Word: nair
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...Nair sees herself in the very clash of identities that her films represent. But rather than affect a Third World cosmopolitanism, she grounds herself in the particulars of exile, never abandoning her sense of origin. "If you don't know where you come from," she insists, "then you're just knocking about the world, you know." She grew up in Orissa, a region in eastern India. After a brief stint at Delhi University, she came to Harvard, where she discovered "this foolish confidence that you can do anything." She also discovered her interest in film. Arriving in Cambridge, she intended...
...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...
...filming a table tennis match in Currier House," Nair said, "and when I saw it,it was one long stretch of black. I realized thatI had forgot to remove the lens...
...Nair is now a renowned director whose work haswon awards at the Cannes Film Festival andreceived Academy Award nominations...