THE RIGHT DIRECTION

With Mira Nair directing its adaptation, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy seems to have found safe hands

NAIR NEVER SHIES AWAY FROM ANSWERING A P OLITICAL QUESTION, BUT DOESN’T ADD P OLITICAL MOTIFS TO HER FILMS IN RETROSPECT

WWhen we called Mira Nair last month, she was in Lucknow. Still in her yoga pants, with a hundred things to do, she told us, “We begin shooting A Suitable Boy tomorrow. I’m happy to make movies, but I’m still struggling. It never does become a cakewalk.” And the 61-year-old filmmaker insisted she wasn’t being modest: “Doing this is a lovely pleasure, but it’s a beautiful mountain ahead.”

Nair had wanted to adapt Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy since the moment it was published in 1993. Seth’s book was set in 1951. Nair’s parents were married in 1950. She had always imagined what it would have been like to live in a newly free India, “an India that was finding itself”. Directing a six-hour adaptation for the BBC, two years after she acquired the rights to the book, Nair sounds relieved.

In her interviews, all of Nair’s convictions seem hard to shake. She does, for instance, still stand by her view that “filmmaking is a political act”. She says, “That’s what fuels me to make A Suitable Boy. It’s timelier than ever. It shows us who we were—a great nation of intermingling, one of coexistence. When seeing where we’re going, it’s sometimes very powerful to remember from whence we came.”

One is best advised to not let the words ‘web series’ drop in a conversation with Nair. She says that neither does she subscribe to the term, nor does she understand it. She much prefers the word ‘longform’, and tries explaining why: “The art of the longform, which television now allows, is a beautiful way to make this sweeping story of four different families. With A Suitable Boy, we are making three films within a single film and it needs that pace for its several realities to unfold at once.” Having found the right format to do Seth’s 1,349-page tome justice, Nair also seems delighted with the cast of a hundred-plus actors she has put together for its visualisation. Thirteen years after The Namesake released, Nair is again working with Tabu. To describe the actor, Nair employs adjectives such as “eternal”. The filmmaker calls “sublime” the focus with which Tabu gets into character. “There’s no bravura in her performance. There’s just a quietness to it.” Ishaan Khatter and Tanya Maniktala—the only two other names from her cast that Nair confirms—might both be in for an education of sorts. It was perhaps its candour and abandon that made Monsoon Wedding (2001) iconic. For the past decade or so, Nair has been working on transforming her film into a musical. After its London premiere in July 2020, she promises to bring it “homeward”. Nair, surprisingly, calls A Suitable Boy the “ma-baap” of Monsoon Wedding. She says, “I couldn’t adapt the book then, but it inspired me to tell the story of a family and its vicissitudes. I could afford to make it in my actual and contemporary way.”

Many of Nair’s films—Salaam Bombay! (1988), Vanity Fair (2004), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012)—have the ability to feel relevant and contemporary even years after their release. Vanity Fair, for instance, is set in early 19th century England, but Nair’s adaptation seems unmistakably modern. Nair, for her part, says she doesn’t have a formula to ensure lasting freshness: “My endeavour is to make stories that aren’t frozen, to make them fully of the time in which they are set, but to make them in a way that speaks to you now. I don’t want people to observe the film, I want them to engage with it. People find themselves in my hot-blooded, funny and fully human characters.”

Even though Nair never shies away from answering a political question, she doesn’t add political motifs to her films in retrospect. When asked if she thinks that The Namesake—a

landmark film about the US immigrant experience—is more resonant in the Trump era, she says, “I think The Namesake

will be considered a pretty ‘woke’ film today, but it was about longing. To respond to immigration laws would mean making a different film, which I did with the Reluctant Fundamentalist.”

Nair knows well the meaning of home— she has one in three different countries

(the US, India and Uganda). In Kampala, she set up the Maisha Film Lab 15 years ago. A free film school for East African students of cinema, Maisha invites known directors and writers to facilitate its workshops. It now has more than 800 alumni. Nair says, “Maisha follows my mantra—if we don’t tell our stories, no one else will. And those stories should be told with excellence.” Despite the obvious rewards, doesn’t all the movement become tiring? “I feel lucky because we have three beautiful homes, but sometimes I want to see the seasons in one place and not pack my suitcase again. That said, it’s a full life. What to do?” ■