The character arc of Mira Nair

Who is Mira Nair?

The debut was the easy part. Then came the years nothing worked.

Her mother was a social worker and her father a civil servant, and the family moved from Rourkela to Bhubaneswar while she was small. Her father was a remote man who drove his children hard and insisted they spend their time usefully, and he argued with her two brothers constantly. She has said she was not treated as being as important as they were, because she was a girl, and that the lack of attention was her lucky break: it left her quiet space to get on with what she liked, with nobody watching. At a convent school in Shimla she read Thackeray's Vanity Fair and decided she would film it one day.

She studied sociology at Miranda House in Delhi, acted in an amateur company and did street theatre in Calcutta. At nineteen she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge and went to Harvard on a different one. A photography course and a film class with Richard Leacock at MIT turned her towards documentary, and her thesis film, shot in the streets of Old Delhi with a Bolex, was seen by D. A. Pennebaker, who liked it enough to help her get a grant for the next one.

The documentaries she made in the 1980s were not comfortable. India Cabaret, about the exploitation of women working in Bombay strip clubs, was widely attacked in India, was bought by PBS and then rejected by its New York station, and was criticised by her own father, who said she should not have shown those women in a good light. She made it, she said, to expose the prejudice they lived under. Her next one was about the use of amniocentesis to select for sons.

Then came Salaam Bombay. She cast real street children, struggled to finance it, and cajoled the completion money out of a French company. It premiered at the closing gala at Cannes in 1988, days after she had finished cutting it, and got a fifteen minute standing ovation. It won the Camera d'Or, the first Indian film to do so, was nominated for an Academy Award, and won twenty three international awards, and it did not do well at the box office.

What happened next is the part worth drawing. The Perez Family in 1995 was judged to have too much plot. Kama Sutra in 1996 bombed, and she later called it an aberration. The family moved to South Africa for three years and her career, in her own account, stagnated. Monsoon Wedding came out of that: written by Sabrina Dhawan, shot in thirty days with a small crew made partly of her own relatives and friends, it grossed over thirty million dollars and took the Golden Lion at Venice, the first given to a woman. She turned down Harry Potter to make The Namesake, set up the Maisha Film Lab in Kampala, and put the profits of her first feature into a trust for street children in India.

The moments

Mira Nair's timeline.

Mira Nair: frequently asked questions

What people ask about her line.

Sources

• Mira Nair, English Wikipedia biography.
• Festival and award records for Cannes in 1988, the Academy Award nomination in 1989, Venice in 2001 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012.
• Her own interviews, including with John Lahr in 2002 and Image Journal in 2017, for her account of her father, her method and her choice of directing over other forms.
• Her public statements on Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the elected office her son holds, are in the record and are deliberately not drawn here, under the rule that a Character page carries no party, election or government office.