Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Mira Nair

By Andrea Plaid

Having watched several of Mira Nair’s films repeatedly, I swear her guiding directive is, “If you’re 1) brown,  2) grown, and 3) sexy, you need to be in my film.”

From Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love to Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake, Nair frames brown people in complicated and mostly saturated palettes of love, be it falling in love with and making love with a person, being bitterly ripped away from a beloved country or person, standing firm in love against someone who damaged a family member, and/or rekindling love for one’s legacy–in Nair’s films, several of these things tend to happen in one film. And she has cast some the sexiest actors of color in her flicks, including Denzel Washington, Naveen Andrews, Sarita Choundhury, Rekha, Indira Varma, Irrfan Khan, Zuleikha Robinson, and Ramon Tikaram. Honestly, I wouldn’t have looked around at Kal Penn if it wasn’t for The Namesake.

Even  my own love for Nair’s aesthetics is a little complicated: watching her adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair I completely understand why she “browned up” the film with richly colored and detailed costumes and having the characters speak of and traveling to India; it was a visual reminder of Britain’s long colonialization of the nation. So often, such novels get the Masterpiece Theater/Downtown Abbey hermetic whiteness treatment, devoid of any context of Rule Brittania that existed due, in no small part, to the country’s deadly takeover of countries of color. But I had a hold-the-fuck-up pause at the “exotic dance” Becky Sharp and some of the other white gentried women do at a private party for Sharp’s benefactor when someone pointed out to me that the music used was an anachronism: 19th-century British Sharp and the other dancers wouldn’t have danced to Hakim’s “El Salam” because it’s an Egyptian pop song from the ’00s (as in the 2000s, not the 1900s or earlier decades). However, the other argument could be–considering that Britain also colonized Egypt while it colonized India–Nair wants to show the audience that, for the white British gentry, India and Egypt are all part of an Orientalist piece to their ways of thinking.

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