FILM-INDIA: Nair Returns to Roots for Another Take on Immigrants

By Sujoy Dhar Reprint | | Print |

Sujoy Dhar

KOLKATA, Jun 21 2005 (IPS) - In the cruel heat of a Kolkata summer, Mira Nair was in a hurry to wrap up the shoot of ‘The Namesake’ in early June and see her film on the editing table by September.

The India-born US-based filmmaker, who won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival for her movie ‘Monsoon Wedding’, actually put other films on the backburner to start shooting ‘The Namesake’.

An impulsive Nair says she listened to her heart and started the film having fallen in love with the characters of this debut novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri.

Its subject, the immigrant experience, is one close to her heart, and the film is actually an opportunity for Nair to return to her roots in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta).

For Nair, life in exile – voluntary or imposed – is always good material for cinema.

Catching the pulse of the Indian immigrant community in the United States has been her forte since the days of ‘Mississippi Masala’ in 1991, one of her seminal films that examined the racial awareness of the immigrant Indian community in the Deep South.

‘Mississippi Masala’ is much more than an interracial love story featuring Sarita Chowdhury and Hollywood actor Denzel Washington. A poignant tale of forced migration, the film also casts an ironic glance at race relations between African-Americans and Indians.

Questions of colour-consciousness and inherent racism reside at the movie’s core, which also brings forth the separatist nature of the U.S. Indian community.

"I seem to be getting some sort of reputation for making films about exile. I didn’t choose this; it chose me. Distance from a community is something which used to confuse me but now I use it as a tool for my films," says Nair.

The filmmaker told IPS at the end of her Kolkata shoot that she has never lived the life of an exile, but has had so many of her close friends living as forced immigrants that she could almost feel their loss and pain.

Constant shuffling between India and the United States gave Nair a chance to observe expatriate Indian life at close quarters – and she uses her knowledge and sensitivity toward the issue in films such as ‘My Own Country’ and ‘The Perez Family’, where she depicted Cuban refugee life in the United States.

For Nair, the shooting of ‘The Namesake’ in India is also an emotional journey back to her Kolkata chromosomes. Her creative roots are in the city where she spent over a decade since the late 1960s, and in which she acquired her cinematic sensibilities watching masters from Bengal like Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak.

"I am immensely glad to be in Kolkata to shoot for ‘The Namesake’. I have spent several summers in this city and got my cultural orientation here. I used to stay in a house on Cornfield Road in Ballygunge area and in Alipore," says Nair.

"I am a big fan of Satyajit Ray and Ritwick Ghatak. I have posters of Ghatak’s 1960 film ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’ (‘The Cloud Capped Star’) in my room. I learnt a lot from Ghatak," says the maker of ‘Salaam Bombay’, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988.

"I learnt from Ghatak’s film for the first time how to capture a tree in a film. There are so many subtle things to learn from Ray and Ghatak," says Nair, who cast in ‘The Namesake’ famous Bengali actor Supriya Devi, who made celluloid history with her powerhouse performance in ‘Meghe Dhaka Tara’, the heart-rending story of a female bread-earner who makes sacrifices for her family uprooted by the partition of India.

‘The Namesake’, set in the backdrop of the 1970s of Kolkata and the 1990s of the United States, was scripted by Nair with friend and collaborator Sooni Taraporewala.

After arriving from a chilly New York at the end of May, Nair started the fortnight-long gruelling shoot of the Kolkata leg of the film. Adapted from Lahiri’s eponymous novel, it traces the journey of the US-born Gogol, who is torn by his Bengali heritage.

"When I read the book I was just overwhelmed. It is a great love story which captures the modern pulse of South Asians in New York. I am thankful to Jhumpa that she gave me the opportunity to film it," says Nair.

"Jhumpa is just ecstatic that her book is being filmed. And she herself plays Jumpamashi (Aunt Jhumpa) in the film," she reveals.

‘The Namesake’ is the story of the Ganguly family of Kolkata, which moves to New York and tries to blend the new world with their old culture.

While parents Ashoke (actor Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Bollywood megastar Tabu) long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, their son Gogol (played by Kal Penn of ‘Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle’ fame) is torn between finding his own unique identity and his heritage.

"I want to capture the Bengali culture in this film as I am myself so influenced by it," says Nair.

"I think I was here from 1968 till 1976. That was a great time. So today I can relate to the character of Gogol’s mother Ashima in this film, played by Tabu. After all, this is one city which has not gone westernised fully."

"My film will have Baul songs (folk music made by roving minstrels in rural Bengal), Rabindrasangeet (Tagore songs) and of course the great erudite culture of the Bengalis," says Nair.

She hopes to start editing in September and complete the film by February 2006 so that it can travel to the Cannes Film Festival in May, where several of her earlier movies were screened.

So can ‘The Namesake’ become another crossover success?

Says Nair, "I don’t think too much about the results of a film. I can say this is a very stylised and modern film and for me this is something I am trying new with myself. Every movie is a step forward in growing."

"My films reach the global market and ‘The Namesake’ is a universal story. It is like the story of Satyajit Ray’s Apu." "’The Namesake’ is the story of the sacrifices our parents made for their children and which we now cannot perhaps think of. It is a deep human way of telling the story of millions of us who left one home for another, who have known what it means to combine old with the new," adds Nair.