Mira Nair, director of the controversial Kama Sutra, has moved to Cape Town. She spoke with DAVID BERESFORD
THE story is told of how one of South Africa’s most powerful black women was involved in a minor traffic accident with a white motorist recently. Mamphela Ramphele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, former director of Anglo American and one-time lover of Steve Biko, was ruefully contemplating the scrape on the side of her BMW when the white woman admonished her: “Just wait until I tell your madam about this!”
Recounting the tale, Mira Nair, resplendent in a silk kurta bundi, gives a fair imitation of India’s bandit queen – dark eyes flashing at the memory of a skirmish much relished, if only vicariously. For a moment there’s a hint that one of India’s most combative film-makers may have rested her ever-roving eyes on a new battlefield and that South Africa might add another illustrious name to a pantheon of social activists who have fought the good fight on the tip of this benighted continent.
But her attention is on the world’s biggest democracy, rather than its youngest. As she leans over her laptop computer in anxious search of e-mail on the progress of her struggle with the Indian censors, it’s apparent that Nair’s heart is not where her latest home is – set gloriously, though it is in the shadows of Table Mountain.
The director who has brought Indian cinema out of the backwaters of Bollywood to world attention, with the likes of Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala, seems to have done it again with her latest, Kama Sutra. Subtitled “a tale of love”, it might be better described as a tale of Asian sexuality – and one seemingly much appreciated by audiences as it chalks up box-office records from America to Japan.
Cape Town seems an unlikely location in which to discover Nair and she herself appears mildly surprised to find herself in the land of recent apartheid. A film-maker who, cinematically at least, has one foot determinedly planted in the United States and the other on her home continent, the choice of Africa to set up house offers geographical compromise as the only apparent rationalisation. But it is a passion discovered in Uganda which brought her by a roundabout route to Francis Drake’s “fairest Cape in the entire circumference of the world”.
“I have this odd, deep connection to Kampala,” she says dreamily. “It’s funny. I am not from there, had never been there, went there in 1989 to research Mississippi Masala, met Mahmood, fell in love and my life changed.” Professor Mahmood Mamdani, distinguished Ugandan political scientist with the looks to set a Bollywood producer scrambling for contract forms, became Nair’s second husband after her break-up with the New York photographer, Mitch Epstein.
But Kampala shared the passion. “It reminded me of the small town I grew up in in India. We bought the house that is in the beginning of Mississippi Masala – that little house that has that amazing view. I planted my first garden there and I became a gardener, sort of …”
They have kept the house in Kampala, but moved to South Africa at the beginning of this year with their five-year-old son, Zohran, when Mahmood took up a post as director of African studies at the University of Cape Town. So now home is an imposing three-storey house set on the lower slopes of Table Mountain with panoramic views over the “mother city”.
South Africa has to some extent found Mira Nair – she is fast becoming a feature on the local artistic landscape – but she has yet to return the compliment. Gesturing out the window she says: “It pretends to be the Riviera … It clicked into place when someone said that here even the vegetation is imported. Then I understood why it felt weird. It is not itself, it has many-times borrowed cultures and as a result it does not stay within me – it sort of washes away when I leave it …” The same cannot be said of India, where Nair’s battle with the censors, which has already become something of a cause clbre on the sub-continent, is her current pre-occupation.
There has always been provocative edge to Nair, from her childhood. Her father was something of a grandee, albeit in the ranks of bureaucracy – one of the first cadre of Indian civil servants who filled the administrative vacuum left by the departure of the British Raj. His only daughter was born in Bhubaneswer on the south-east coast of India some 300 miles south of Calcutta. An outstanding student, her temperament was ill-suited to the provincial school in Orissa, an all-girl establishment which was more of an ante-room to the marriage chamber than a forcing ground for the intellect.
Her complaints to her father were met with an invitation to identify the school’s shortcomings. Nair did so with the dramatic flair which was later to drive her career – submitting several essays written in gibberish. When she presented these – complete with the “A’s” awarded for the nonsense by her admiring, but sadly uncritical teachers – she won herself an instant transfer to a convent in the Himalayas.
There the Irish nuns proved her equal and she moved on, via university in Delhi, to Harvard. Studying drama, she graduated summa cum laude with a documentary for her thesis – made by walking a camera through the streets of the Moslem community of Old Delhi, recording their reaction to a woman behind a lens, instead of a veil.
After a stint of waitressing between scraps of film work she raised the funds for her first documentary, So far from India. An account of an Indian immigrant working at a subway news-stand in New York, it was an exploration of the bleaker side of the American dream for latter-day Columbuses. She followed it up with her favourite, the documentary India Cabaret – a portrait of two strippers in Bombay with whom she lived for four months.
Then came fame with Salaam Bombay! – which won her an Oscar nomination and the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1988 – and Mississippi Masala, her widely acclaimed account of a love affair between an Indian woman and a black man. Now she has done it again, seizing on the 2 000-year-old Sanskrit sex manual to produce a film challenging Indian sexual taboos.
The Kafkaesque battle with India’s censors over the film – which at one point was fought over a half-second flash of nudity – is expected to come to a climax in the Bombay High Court later this month, when Nair is suing for harassment and loss of revenue. If she wins it will go on nation- wide release and, she hopes, will teach the Indian film industry some of the joys of sex.
“Sexuality in Indian cinema is always cloaked in rape and violence,” she laments, “the women as whores, or virgins, and never the twain shall meet.” She blames it on a colonial heritage, of Victorian hypocrisy, compounded by Indian male defensiveness in the face of the foreigners. “Male and female politics were affected – the whole notion of sharam [shame] and izzat [honour] became very important to protect their women from the men outside,” Nair says.
“The irony is that we come from a culture which had regarded love and sexuality as a link to the divine. It was an art to be learned and yet to be completely matter-of- fact about. Kama Sutra is very straight- forward and non-didactic. `If you wish to have sex without love, this is the art of pretence, this is how to be a courtesan. If you wish to have sex with love, then if you handle yourself in this manner there is the possibility of something sacred’,” she says.
“If you read any of the literature up to the 13th to 14th century there is an unabashed embrace of the erotic in a very radical way. And we have gone so far from that, not just in a repressed way, but in a twisted way. I wanted to address that. And I wanted to make a film in an ancient- modern style – not a museum piece on India, not a culturally correct work. Just what moved me.”
It ended up more of a film of sexual politics than sexual positions; a game of chess between the sexes. “It is essentially the journey of a woman who goes from a level of innocence to a state of person- hood.”
Nair is jubilant about the impact the film is having. She recounts how she met an Indian woman in Trinidad who had seen the film, in a black working-class neighbourhood, and told how it became the subject of intense discussion in the community. “Indian male virility has become something to contend with,” Nair said with joyous peals of laughter “… in Trinidad!”