Word: nair
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...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...
...Harvard, Nair met and later married her photography teacher, 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...
...Nair's idea for the interracial love affair in "Mississippi Masala" grew out of her experiences as an undergraduate in Currier House. "At the time," she explains, "there were very few of us [people of color]--both Black or Asian. And I sensed, for instance, among the black men that I was a Third World sister, somebody they could take out on date or go around with." Nair sought to complicate the Black or white model of race relations in America with what she calls a "hierarchy of colors," an insertion of brown in between, When Mina (Sarita Choudhury...
...even Denzel Washington...at least at first. Nair reports, "The thing he had the worst trouble with in "Masala" is that he refused to be acting like a man in love. He just said. `My God, you know, I'm too cool for that.' And I said, `I can't have it. It's the cornerstone of my movie, and you have to be in stupor in love...I said, `And don't you think that just because I am a woman, I want this love mush stuff. I have to have it.' It was a real, tight...