Vanity Fair
by Judy Stone
Whether they were street kids, strippers or prostitutes in Bombay, Mira Nair has always had a soft, but not sentimental, spot for outsiders. So now here is Becky Sharp, born on the wrong side of the tracks in mid-19th century London and determined to rise in the establishment. She is the extraordinary outsider heroine drawn by William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair, a novel that Nair first read when she was 16 years old.
"What I loved about Thackerayıs point of view," the director said while in San Francisco to promote her newest film, "was that he observed his own society in a very clear-sighted way and with an acerbic satirical touch."
Looking as glamorous as any star in a peacock blue Indian tunic and pants, and as ebullient as when she confounded everyone except the street children - with her successful Salaam Bombay, The kids had it right when they nicknamed her "tough sister." The film was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988 and winner of the Cannes festivalıs Camera dıOr for best first feature. Since then, her sparkling Monsoon Wedding became the highest grossing Indian production ever released in the United States and led to Focus Featuresı offer for her to direct Vanity Fair.
As someone who grew up in Orissa, the backward capital of a state 300 miles south of Calcutta, she enjoys pointing out that Thackeray was born in Calcutta and was taken to England as a young boy. "He was an insider but a total outsider who would expose the sham and the hypocrisy of his own people with great insight."
When Nair first read the novel, she felt that Becky was like any modern girl. "She didnıt like the cards that society dealt to her. But in early 19th century London young girls were supposed to enter drawing rooms and wait for young men to propose. And this is not what Becky had time or opportunity for so she had to create her own way. I thought she was a timeless and modern heroine like women are today."
Athough India was independent when Nair, the daughter of a Hindu civil servant, was growing up, she still felt steeped in British influence . "Weıre all colonial hangovers in India. I went to an Irish Catholic boarding school. I was taught Shakespeare, Keats and Dylan Thomas. Those were my references. Like most colonies, we in India knew much more about England than the rest of the world knew about us. Iım a very independent spirit and the fact that we were colonized is something that is under my skin always. I was offered a scholarship to Cambridge. I turned it down without thinking or with thinking because I had a chip on my shoulder. I just didnıt want to go there and I came to the United States instead to pursue my undergraduate education at Harvard."
When she was finally asked to direct the movie "What I loved was that the chief character for Thackeray was the world he was talking about at that time. London was hugely intersecting with colonies and the middle classes in England were getting fat from the plunder of India and the other colonies. They had the money of the aristocrats but didnıt have the status or the titles that they wanted."
What Nair didnıt want to do was to make what she calls a "sedate period frock movie. I loved creating Salaam Bombay on the streets of London. I wanted to show the grit and the filth and the cacophony of working class 19th century England because it was this army of the working class that was supporting the upper class to lead the lives they had and if Becky (played by Reese Witherspoon) made one false move she would be back in the gutter from whence she came. To be able to do that and to make it sing with life was a great joy."
Still, she wasnıt happy with the original ending. After the film was finished, she thought, "how could I make such a ripe mango of a movie and end it on the damn bloody English countryside. No way! So I went to the studio and said, I really want to take her back in triumph to India, the place she was always obsessed by. She has to survive with a certain elan and she has to go on to the next adventure." Nair calls the colorful three-day shoot in Rajastan "my wink to Thackeray."
She notes that Thackeray was asking the essential question for that milieu of social upheaval in England. " I call it the yog-ic question like yoga the spiritual question: "Which of us is happy in this world?. Which of us having met our desire is satisfied? Weıre all racing to get somewhere and when we get there we wonder is this all there is? Are we content?"
And is Nair? Thereıs a pause. A deep sigh. "Iım blessed because Iım happy. I keep the ephemeral nature of fame and success and all of that at armıs length. For me success is doing what I want to do and not doing anything that creates a sense of disharmony. My family are my pillar and they keep me anchored."
She had met her husband Mahmood Mamdani when doing research for Mississippi Masala, an interracial Indian/black romance, and had to learn more about Indian motel owners who were expelled from Uganda in 1972. A member of an Indian family that had lived in Uganda for generations, Mamdani had written "From Citizen to Refugee," an "amazing" personal and political account of the Asian expulsion ordered by Idi Amin, the countryıs dictatorial ruler. Today they both teach at Columbia University where Mamdani is director of the Institute of African Studies and she teaches film. With their 13-year old son, they divide their time between New York City and their home in Kampala, Uganda where, incredibly, this energetic filmmaker plants wild palms and orchids in public gardens.
And next for Nair is The Namesake, based on a classic immigrant story by the Pulitzer prize winning author Jhumpa Lahiri . "Monsoon Wedding was my world in India," Nair says, "and The Namesake which starts in Calcutta, goes to Cambridge, Mass. and ends in New York, is a trajectory of the road Iıve traveled."