Kevin Lally on Film

One of the week’s big newsmakers is Zohran Mamdani, the relative newcomer who decisively defeated former New York governor Andrew Cuomo (and his big-money machine) in the Democratic primary race for mayor of New York City. What I didn’t know before voting this past weekend is that Mamdani’s mother is the gifted film director Mira Nair. I met Ms. Nair in early 1992 to discuss her second narrative feature, Mississippi Masala—and there in the hotel room was her three-month-old son, the future political dynamo. Nair’s distinguished filmography includes her breakthrough film Salaam Bombay!, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair, The Namesake, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Queen of Katwe. Here’s our 1992 conversation.

Unless you’re a connoisseur of Indian cuisine, the title of director Mira Nair’s new film, Mississippi Masala, will need some explanation. A masala is a mixture of hot spices of different colors, an apt metaphor for the movie’s tumultuous romance between Denzel Washington as the Black owner of a carpet-cleaning business in rural Greenwood, Mississippi, and newcomer Sarita Choudhury as the spirited daughter of an Indian motel manager. The film’s interracial matchup is new to cinema annals, and so is its recreation in flashbacks of a little-known injustice of the early 1970s: the expulsion of all Asians from the nation of Uganda by the despot Idi Amin. Choudhury’s parents, played by veteran Indian actors Roshan Seth and Sharmila Tagore, resettle in the American South and become part of the circuit of Indian-run motel operations that have blossomed there—another unusual facet of the movie. Charles S. Dutton and Joe Seneca co-star in this charming and intriguing love story.

Mississippi Masala marks the 34-year-old Nair’s American debut following the critical and box-office success of Salaam Bombay!, her powerful drama of an Indian boy surviving on the streets of that city. Born in the small Indian town of Orissa, the vivacious director first came to this country in 1976 as an undergraduate student at Harvard. She made her first film, Jama Masjid Street Journal, a documentary exploration of the Muslim community of Old Delhi, as a student thesis there. Three more documentaries followed: So Far from India, about an Indian newsstand worker in Manhattan and his pregnant wife back home; India Cabaret, a look at Bombay strippers; and Children of a Desired Sex, an indictment of India’s repressive attitudes toward women bearing female children.

Interviewed at Manhattan’s Stanhope Hotel, with her three-month-old son close by, Nair proved to be as disarming as her latest film.

You experimented with your own masala of Indian and Black actors in this film. Did that create any surprises?

Nothing but the surprises I wanted to create onscreen—in the sense of casting Indian actors from India who had not been already “flattened out” by the American experience. There were some characters whom I gave a slightly American accent, but usually I cast the film very particularly, so that people would retain their particularity onscreen… Nice, humorous things would happen, totally improvised. It was unfamiliar territory, kind of like the experience of the characters they were playing. It usually worked to our advantage.

Did you seek a lot of input from the Black cast members to make sure their dialogue was on target?

I’m always open to input, whether it’s from the carpenter or the cast. That was our greatest challenge, to represent and to enter the Black world as much as we did the Indian one. While [screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala] was still writing, we returned to Mississippi to learn more about the Black world. Neither of us know how to drive, so we hired this young Black guy, Clarence, to drive us around. And through him, we entered this whole world of young guys hanging about and went to the nightclubs with them, and to barbecues, and got to know his granddaddy and his family. That began to be the real fountain of our research, Clarence. So when Sooni began to write these scenes, sitting there in Greenwood, we would invite Clarence’s friends to our motel room and read them out loud. It had to be right not just in the Black world sense, but in the local Greenwood sense. They would tell us you should use that word or this word. This kind of thing continued right into the shooting. Shooting in the authentic locations you’re trying to represent in the film is its own advantage. The authenticity that the people there lend to it is extraordinary.

I imagine that’s where your documentary background helps.

Absolutely. That is my greatest treasure, when something is mirroring a reality that the people in that frame have lived through. Like the bar scene in Kampala, where the Indians are throwing away their money on their last day in Uganda—that was something that friends told me happened to them, because their money was worthless. The extras in that scene, ironically, were Indians who had been expelled and had returned, or who had never left, and it was really moving for both me and them.

Had you known any Black-Indian couples before you started this project?

Not that many. Some. But the film was not inspired by knowing a couple. It was inspired more by the relationship—not necessarily romantic—between Black and brown as I knew it, and also by the consciousness of color within my own community. We just think of racism between Black and white and think of the minorities as lumped in one sphere. But we don’t think of the shades within our own communities, and I think that’s pretty potent stuff.

What’s your own personal experience of the tension between different shades in the Indian and Black communities?

My own personal experience is quite unusual because—I don’t know why—because of the way I am, I guess. When I came here as a student, I felt a great flexibility and freedom in moving between the Black and the white communities, and I felt particularly in solidarity with and comfortable in the Black world. The warmth of people was very similar to how I’d grown up—the extended family, the kinship, the physicality, that sort of thing. I was sort of being regarded as a Third World sister by the Black community, but sometimes there would be this resentment on the part of the women, because I was considered more eligible to go out with the men as opposed to a white woman. But there was not really a consciousness of color with the West Indian African students, who just happened to be my closest friends. That was my own personal experience, but I used to work as a waitress in the summers in an Indian restaurant in New York, and the racism was incredible. When a Black couple would come in, the Indians would behave fine, but the way the owners would talk—there were definitely racial allusions, it would not be like a white person coming in. In India growing up, too—fair is always beautiful and dark is not so beautiful. There’s a great myopia, total ignorance. And there’s no crossing the border here, as I see it. There are very few Indians I know who have Black friends, and very few Indians who even go outside their own oases… There are still chasms of differences between us, in terms of how one perceives the other. It was ironic, while making this film and entering the Black reality and the Indian reality, to actually see the commonalities between the two communities, though they would never see it that way.

Is there much friction between Indians and whites in the South?

No. It’s like it is in the film—it’s an island unto itself. There’s no real visible physical interaction, it’s not like Korean grocery owners. They’re out there on the highway, and usually they live and work together, and that’s that. My feeling is that white folks are happy that Blacks aren’t running those motels, and Black folks are happy they’re not white.

How difficult was it persuading Denzel Washington to get involved with an independent film, especially on a subject like this?

He’s an intelligent man. I think he really respects the independent filmmaker and vision. So while he’ll do a big-budget movie like Ricochet, he’s the kind of person who will do an independent film if he feels its power. I think he was intrigued by the components of this film. I know he loved Salaam Bombay!. And it isn’t every day that a film will come along to him with this Asian component. I also think it attracted him to play a sort of homeboy, an ordinary guy with fears and vulnerabilities and tenderness and weaknesses, and not just the usual larger-than-life Steve Biko type characters he’s played. I kept meeting him as we would get more drafts done, and he was the one who encouraged us to provide the balance between the Indian and the Black world and make his character and the characters of the Black family as felt as they are, as multifaceted as they are.

What were the dynamics like between him and Sarita Choudhury?

She’s never acted before, and he really made her feel comfortable. I think we both tried to create an atmosphere where it was absolutely alright to make mistakes, where one could be fearless and just jump into it. And she is like that—she’s brave and unselfconscious, which is why I cast her. She just flings herself into something and comes up swimming. And especially in a love story, either you have the chemistry or you don’t—and one thing she and Denzel had was definite chemistry. People have told me that they’ve very rarely seen a love story where there’s a genuine awkwardness and electricity, how it really is when you first kiss a man. Denzel is such a consummately skilled actor, he knows how to be fresh onscreen, but the great thing about an unskilled actress, if she knows roughly what she’s doing, is that she has that freshness. It’s quite wonderful to put that together.

As you know, this past year has been a landmark for Black filmmakers. Do you see the same opportunities opening up for other minorities?

I see it as a landmark year for the independent vision. I don’t like the lumping of us as minorities or this or that. I think that you have to make films that sing and speak to the world, and it’s great when you make them of your own reality, because that’s when sincerity and passion are reflected on the screen—it’s not just some generic movie. I don’t think, “For an Asian, this is a good movie.” What is being proven is that there are enormous audiences out there for stories like these—whether they be stories of people of color or made by people of color, that’s not the point. It’s the fact that they are really speaking to a lot of people regardless of their color. That’s what art is, and that’s what great art can do.

Were you taken by surprise by the success of Salaam Bombay!?

Oh yes, absolutely. There were no models for it, no precedent that told me this could happen in India or in America, or anywhere. They always made movies in India with Western protagonists because they felt that they had to interpret India for the West, or whatever. In India, they told me they had to make movies with multi-star casts, with at least a few rapes, and some cabaret, or whatever. There was no movie that was of itself like this one, the same movie that you could show in Cannes and show in a little Indian town. They always said you had to make a version for the West and a version for the East. It’s all bullshit. You strike that chord that’s universal, and you’ve got it.

One final question. Where is your home base these days?

It’s now in Kampala in Uganda, in the house in the movie. It’s really peaceful and beautiful. I don’t even have a telephone. It’s wonderful, especially with the baby. Someone asked me: Does he have a mobile? I said: No, he has butterflies.

Mississippi Masala is available to stream on HBO Max and Prime Video.