‘Keep your eye on the prize’: Director Mira Nair shares the lessons she learned along the way

Sonia Faleiro (SF): Mira, you recently celebrated the 20th and 30th anniversary of Monsoon Wedding (2001) and Mississippi Masala (1991) respectively. The longevity and excellence of your career immediately bring to mind the question of resilience. How did you develop resilience?
Mira Nair (MN): Thank you, Sonia. It’s a question I ask myself these days, because I’m at a different stage of life and yet feeling incredibly, deeply creative. I learned about resilience at an early age without realising I was learning it. I am the youngest child of three, the only daughter with two older brothers. My father was an IAS man in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, and my mother was a social worker. I learned many things from them, but one thing was their emphasis, very sweetly and without any big deal, on the boys. I was just the faltu at the end. I used to joke with my family that no one really knew what I was doing. The best thing about that is that I found my own way without being prescribed to.

Oral history was a big part of my inspiration. In Orissa, jatra, the folk theatre that travels through towns, was a formative inspiration. Later, I discovered that Peter Brook and the other theatre people I used to admire – because I was once an actor – had also learned from jatra. We had a cultured home. We didn’t have many books, but music was important, ghazals especially. Begum Akhtar visited our house in Odisha and gave an amazing concert. These were powerful images for me growing up. Also, my father only spoke Urdu – he was a Persian scholar. In the pre-Partition days, the men were trained in Urdu, and the women learned Devanagari and Hindi. My father was from Lahore before Partition, and my mother was from Amritsar, so we had an interesting and musical home.

I studied the sitar for two years when I was eleven and learned from my teacher that to excel one could not have many pursuits. That piece of advice was a major moment of understanding. That I could not do a hundred things with excellence, I had to focus. I also study yoga, and for forty years I’ve been practising Iyengar yoga. I have absorbed that humility of surrendering to not knowing, to never thinking I know fully, because even in the simplest position, thought, or raga, there are volumes to know and to discover.

My focus in my teen years was political theatre. I studied with Badal Sircar who lived in Calcutta, and we made plays that were about themes important to us, and took them out on the streets. When I was eighteen or nineteen years old, I began to want to be challenged academically. Although I had a scholarship to Cambridge, I had an attitude about the British; I could not go to “the Raj” to study. I could not go to a culture that had so fully oppressed us. I used to tell my family that if I had grown up when they did, I would have been an anarchist. I would have killed someone. A large part of making A Suitable Boy (2020) was wanting to live in the fifties when India was being made.

It was this pursuit of not wanting to go to England that led me to apply to American colleges. I sent off applications and six months later the postman came into Bhubaneswar with a very large envelope from Harvard, of all places. I don’t know how I had the brazenness, but mostly it had to do with finding my own way. I always say that one must cultivate stamina and one must keep practising the craft. The craft is not just, as in my case, filmmaking, but it’s arming yourself with knowledge and community. We don’t realise how important a creative community is. I am grateful to have always cherished my community so that even thirty or forty years later, I can rely on some people to speak the truth. I don’t ask too much too often, but it’s important to know that I’m not alone.

I wanted, right in the beginning, to bring the unseen to my story. I never saw people on screen who looked like us, who did what Ashima Ganguly did in The Namesake (2006). She had no idea how to dress in the snow and wore her husband’s overcoat over her muslin sarees. I wanted to make my distinctiveness my calling card, and never let them forget it. This is why I never let them mispronounce my name. I say “Nair” is like “fire”. “Near” is not my name. Now the world has woken up a bit to needing to learn; now they’re ashamed about how they said our names, but I don’t let them forget. I tell television anchors before we start, “This is how to say it”. So, a long-winded answer, but I hope you get a sense of how it is.

What I found most fascinating about that answer – not at all long-winded and full of all the right amount of details – is how you spoke of a career being made by challenging oneself, refuelling, and learning. There is however the question of rejection, which is also a part of the creative life. Has that affected you?
I never used to feel that I didn’t get what I deserved, because I have a sense of pride. Mississippi Masala was a really radical film with a big movie star (Denzel Washington) but it was turned down by Cannes. Cannes is one of the pinnacles, one of the temples of our industry, and I had been a big hit at Cannes with Salaam Bombay! (1998). So, it came as a shock when Mississippi Masala was not accepted.

I didn’t want to admit it to myself but today I do admit that the treatment of people like me by the temples of cinema was not commensurate with many of my male colleagues. The path to recognition, and even reward, was not equal. Now everyone is on the back foot trying to make amends – it’s a mandate now in our industry to hire women, to hire people of colour. I don’t buy it. One of the phrases I use is, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” which means don’t buy it because we are the flavour of the moment. Continue to believe in what you do and how you do it. Continue to raise your own standard among your own community of people. Never feel complacent – complacency is death. That’s why I talk about stamina, craft and rigour, these are the pillars that must not change. They are difficult to sustain, at my age, which is sixty-four, but I’m full of energy and vibrancy.

It sounds as though it may have been lonely at times. Were you afraid?
I did not fear. Fear is paralysing; I would not recommend fear, it will not help you in terms of the creative act. The loneliness, for sure, but one thing, Sonia, that I really recommend, is to never lose your sense of humour. Humour is important to confront the backlash you will get from a hundred people. I also had what I call “the foolish confidence of the Ivy League”. When you’ve gone to places like Harvard – I only have a bachelor's degree – you develop foolish confidence. It was my foolish confidence that led me to Denzel Washington to whom I said, “Hey listen, I have an Asian interracial love story that no one else is going to offer you. Sit with me?” And, he did, but only because he loved Salaam Bombay!.

And that’s the other thing I want to say, which is that the quality of your work will open doors for you forever. Keep working until you know it’s as you want it to be; not to please others, but to have it as you want it to be. This is one of my pet peeves about friends in Bombay. Great filmmakers would ask me, “How did you make Salaam Bombay!?” It was such an internationally distributed film at that time, in 1988, when Indian films, even Satyajit Ray’s films, were never seen in the world. They would come up to me with stories of what they thought were international but were really just imitative. What is sometimes missing from us is rigour. The first draft should not be fucking published. It’s about pushing yourself and sharpening your skills, we call it “spitting and shining”. You have to keep doing that and subject yourself to opinions. Be receptive, don’t be high-handed.

Many times, Sonia, in our movies, the bigger the budget, the larger the committee that you have to listen to. It’s a team sport. That’s the other issue, how do you navigate the whole world’s opinions, and then your own? I am here to tell you that sometimes it’s not possible. Sometimes you can’t preserve your own ideas, and you learn from what others tell you.

India is undergoing a political and social transition that is crippling creative people. What do we do when we are faced with such a challenge? And how do we find joy when the world seems bleak?
Your first question is the question of our times. At one level it can appear like it’s all right but lurking underneath is – I am thinking of the scorpion – the forever possibility of several bites to come, either at once or staggered. Many writers are at the frontline in terms of dealing with it and I would have loved to ask you that question, because I am sometimes protected by my comings and goings between India, Kampala, and where I move. I don’t run away from things but it can get heated up. Like two years ago, when we went back to India, my husband Mahmood [Mamdani] and I were concerned that we would not be allowed in. I remember joking when I got the Padma Bhushan – I was making The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) at the time – and someone from the Home Ministry called. I thought it was a prank. I said jokingly, “Haan, haan, haan. Am I getting a shawl, a piece of land, and the promise of no arrest?” He said, “Madam, it’s the Home Minister calling.”

The daggers of our struggle now are constant. It’s not just Hindu-Muslim, it’s so much more. The only thing I can say for myself is that it furthers my grit. Just last week I was speaking to the great Iranian director, Asghar Farhadi, who made A Separation (2011) and I was saying to him that we admire the Iranians, how they deal with censorship in cinema, and how they find interesting ways to do it. He said, “I hate that I have to obfuscate, that I have to find another way. I do not believe in it and I cannot do that.” But what he does is very interesting. On the surface, A Separation is about two people negotiating a divorce, but in the revealing of it, the film reveals everything about Iranian society.

It’s similar to writing about Amrita (Sher-Gil), in trying to bring her to the screen, which is the project I’m working on. She challenged all norms with a strong moral compass. Her artistry came first, but she navigated what it was to love men, to love women, to understand her own Eastern heritage with her flamboyant Western cultural teaching. How did she navigate all these threads into making not just her life but her art? The art that lives on so extraordinarily and represents – the term is overused – “us all”? She brought colour to the canvas in a way that had never been seen. For me, it’s still about working in a way that, without being preachy, holds the mirror to the world. Young women and men are still confronting challenges in terms of who to love and how to love. The challenge is how do you keep your eye on the prize, the prize that helps you, which in her case, is painting, and in my case, film?

As for the second part, about what brings me joy. When I started on this path, I used to love reading biographies, I still do, of people I loved, like Billie Holiday and various artists who had given me succour and refuge. So many of them had ended their lives in madness like Van Gogh. I thought, “Mera kya hoga, yaar?” Will I go insane? Long story short, early on I decided that my family, my relationships, my loves, would always be the most important to me. They were not always familial – they were creative collaborations, friendships. I made that decision to honour, cherish, and love, and, as the struggles of life happened, that family became my buffer, so I am devoted.

I have a family of two boys, my husband and my 30-year-old son, and it’s not touchy-feely like “Hi mama, what will you have?” but it’s a beautiful compass. I take it seriously. For instance, what gives me joy is Thanksgiving, because it’s about cooking and not commerce. It’s about gathering. We just finished it last week and my joy was two or three days of cooking with my family and a close friend – just that one constant of having food and a door wide open. We feasted, we danced, it was bindass.

I also nourish myself with art. In America it’s artists, and in India, it’s Humayun’s Tomb, Khan-i- Khanan, Hazrat Nizamuddin, where I live. In Kampala, I am a gardener. I have built a garden, partly with my film school, Maisha, which has a mentorship programme, and every student and every teacher plants a tree in my design. Now it’s a forest of 35-year-old trees. Everything grows there. The Line of the Equator runs through my garden, so it’s very fertile. Then there’s Iyengar yoga. BKS [Iyengar] used to say that “yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind”, and I long for the fluctuations of my mind to be managed somehow so that I can work.

That was gorgeous, thank you so much. Let’s now talk about stories, and how you choose which to work on.
When you’re looking at your work, it’s important to not think of a notion of success, or what some other person has. A small case is when I was making Indian Cabaret (1985). I was sharing an editing room with Spike Lee because neither of us had money. He worked for 12 hours and then I worked for 12. He was making She’s Gotta Have It, and it became a big hit. I told myself, “Spike can have it because he’s a black kid in America, and has a community. I will never have that community, and I won’t have that community even in India. So, I shouldn’t mess my head up with ‘that success’ becoming my success.” These days we’re flooded with yardsticks of success – this prize, that prize – but it’s important to sift away the fruits of one’s action. As the Bhagavad Gita says, beware the fruits of action, because it’s confusing to think about the fruits when you’re doing the action.

As for choosing stories, it’s sometimes a matter of intuition, and sometimes serendipity. The Reluctant Fundamentalist came from being invited to visit Pakistan. We went there, Mahmoud and I, and were embraced by the culture. I was inspired, in terms of the love, the largesse, the music, the refinement, the depravity – it was everything. When the book came along, which I was given about six months after my trip, I thought, “Here it is!” It’s about this guy who loves America, and who makes this journey, and asks, “Why this love?” For me, that was an instant fit. I knew it would be tough but I just had to tell it. So, different films come out of different states of inspiration.

Music plays an important role in your films. Can you talk about the process by which you choose your soundtrack?
If I love someone’s music, I’ll go to them. I loved Vilayat Khan saab, so I found Vilayat Khan saab. He turned out to be in New Jersey and I became his friend. He did the music for Kamasutra. It was the old days when you bring the guy to the screening room and show him the film. I remember dying of nerves. It was a pretty erotic film, it had nudity, but he saw it and said, “Aapne to hamare desh ki haar banai hai”. I was like, “Wow!” Then he took out his sitar and performed “Jaijaiwanti” till 5 am in the studio. The lesson of that was, “Ask people you’d love to work with”, because the worst they can say is, “No”. But if you don’t ask, it’s already a no.

When we were working on the story of Salaam Bombay!, Sooni and I, I used to hear L Subramaniam’s “Raag Kirwani” not even knowing I would later use it. I had never made a feature film at the time, I had never worked with a musician, but we were listening to this very haunting raag. I listen to music very carefully and never as background. I listen to a lot of Indian classical music. So, “Raag Kirwani” was the haunting melody I listened to while the story was being written. Long story short, I went to L Subramaniam, who had never done a film before. He was quite dazzled by the fact that he was asked to do music for a movie. I sat with him for six weeks, and we extrapolated things he had already recorded to things he was going to record for me, to hit the frame in a certain way. Same thing with The Namesake. There was a great boatman song, “Bhatiali”, that Nitin Sawhney made, which became the foundation for The Namesake soundtrack. Again, Nitin had not done narrative music; he had done his own records which I loved, but we made a beautiful track.

Now I’m more assured with music, and it’s a very close and, sometimes, very delicate collaboration with the musician at hand. But I really enjoy it and I think it’s a great part of filmmaking. It’s a real privilege to use music in this way. It’s important to get the rigour. One thing I can’t bear about our current South Asian cinema is the emphasis on what they call “background score” which I will always spell as b-e-g-g-ground because it’s a manipulative thing that tells you how to feel. There’s no silence in any of it. A large part of using music is using silence to hear the music or to listen to what the music can do.

I make my own tapestry of sound for a project and it keeps me going. When life is tough with the project, I listen to the music. The same with Reluctant. “Mori Araj Suno” was originally sung by the great Tina Sani, but I made a new version with Atif Aslam, and that song kept me going for five years while I was raising money for the film. I am basically a student of ecstasy, I love to be ecstatic! I like to go into that, and music is the way for me. So, find the music that keeps you burning and surrender to that.

Excerpted with permission from How I Write: Writers on their Craft, edited by Sonia Faleiro, HarperCollins India.