later called that film "an aberration".

  In 1996 the family moved to Cape Town, South Africa, where her second husband became head of the African studies program at the University of Cape Town. They stayed for around three years, and Nair's career "stagnated". She still worked there. She developed scripts with Taraporevala and made a telemovie for Showtime based on Abraham Verghese's book My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, about his real-life work treating HIV/AIDS patients in East Tennessee. She also spent six weeks helping children from local townships make films about their own lives.

  In 2002 she directed Hysterical Blindness for HBO, a romance set in 1987 starring Uma Thurman. Thurman won a Golden Globe for her performance. In 2004 came Vanity Fair, an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's epic novel.

  A far bigger choice arrived in 2005, when Nair was asked to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She turned it down to make The Namesake, reportedly after her son Zohran persuaded her that she was the only person who could direct it. The film is based on the book by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, with a screenplay by Taraporevala. It follows the son of Indian immigrants who wants to fit in with New York society but struggles to escape his family's traditions. It won the Dartmouth Film Award and the Pride of India award at the Bollywood Movie Awards.

  Amelia, her 2009 biopic of Amelia Earhart, starred Hilary Swank and Richard Gere. It received mostly negative reviews and flopped, grossing $19.6 million against a budget of $40 million.

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• 8. Family and Causes

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  Photography classes at Harvard in 1977 brought Nair together with Mitch Epstein, who was her lecturer. They married in 1981 in India in a traditional Punjabi wedding, even though Epstein was, in a phrase she used, "a Jewish boy from Holyoke, Massachusetts." They were together for 12 years and married for 8, and they divorced around 1989.

  On the 29th of March 1989, she met Mahmood Mamdani in Nairobi, Kenya. He was an Indo-Ugandan political scientist, and she was researching Mississippi Masala. She had read his book From Citizen to Refugee, about the expulsion of Asians, and she interviewed him. She moved in with him on the campus of Makerere University, where he taught. They married in 1991, and their son Zohran Mamdani was born that year in Kampala, Uganda.

  Zohran appeared as an extra in Queen of Katwe. A song he performed under the rapper name Young Cardamom, "#1 Spice", is also in the film. In 2020 he won a seat in the New York State Assembly representing Astoria, Queens, and on the 1st of January 2026 he became Mayor of New York City.

  Since 2005, Nair has run the Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, Uganda, an annual laboratory and nonprofit that trains young directors in East Africa. Its motto is "If we don't tell our stories, no one else will". As of 2018, Maisha was building a school with the architect Raul Pantaleo, winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and his company, Studio Tamassociati. She has also taught as an adjunct professor in the Film Division at Columbia University, which collaborated with Maisha. Her company, Mirabai Films, produces her independent dramas.

  Her politics are public. In July 2013 she declined an invitation to be a guest of honor at the Haifa International Film Festival to protest Israel's policies toward Palestine. She posted on Twitter, "I will go to Israel when the walls come down." The Palestinian campaign group PACBI praised her decision. For decades she has practiced yoga, and on her film sets she has the cast and crew begin each day with a session.

  Honors have followed. She received the Harvard Arts Medal in 2003. In 2012 India's president, Pratibha Patil, presented her with the Padma Bhushan, the country's third highest civilian award. Work has continued into television, including five episodes of A Suitable Boy and a ten-episode Disney+ series reimagining National Treasure. Her next feature, Amri, was listed as in post-production.

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