A Toast to Her India

The spirit of masti is what director Mira Nair wanted to capture on film. “It means to be intoxicated with life,” she explains, “and nothing exemplifies that more than a Punjabi wedding.” So it became the pivotal event of her new work, “Monsoon Wedding,” which joyously and rambunctiously celebrates life, love and family relationships in their varied manifestations and pitfalls.

Here in the balmy climes of Palm Springs, “Monsoon Wedding” launched the Palm Springs International Film Festival in mid-January and Nair is being honored with a luncheon in the garden of the Casa Cody inn. A grizzled Alan Bates has risen to give an introduction to the honoree. He is visibly moved thinking about the film he saw the evening before.

“I was so touched with the love, the honesty and the humanity in this film,” he gushes about “Monsoon Wedding,” which opens in Los Angeles on March 1, “and it makes no concession to the usual norms of film.”

By that, he means that it has escaped the stranglehold of genres, whether they be the conventions of American romantic comedy or of India’s Bollywood musicals.

Nair, elegantly outfitted in a toast-colored raw silk churidar-kurta, an Indian-style tunic worn over matching slacks, graciously accepts her award--an original Dale Chihuly handblown glass piece--and throws Bates a compliment in return. “I remember I had such a crush on him after seeing ‘An Unmarried Woman!’” she says, laughing.

After lunch, Nair, 44, settles comfortably on the sofa in the adjoining guest house, eventually slipping off her flat sandals and tucking her legs under her.

“You just can’t believe the kind of packing I’ve had to make for this trip,” she says about flying in from her home in New York. “From the desert to the snow.” The following day she is jetting off to the Sundance Film Festival where “Hysterical Blindness,” a film she made for HBO that is set in working-class New Jersey, is about to get its world premiere. And this month she heads for Berlin, where she has been named head of the Berlin Film Festival jury.

But rolling with the punches--or the weather or the landscape or the culture--is her strength. It’s the price, in a way, of being a truly international director.

Born in India, Nair grew up fascinated by the theater and took up acting as a teen. She was offered a scholarship to Cambridge University when she was about 17. “But I refused to go, I had a chip on my shoulder about the Brits,” she says. Instead, a year later, she applied to American schools and got a full scholarship to Harvard, which she accepted.

But there she found theater “very uninspiring, like ‘Oklahoma!’ was playing for months, musicals and hoop skirts.” Instead, a photography course offered inspiration. “The photographs got me admitted into the film program at Harvard, which was very competitive because it was very expensive and they took only 10 students a year,” she says. Afterward, she moved to New York and raised money to make five documentaries, all about India.

In 1988, she directed “Salaam Bombay!,” her first feature, a gritty tale of the plight of Bombay street children, fending for their survival through odd jobs and scams. Nair recruited two dozen such kids and put them in the film. (She later set up a foundation for street children in India, the Salaam Baalak Trust.) It proved an impressive debut--the film won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for best foreign-language film.

That film was followed by “Mississippi Masala” (1991), about an interracial romance in the American South involving an African American man (Denzel Washington) and an Indian-born woman; “The Perez Family” (1995), about Cuban immigrants arriving in the United States; and “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love” (1996), a lush visual fable about the sexual politics of 16th century India. These films had mixed critical and audience reactions, and there was some feeling that she hadn’t quite tapped the potential she showed with “Salaam Bombay!”--until “Monsoon Wedding,” which last year won the top prize at the Venice Film festival.

The film focuses on four days of wedding preparations and celebrations in a lively Punjabi family outside New Delhi. Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) wants everything to be just right for the arranged marriage of his darling daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das), but costs are mounting and nerves are fraying as the big day draws nigh.

First, it’s not certain his marriage is going to last, nor that the new one will get off the ground, because Aditi has been having an affair with a married man. How can she broach the subject with her groom (Parvin Dabas), a nice Indian boy from Houston? (Yes, Texas.)

Meanwhile, cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty) is reliving some bad memories after the arrival of an old family friend, and P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz), the hangdog-faced wedding planner, is falling desperately in love with the shy family maid, Alice (Tilotama Shome). On top of that, it looks like 40 days and 40 nights of pelting, monsoon rains are upon them.

Swirling around the action is contemporary India, where the wedding guests may arrive by jet from far-flung places only to enjoy the most traditional of ceremonies: Women in saris decorate themselves with henna; the groom dresses like a prince and arrives on a horse; then all join in the boogying to the infectious beat of Indian disco.

Like the polyglot culture it portrays, “Monsoon Wedding” freely mixes English, Hindi and Punjabi; characters often switch among them in mid-sentence (the film is partially subtitled).

The idea for the film was born several years ago when Nair was teaching at New York University and met Sabrina Dhawan, a fellow Punjabi in graduate school there. “We were both chatting, ‘How come there’s nothing we have seen about what our life is like?’” Nair recalls. “I also wanted to make a film about Delhi, the city I loved and she loved too. We plotted together, like I really wanted the upstairs-downstairs quality--the Alice and Dube thing--and the kind of seamless coexistence of class, and the multilingual way we live, the music.” A wedding seemed the perfect occasion for bringing all these colorful elements together.

“Mira called me and told me she had an idea to do a fun, quick film in India,” says producer Caroline Baron by telephone from New York. Baron had fallen in love with India after working on “Kama Sutra” and was eager for an excuse to go back.

“There was just an outline at the time, and I thought my experience in India was life-altering, enriching. I found that it was not just a country of poor people, it was an incredibly rich and diverse culture, with a tremendous amount of humor and I wanted to see that on film. ‘Monsoon’ seems to have all that in it, so it was an easy decision to make.”

To make the film on her own terms, Nair knew the production would have to be kept lean. Although she didn’t stint on talent, calling on acting newcomers as well as respected veterans of stage and screen, she established a pay scale in which all the principals would receive the same modest amount (Nair included), with profit-sharing, should the film do well.

To prepare, she and the actors spent two weeks in workshops, then a week in rehearsal at the house that would be the Verma homestead. Nair decided on a handheld camera, and shooting sped briskly along, 40 locations in 30 days. “It reminded me of how I began my own work, guerrilla-style.” In some ways, it was truly a family affair, as Nair cast her nephew Ishaan Nair for the role of Aditi’s younger brother, and Nair’s mother did the catering.

Nair herself has been married twice. Asked to describe her first wedding, which took place in full-blown Punjabi glory in India, Nair starts to laugh. “My husband was a nice Jewish boy [from the U.S.], he came on a horse--the grooms come on a horse,” she recalls. “He did the whole thing, it was very funny.” Then she adds, “I married him anyway.”

Her second marriage, to her current husband, Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan academic, took place far more quietly, among a handful of friends and family when they were visiting Toronto. “That’s it,” she says, “No more marriages now.” They have a son, 10.

In spending part of every year in India, Nair has been happily rediscovering her homeland. One recent development there prompted her to go back to documentary filmmaking--”The Laughing Club of India,” about the laughing clubs started by Dr. Madan Kataria in 1995 that have caught on like wildfire throughout the country. The documentary has played on TV in the U.S. and India and has been screened at some film festivals.

Overall, she finds an improved self-image. “In today’s India, it’s kind of cool to be Indian, to dance to our music, to wear our clothes,” she says. “When I was growing up, there was a kind of looking-Western ethic, a quasi-inferiority complex. We’d know more about the Beatles than about [director] Satyajit Ray!”

How did this sea change come about?

“The ironic turning point is that India became more global, opening its doors to everything from IBM to Prada,” she says. “As that happened, our culture became more assertive of itself. We beg and borrow and assimilate and steal, but we take it all and make it into something that is uniquely Indian.”

Well into the conversation, the dipping cadences of Nair’s Indian-accented English become more pronounced. And she lets herself go with Anglo-Indian wordplay--repetition of words or thoughts to make a point, extended riffs of wryness--when discussing troublesome, even desperate, subjects.

Nair is reminded of the scene in “Monsoon Wedding” when one exasperated panelist on a television talk show says with a sigh, “Just because we’re going global, does that mean we should embrace everything?”

“This is a constant debate,” she says. “That scene was a sort of a [reply] to the Indian censor board which put me practically into prison for ‘Kama Sutra.’” That film was inspired by the classic sex manual, although not based on it. Set in the 16th century, Nair’s film told of a young woman’s discovery of love, both sacred and profane, and was controversial for its nudity and simulated sex scenes.

“The film was made as a response to the twisted, perverse sexuality on our screens,” Nair insists. “In the guise of censorship and not kissing and not lovemaking, what was being shown? Rape, abuse, vindictive revenge movies, and songs and dances of extraordinary perverse nature. And this is the country which wrote the Kama Sutra where you understand that the sexual act is one of many sensual expressions in life.”

After the film was made, she spent six months fighting government censors, making cuts, then finding out more had to be excised. “This is what I would hear in six months of those meetings--just because we have gone global, does that mean we embrace everything? Then the other guy would say, ‘That is American, this is Indian.’” Eventually, the film did get released.

So how did “Kama Sutra” do in India? She quips, “Big hit, hacked version.”

But the battle took its toll on her spirit. “I had moved [to India] from New York, from everywhere, we wanted to make a go of it,” she says. “I started an office, I did everything, but finally I left. Even though I was winning on paper, they were possessing my dreams.”

To escape the nightmare, Nair moved to Cape Town, South Africa, in 1997 with her husband, who had gotten a job there. Two years later, they returned to New York.

“Happily back,” she says. “It was where my filmmaking community is. I have a sense of history there. Now I like it because my husband teaches at Columbia, my son goes to school, and I can work there. As I’ve become a mom and a real family-maker, I don’t like to leave my family. New York is where I can do my work and I can find like-minded people, but from where I can go anywhere else quite easily.”

Her other film being released this year, “Hysterical Blindness,” was made in her new backyard--New Jersey. Culturally speaking, it is a light-year away from “Monsoon Wedding.” The film is about two women, played by Uma Thurman and Juliette Lewis, who live lives of noisy desperation believing that life has passed them by. The best thing they can think of to do on weekend nights is hang out in the local bar, hoping they’ll get lucky and find the guy they’ll marry.

Nair found the original script a little too cool and injected more warmth between the characters. At the same time, she encouraged Thurman, a natural beauty, to look and act wasted by her own desperation. “It’s really a character study,” Nair says, “and if you’re half-assed about how depraved she is, how neurotic she is, you’ve got nothing.”

Colin Callendar, president of HBO Films, is pleased with the results. “Mira’s got enormous heart, a wonderful, distinct sense of humor,” he says. “We needed someone who would not shy away from that pain, someone who was not afraid to explore the paradoxes.”

That sentiment is shared by Thurman, who brought the project to HBO--the film will air on the cable channel later this year--and specifically courted Nair to direct the film. “‘Hysterical Blindness’ is very intimate and very honest,” she says by phone from New York. “It’s about all the yearning we have inside to belong, the desire to be desirable, and the unattractiveness of self-consciousness, all the things we share.”

For years Nair felt caught between the two cultures, Indian and American. “In the early years, I used to feel confused by that,” she says. “But then I began to use the confusion in my work, and then I began to accept that confusion so that it no longer is confusion, if you know what I mean.”

While deeply proud of her Punjabi heritage--”we are an earthy, unpretentious people”--she bristles against being seen as an ambassador of it.

“I’m irreverent and affectionate toward my culture,” she says. “Now of course to make matters more complicated and more interesting, I’m really of three cultures. I also have a home in Uganda where my husband is from.”

She smiles. “It may seem quite daunting for other people, but of course it becomes part of one’s life.”

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Scarlet Cheng is a regular contributor to Calendar.