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                                                                                CINEMA, Page 67

Focusing on the Margins


In the piquant film Mississippi Masala, Indian-born Mira Nair
depicts outsiders in multiethnic America

By JANICE C. SIMPSON


    Outsiders are Mira Nair's specialty. She has always, the
filmmaker says, "been drawn to stories of people who live on the
margins of society; people who are on the edge, or outside,
learning the language of being in between; dealing with the
question, `What, and where, is home?' "

    At the relatively tender age of 34, India-born Nair has
built a global reputation for her skill at portraying those
lives. With unsentimental care, her camera has focused over the
past 13 years on homeless children, homesick exiles and
struggling immigrants. Her first feature film, Salaam Bombay!,
won awards at Cannes in 1988 and an Academy Award nomination.
Her second, Mississippi Masala, a piquant love story about an
Indian immigrant and a black American in the Deep South, is
garnering warm reviews and a growing following. A film about the
life of Buddha is in preproduction, and its $30 million budget
certifies her arrival in the major leagues of moviemaking.

    Unlike the people who populate her frames, Nair has always
enjoyed a strong sense of who she is and where she belongs. The
daughter of a government administrator, she grew up comfortably
in Bhuba neswar, a small city in eastern India. At boarding
school she became a serious theater student and discovered the
work of avant-garde British director Peter Brook.

    Unhappy after a year at Delhi University, Nair applied to
colleges in the U.S., ending up at Harvard because it offered
the biggest scholarship. But Harvard's theater program proved
disappointing, far more orthodox than her experimental work at
home. Nair looked around for a more challenging place to direct
her creative energy. She found it in film. "Documentaries really
grabbed me," she says. "They were a way of entering people's
lives -- if they should choose to let you enter -- and embracing
them."

    Shuttling between her native land and the U.S., Nair
filmed a number of lives over the next few years. Among them:
an Indian immigrant working in New York City while his wife and
newborn son remained home in a world increasingly unfamiliar to
him; and pregnant Indian women who contemplated abortion of
female fetuses because their society prizes sons over daughters.
India Cabaret, a hard-eyed look at a group of Bombay strippers,
won the American Film Festival award for the best documentary
of 1985.

    But Nair grew restless. "I was tired of waiting for things
to happen," she says, referring to the serendipitous nature of
the documentary film process. "I wanted to make them happen."
Working with an idea in 1983 for a documentary about Bombay
street kids, she decided instead to turn their stories into a
feature film. Salaam Bombay!, made on a $900,000 budget, was a
commercial as well as a critical success; Nair used part of the
profits to provide educational, medical and vocational services
for street children.

    The inspiration for Mississippi Masala, Nair's first
English-language film -- her other work was in Hindi -- came
from a New Yorker magazine article about an Indian family forced
to leave their native land of Uganda when dictator Idi Amin
expelled Asians from the country in 1972. In her film, Nair
relocates them to Mississippi, where Indian immigrants now
dominate the motel business. The daughter in the family falls
in love with an African American (Academy Award winner Denzel
Washington) who owns a rug-cleaning service. Their romance sets
off a clash of cultures between Indian Africans who have never
seen India and African Americans who have never seen Africa. In
the background are anxious white Americans who are equally
dislocated as the country changes around them.

    Determined to capture contemporary America with accuracy,
Nair spent a month moving from motel to motel, interviewing the
Indian families who owned them. In Greenwood, Miss., she also
spent time in the black community, attending church, going to
barbecues and hanging out in the local barbershop. "I think it
would have been different if I had been white," she says. "But
I was allowed in. I was seen as one of them."

    Uganda proved even more congenial. During her weeks there,
Nair fell in love with Mahmood Mamdani, a political scientist
who was born in India but grew up in Uganda and returned there
after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard, just three months before
Amin's expulsion edict was announced. Mamdani moved to Tanzania,
then went home in 1979 when the restrictions against Asians
were lifted. He is, says Nair proudly, "a true son of Africa."
The couple, now married, have bought the beautiful house in
Kampala that the Indian family is forced to abandon in
Mississippi Masala; they live there with their four-month-old
son Zohran.

    Ahead is the challenge of the Buddha project, with its
intimidating budget, multiple locations in India and all the
risks that accumulate for an auteur who has never experienced
big-league success -- or failure. But Nair isn't worried.
"Knowing where you come from gives one an incredible amount of
self-confidence," she says. Besides, anywhere she aims her
camera is now her home.