She gives the ‘nowhere people’ a voice

With ‘Monsoon Wedding’ winning the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Mira Nair has truly arrived. Critics are calling her a worthy successor to contemporary directors like Hanif Kureishi and Damien O’Donnel who have portrayed the dilemmas of immigrant Indians. But no one has done it as powerfully as this the Harvard-educated filmmaker, writes Mukesh Khosla.

"AFTER ‘Salaam Bombay’, I could have picked up any one of the several offers that came my way and lived happily ever after. But somehow, honest commitment would have been missing. I needed a subject I could relate to," said Mira Nair in a recent interview.

Constant shuffling between India and America gave her a chance to observe expatriate Indian life at close quarters — an observation that later attained a concrete shape in ‘Mississippi Masala’ and ‘My Own Country’, and then in ‘The Perez Family’ where she depicted Cuban refugee life in the US.

However, her best piece of work has come with her latest ‘Monsoon Wedding’ where Nair closely examines the growing phenomenon of global Indians. A world where the young, wired and upwardly mobile Indians co-exit with their traditional parents and family elders. The film portrays on extended Punjabi family that reunites from around the world for a noisy and colourful wedding. The film is all about the four days preceding the marriage.

‘Monsoon Wedding’ has not just won the prestigious Golden Lion for the Best Picture at the Venice Film Festival this year but has also made Nair the third woman filmmaker in 58 years to win the award. Before her; Margarethe von Trotta won it for ‘The German Sisters’ in 1981 and Agnes Varda for ‘Vagabonde’ in 1985. Nair also became the second Indian to win this award after Satyajit Ray whose ‘Aparajito’ was honoured with the Golden Lion in 1957.

"This one is for my beloved India and my continuing inspiration, and for the extraordinary ensemble of actors in my movie who possessed their roles so completely," said Nair after she received the award earlier this month.

Most media observers feel that the film starring Naseeruddin Shah and Lillete Dubey is most likely to be the hot favourite at the all-important Cannes Film Festival to be held in March 2002. Many critics say that before that it could win Nair the Oscar that she missed after being nominated in 1987 for ‘Salaam Bombay’.

"I could have done another movie on poverty and derelicts and got rave reviews for it. There is nothing western audiences love more than watching the poor in the Third World. But no, I wanted to focus on Indians living in America, England, Dubai and other parts of the world," says the filmmaker who shot ‘Monsoon Wedding’ within a month using hand-held cameras.

Today the 43-year-old Nair looks comfortable as a worthy successor to contemporary directors like Hanif Kureishi (‘My Beautiful Laundretee’) and — more recently — Damien O’ Donnel (‘East Is East’) who have followed the migrants to England and elsewhere.

Nair has a deep understanding of expatriates. In fact, she has gone to great lengths to research it whenever she’s felt the need. For her, credible continuity of a film is paramount. For example, in her quest for authenticity in ‘Mississippi Masala’, she travelled to India, England and Uganda digging up facts on the plight of Indians during the black days of Idi Amin.

Says Nair, "After reading about Indians from Uganda, I met a few of them and found that they were similar to the second generation Indians living in America. That’s when I decided to weave the facts together." Nair also discovered that nearly 80 per cent of the motel trade in America’s south was in the hands of Indians. Sponsored for immigration, trained in hotel trade, Indians have become a wealthy community here.

In fact, she repeated the experiment in ‘The Perez Family’, and she made several trips to Cuba to understand the feelings of the Cuban community. Here too she came up trumps, as she was able to reflect the true emotions of the Cuban refugees in a story woven around love and triumph and tragedy and comedy.

Then came ‘Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love’ that chronicled the personal travails of two women who have been friends since childhood. The film was not a narration of the classic Indian love tome but more an inspiration for a sexually explicit story.

Nair’s next film has been the least heard about. The 1998 movie titled ‘My Own Country’, revolved around an Indian doctor in a small American town who is battling to save the lives of three AIDS patients, including a conservative Christian couple and a trucker’s wife. It was powerful drama made all the more poignant since it was a true story.

‘Monsoon Wedding’, too, is a close look into the psyche of the Indian immigrants. Wrapped around the theme of a Punjabi marriage it is an insight into the vibrant community that has not lost its roots despite having left the country years back for different parts of the world. The strongly individualistic Punjabis have managed to retain their identity — warts and all.

"We are nowhere people," says Nair who did her post-graduation from Harvard, married and divorced an American photographer and is now wedded for a second time to a professor of African Politics at Columbia University where she herself teaches filmmaking.

Perhaps, like Nair, the global Indian immigrants too are ‘nowhere’ people. "When I left India at 19, I was rooted in reality. Since then, life has been very fluid, back and forth, back and forth. And I realise in hindsight that I use that fluidity in my work," says Nair.

"I used to have a joke when people asked where I live," says Nair, "I’d say, ‘I live on Air India’. But the other side is that you live between your ears. You carry your home within yourself. That’s a nice-sounding cerebral concept, but the truth is that you’re torn."

A recent newspaper report said, "With Nair’s movies immigrant communities like the Indians settled in this country (America) are being asked to stand up and identify themselves. They cannot travel in both the boats. For them its time to drop anchor."

Nair herself said: "There’s a tension around the issues of alliances. The Black folk think, ‘All coloured people are the same and should stick together.’ South Asians cash in on that when it suits them. But the White people are glad that the people from middle class aren’t black. I once asked an Indian motel owner if he’d experienced racism, and he said, ‘No, I’m just a White person who stayed in the sun too long!’ ‘Mississippi Masala’ ended with the sordid reminder, ‘In the end, people stick to their own kind.’"

Despite its complexities, Nair has proved she is best when working with raw and unproven talent. In ‘Salaam Bombay’ she assembled the cast from a motley crew of street urchins. For ‘Mississippi Masala’ she chanced upon an unknown actress Sarita Chowdhry who portrayed the rudderless Mina perfectly. She was a rebellious girl, a passionate lover. She was so brilliant that it was hard to believe that this was her first feature film. The affinity between the actor and the character was complete.

"It was the sense of homelessness that brought out the actress in me. I knew nothing of India. The country was like a storybook. So I could identify with the heroine instantly," says Sarita, daughter of an English mother and a Bengali father who quit his government job to join the UNO. Her father’s postings took her to Jamaica and Italy, but never to India. "I was a Jamaican more than an Indian," says Sarita who later joined Canada’s Ontario Film School.

This sense of perpetual homelessness is the common bond which Nair shares with all her movies. Born in Bhubaneshwar, 200 miles from Kolkata, Nair is a daughter of a retired Indian civil servant. She studied in an Irish Catholic School in Shimla and followed it up with college. Then she came to America where she took up filmmaking seriously.

For Nair, films like ‘Mississippi Masala’ and ‘Monsoon Wedding’ are two steps forward from the days of documentaries. Her cinematic realism is rooted in her earlier efforts at social documentaries. Says she, "I believe in relevant cinema, not boring cinema." She seldom wavers and even her critics admit that despite the gritty realities, the pace never slackens.

Nair made her documentary debut with ‘India Cabaret’ a short film about strippers in Mumbai nightclubs. This 1995 film focussed on the state of these women in a male-dominated Indian society.

A controversial film, it drew a lukewarm response in India, but was a big hit in the West. Two years later she turned her attention to the prejudice women face in India when they bear daughters. Called ‘Children of Desired Sex’, the film told the somewhat exaggerated though tragic story of women who bear a female child.

Then came ‘Salaam Bombay’, an Indian-French-British co-production that brought her international stardom. " I wanted to use my influence in documentary film-making to bring an authenticity to the screen that has rarely been used in any Indian film," says Nair. Since then, she has struck to her guns. (NF)

Manoj Kumar resurfaces
Rakhee Gupta

ONCE a filmmaker, always a filmmaker — or so Manoj Kumar is out to prove as he emerges from self-imposed exile to announce his next venture ‘With Love from India’. His last film, ‘Jai Hindustan’, released more than a decade ago, was a crashing disaster at the box-office.

"The film will revolve around a beautiful foreign girl who comes to India and gets involved with a handsome young man," he revealed. "We will actually have two heroines, one Indian and the other, a foreigner. If all goes well, we should go on the floors by the end of November."

The actor-filmmaker said he was averse to "filming skyscrapers and tulip fields", just because it is currently fashionable to shoot in New Zealand and Switzerland. "I would rather shoot the green fields of my country," he said. "Right now, I am negotiating with two well-known Hollywood actresses and in all probability, the deal will be finalised with one of them by the end of this month. In that sense, I am bringing Hollywood to India and not the other way round."

He did not disclose the name of his leading man, but indicated that it would be a new face. "He will be my protagonist — a character called Manoj with strong moral and cultural values and a modern outlook and above all, a man who is proud to be Indian."

The film would be based on a story and script by Manoj himself. He would also be its producer and director, though he did not reveal if he would be acting as well or his son, Kunal Goswami would have a role. For the music scores, both Anu Malik and A.R. Rahman have been approached. "I have already recorded the title number last July," he said. By April next year we should be through with the shooting so that the film is released on Independence Day, August 15, 2002!" (MF)