By Amit Roy
AS A SUITABLE BOY ended on the BBC on Monday (24), its director, Mira Nair, had a virtual lunch with the Financial Times (FT) from her “book-lined study in Manhattan’s Upper West Side”.
It is from here that she remotely completed editing the six-part adaptation of Vikram Seth’s novel, “collaborating with colleagues across the globe – the UK, Australia, Los Angeles, Budapest (where an orchestra has played the score) and India”.
The interview contained references to Nair’s second husband, “Indian-Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani, now a professor at Columbia University”; their son, Zohran K Mamdani, “who has just won the Democratic primary for a New York state assembly seat, defeating a 10-year incumbent”; how she turned down the chance to direct the fourth Harry Potter movie; and her plans to make a film about “one of the greatest modern artists of this world”, Amrita Sher- Gil, “a half-Hungarian, half-Indian painter who was famous in the interwar years, then died tragically at the age of 28”.
Nair spoke of the complexity of Hindu-Muslim relationships that she had tried to put into A Suitable Boy: “I wanted to try to capture India’s beautiful intertwining that has always been our strength, but is now being obliterated.”
She revealed what happened when she “tweeted enthusiastically about Lucknow’s new metro, where the map rotates between English, Hindi and Urdu”.
“I was so excited to see Urdu on a metro station,” Nair told the FT. “I took a picture of it and tweeted it. I said ‘Long Live Lucknow. My first Urdu on the metro!’ That is it. That is what I said. I was trolled by like 400 trolls saying, ‘Mira Nair loves the language of the invaders. Go back to Pakistan.’”
Sunder Katwala
Migrants in a dinghy crossing the English Channel
