Nair Rides 'Monsoon' Wave Back to Harvard

If Mira Nair ’79 were a yoga pose, she would be the headstand, or sirshana.

“It forces you to look at life upside down,” she says. “It teaches you balance and how to see your world differently.”

Standing on your head isn’t easy—but then, it’s not the straightforward that Nair is after.

In 1976, the young woman who was to become one of India’s most acclaimed modern filmmakers left her home in Delhi for the first time. The plane took her across the world to Cambridge, Mass.

She’d seen Harvard’s red bricks and white trim only in the film Love Story—but her top choice, Wellesley College, wouldn’t give her credit for her studies at Delhi University, and Yale had lost her application altogether. So she came to Harvard along with a passion for theater, a wide smile and an open mind.

“I was less culture shocked than many of my classmates,” she says. “I didn’t grow up with this big mantle over my head about Harvard. I didn’t have any great expectations. I came here with a fairly blank slate.”

A couple of decades, several award-winning films, an Oscar nomination and a family later, Nair will return to her alma mater this weekend to receive the 9th annual Harvard Arts Medal. She will host a screening of her signature film Monsoon Wedding at the Harvard Film Archive and discuss her work in Sanders Theater with Third Rock from the Sun’s John Lithgow ’67.

“It’s a little weird because Sanders is where I took exams. To speak there is a bit much,” Nair says. “But it’s pretty awesome—in the literal sense of awe, not the slang word.”

Nair’s ability to pack every frame with eye-candy has garnered her worldwide attention. Documentaries So Far From India and India Cabaret won international awards, and her first feature film Salaam Bombay! was nominated for an Oscar. Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington, won three awards at the Venice Film Festival. Monsoon Wedding was showered with critical acclaim, while her more daring Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love and The Perez Family sparked controversy.

It’s an impressive catalog of accomplishment behind the camera for a woman who originally thought she’d be front-and-center on stage.

An active participant in Calcutta’s political street theater scene, the girl who came to Harvard had long aspired to a career in the spotlight.

“I was passionately involved in drama,” Nair says. “But in college I found only musicals.”

Nair took to the stage several times at the beginning of her Harvard career, starring in a South American version of Sophocles’ Antigone. In her first semester she won the Boylston Prize for her delivery of one of Jocasta’s speeches from Oedipus Rex.

“I performed for a year, but generally the inspiration wasn’t there,” she says.

She says she found it in a musty Sever Hall basement.

Originally a sociology concentrator, a portfolio of landscape photographs gained Nair entrance into the nascent Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) department, capped at ten students per year.

“It changed my life,” she says.

But she wasn’t passionate about photography.

“It was not my personality,” she says. “I liked working with people more.”

Filmmaking allowed her to “dream in images and say something about life.” In its second year of existence, Harvard’s film department was still “basic.”

“We did everything ourselves, from camera to sound to cutting negatives,” Nair says.

Though the equipment was obsolete, VES professors’ passion infused Nair with a desire to make films and introduced her to various directors and styles. And as a sophomore, she met Sooni R. Taraporevala ’79, who now writes Nair’s screenplays.

For her senior thesis, Nair submitted the 18-minute Jama Masjid Street Journal. The documentary observes and interacts with a Muslim community in old Delhi.

While Nair is now self-conscious about the short, it caught producer D.A. Pennebaker’s attention, who found Nair a grant to make her next film, So Far from India.

“I was lucky that I found my vocation while I was at Harvard without any intention of finding film,” Nair says. “That’s what I’m meant to do and it’s a blessing to find that early in life.”

South Asian filmmaking style is nicknamed “Bollywood,” in reference to the “Bombay Hollywood” movie machine that produces ready-made blockbusters distributed in India, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia.

Such movies are recognized by “stock themes,” according to Lecturer on Sanskrit and Indian Studies Rena Fonseca. Typical plot lines include hostile parents, generations of family drama and boy-meets-girl-boy-weds-girl, all mixed in with a heavy dose of exotic locales, dancing and songs—and of course, the inevitable happy ending.

“While it has been fashionable among Indian intellectuals to put down Bollywood films (not without justification), many are great fun and some recently have even tackled more serious subjects,” Fonseca writes in an e-mail.

Nair has called her filmmaking style “Bollywood on my own terms.” While Nair’s films certainly have the flavor, music and color typical of Indian filmmaking, something beyond Bollywood draws the viewer’s attention.

“My films are generally a bit of a circus,” Nair laughs. “I just can’t imagine making a movie of two people eating sushi. I aspire to make cinema that reflects density, complicatedness of life and that celebrates people.”

“Nair’s films certainly don’t typify the Bollywood formula,” Fonseca says. “They are generally more sophisticated. Her films are successful and compelling precisely because [of their] frankness and storytelling flair…The viewer can identify with the characters and is soon completely hooked.”

Far from the stock characters of Bollywood, Nair’s subjects are compelling and unusual. She depicts the life of prostitutes in Salaam Bombay and young American immigrants in Mississippi Masala. The protagonist of Monsoon Wedding is worldly and daring as she attempts to deal with her family’s wish for an arranged marriage and her own desire for the man she actually loves. Nair’s 1996 film Kama Sutra was censored in parts of India for its depiction of homosexuality.

“I tend to find great strength in characters who are not easily accepted by society, considered marginal in some way,” she says.

Nair’s best known work, Monsoon Wedding, is the eighth-highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the U.S. Shot in just 30 days on real sets, this story of a Punjabi-arranged wedding received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.

Monsoon’s characters speak in Hindi, Punjabi and English. Nair has said the use of these languages adds to the family aspect of the film, making the relationships and interactions true to India. While many Bollywood films concentrate on the upper- and middle-class, Monsoon Wedding ties together characters from all social strata.

A large portion of film’s negative was damaged during shipment to New York City—including an irreplaceable scene shot during an actual monsoon. Luckily, insurance claims allowed Nair to reshoot three of the damaged scenes and use digital technology to recreate the rain storm. She says the lost film was a blessing in disguise, forcing her to reexamine areas of the story that needed strengthening.

Elvis Mitchell’s New York Times review of Monsoon Wedding praised the realism of its hand-held camera work and Nair’s ability to turn the slightly clichéd plot into something beyond soap opera.

“‘Wedding’ captures the small, hilarious, skirmishes of a culture at war with itself and the families trying to hold their ground against change; it is enchanting. It also evokes a marriage of temperaments and subcultures, subtly defining the differences between them,” Mitchell writes.

Nair says she plans to turn the movie into a Broadway musical through her Manhattan-based production company, Mirabai Films.

“Personally, I still think Nair’s best film, and her most serious work, was Salaam Bombay!, which, while not a documentary…was powerful and affecting,” Fonseca says.

Next fall Fonseca will teach the seminar Indian Studies 115: “Voices of Indian Women in Literature and Film.” When she last offered a similar course, she says students frequently referred to Nair’s films in discussion. The class watched clips from Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, examining issues of race, gender and culture.

Nair explored patriotism in 11.09.01, a post-Sept. 11 collaborative project with 10 other renowned filmmakers. In exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame, Nair chronicles the experience of a Hamdani family in Queens whose eldest son went missing after the World Trade Center attacks.

11.09.01 brought accusations of supporting terrorism against Nair and her fellow collaborators for what some called the films’ anti-Americanism. The movie has been distributed in twenty countries, but not in the U.S.

These days, Mira Nair is busy editing Vanity Fair, an interpretation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel.

“It’s very exciting because it’s a great big swirl of a movie and a story I’ve loved since I was 16,” Nair says. Despite the long hours and tedium of editing, she sounds says she is excited about the process: “We’re jamming, baby!”

Actress Reese Witherspoon is playing the lead role in Vanity Fair.

“She’s a sparkler, she’s so engaged in the movie,” Nair says of Witherspoon.

She laughs when asked about a Harvard graduate directing the actress who played Elle Woods in Legally Blonde.

“It’s hilarious, actually, because Elle Woods is really what we’re doing with Vanity Fair. It could be fluff, but Reese sparkles.”

For Nair, yoga sessions and gardening counteract long days in the studio.

Nair’s two-acre home in Kampala, Uganda is dotted with trees she’s planted. She speaks excitedly about her green thumb, discussing her newly-sowed mango grove and the 61 trees she put in last summer.

“Gardening engages me in the rhythm of life directly,” she says. “It teaches patience, rhythm, humility. We can’t control everything. Nature is so many things.”

She says she hopes one day she’ll have grandchildren to appreciate her planting efforts. Nair’s mother always wanted a baby girl, while her father fretted about the expense of raising a daughter in India. Nair’s son is now a pre-schooler in New York City, where Nair teaches film at Columbia University. Her family divides its time between Kampala, New York City and New Delhi.

When she’s not en route to a film shoot or tending her garden, Nair runs Salaam Bank Trust, a organization she founded to help street children. The trust began with the proceeds from Salaam Bombay!, and has expanded from three centers to 17, aiding more than 5,000 children.

A master of both filmmaking and the sirshana headstand, Nair says she finds peace in both the chaos of a movie set and the deep relaxation of yoga.

“I’ve settled my rhythms,” she says. “I’ve finally after some years managed to find complete repose.”

—Mira Nair’s work will screen at the Harvard Film Archive in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts on Friday and Sunday. Nair will also discuss her work in a talk moderated by actor John Lithgow ’67 at Sanders Theatre on Saturday at 7 p.m. Tickets are free and available through the Harvard Box Office.

—Staff writer Kristi L. Jobson can be reached at jobson@fas.harvard.edu.