Word: masala
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...masala" is a mixture of hot, colorful spices. Director Mira Nair '79 used it in the title of her last feature film, "Mississippi Masala," because it alludes to her favorite themes of cultural fusion and displacement. And a lot of people can pronounce it. "When I made my first film, 'Jama Masjid Street Journal,'" says Nair, "people couldn't say the name and I hated that." Content to make mouths hiss and burn with "Mississippi Masala"'s pungent melange of African, Indian, and American identities, she prefers to leave tongues untwisted...
...Mississippi Masala," she drove throughout the South, interviewing hundreds of Indian motelowners, and she traveled to Uganda to interview Indians there. It was more difficult for her to research the community life of small-town Southern Blacks: "Knowing the Black life was not that easy for us [Nair and Sooni Taraporevala '79-80, her screenwriting partner for "Salaam Bombay" and "Mississippi Masala"], and we just entered that life in Mississippi. We were two Indian women, and it was unbelievable to us how common that life was to Indian life, how much there was an accent on religion and community...
...Mitch Epstein; based in New York, the couple worked on each of her films together. She now lives in Uganda with her second husband and their two-years-old son. They bought the idyllic stone house in Kampala that Mina's family leaves behind at the outset of "Mississippi Masala." "I find myself wanting to put roots back into the homeland," she declares. "I just find myself going back there. That's why we've not had our child in America." Withdrawing from America, Nair dedicates herself to the flamboyance of the periphery, to the wisdom of the in-between...
Nair said she drew upon her experiences as an undergraduate when making her most recent film, "Mississippi Masala...
Mississippi Masala...