I meet Mira Nair on a cold, rainy day in February in her apartment in London. She greets me with her dark, kohl-lined eyes, and disarming smile. Two days before our meeting, Nair had just finished editing and finalising the first two episodes of A Suitable Boy, one of the most anticipated six-part television series of the year. An adaptation of the 1993 book written by Vikram Seth. A Suitable Boy will be the first BBC television production with an all non-white cast (with a hundred and thirteen actors). It’s also the first time that an Indian series will be released on an international platform. Andrew Davies, the master craftsman behind television dramas like War & Peace and Pride and Prejudice, has written the screenplay.
“Vikram has already seen the two episodes and he loves it,” Nair states before sitting down at a table near a large, beautiful window that overlooks a street in Soho. Below, we can see locals wrapped in dull overcoats carrying umbrellas, walking by quickly. It’s a modern world; vastly different from the one the Oscar-nominated filmmaker has been busy creating over the last two years. A period drama set in the early 1950s in India, A Suitable Boy is a coming-of-age story about a young woman named Lata Mehra, and how she navigates through life as her mother relentlessly presents a series of suitors to her. The story artfully pits the narrative of the personal against the political, as it paints a vivid portrait of India emerging as a young and independent nation on the verge of holding its first democratic elections.
While Nair has had an extremely packed schedule, she schedules me in on a Sunday morning for an hour-long conversation about A Suitable Boy, alongside her stage production of Monsoon Wedding, the musical in the UK.
The last time when we spoke, you had told me that you decided to make The Namesake because it resonated deeply with you since you had just lost your mother-in- law. When did you first read A Suitable Boy and what about it struck a chord with you?
I waited for A Suitable Boy. I happened to know Vikram a bit while he was writing it. When the book came out, I read it, in fact, I might have read it twice, even though it was such a tome. At the time, I didn’t want the book to end because it felt like my best friend was going to leave me. The book is about a time when India is free and seeks to know itself, out of bloodshed, which is only referred to, but is not our story. Our story is about the people who come out of that and their complicated human lives.
It’s of course, Vikram’s own parents’ story in some deep ways, and 1951, the year that it is set in, was the year my parents were married. It was also the decade that I wanted to be born in, because we were making India. So, that’s what drew me to the book and its amazing characters. Of course, I’ve made the film with the greater interplay of language, meaning it’s not all in English. There are people who speak in Urdu and people who speak in Awadhi in the film as well.
It’s so deeply true what Vikram wrote about India – the layers I saw in the book, especially of this coming-to-consciousness story of the young girl, Lata, who is in my mind, Vikram’s India. I think, I must have wanted to buy the rights back then in 1993-94, but it didn’t happen somehow. I don’t remember whether I actively sought to buy the rights, but I definitely wanted to be a part of anything anybody was making on A Suitable Boy. This project did try to take off once or twice in the past and collapsed in its previous avatars. However, as a result of the powerful bolt of inspiration of A Suitable Boy, we made our own microcosmic version in Monsoon Wedding (the film). It was really inspired – not only by A Suitable Boy – but the fact that it was about these four families, which was something that I wanted to explore.
Anyway, years have passed and I have been actually living a lot more with Monsoon Wedding – the musical, these days because it’s coming out soon in the UK. So, it’s very moving for me that the “ma-baap” (parents) of Monsoon Wedding which is A Suitable Boy, I got to do, while the child emerges at the same time. It’s really like, “Wow, how is all of this happening in 2020?” Because I’ve been working on the musical for ten years and I’ve been working on A Suitable Boy for nearly two years and loving it ever more.
You often pick up great pieces of literature to give them a place in mainstream cinema. There was Vanity Fair (2004), The Namesake (2006), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), and now, A Suitable Boy. What propels you to choose books for film projects? Is it easier to adapt a novel, as opposed to starting from scratch and writing an original screenplay?
I don’t think it’s a plan. It’s just that if the story possesses me or captures me in some way, then I’d want to make it into a film. Of course, I also have to have a vision for it. For instance, I was drawn to The Namesake, because of the death of my mother-in- law, because of the desperate loneliness of losing a loved one in a country that you don’t call home. So, it captured me for those reasons. For A Suitable Boy, it comes from the real love for the book and that particular time in India, when it was going to have its first national election.
It was a charged time for India, much less populated as compared to what it is now, much more peaceful, much more hand-made. It was a time of great co-existence, old associations and total integration between Hindus and Muslims despite partition. And that adaa (charm) and that time, wow, if we don’t remember it, we will never believe it existed, especially with what is going on now in our country. By which I mean, the conscious obliteration of a deep part of our culture. We must remember what India was like – it should not be forgotten, because it’s about who we are as a people.
What was your process behind creating a 1950’s India? What was the mood that you wanted to create? What were your sets like?
In terms of creating the period, it was possible to find almost all the locations in Lucknow – not all, but seventy percent of them. There were beautiful, decayed forts and crumbling havelis in which people really lived, which we refurbished. We also filmed in two old beautiful family kothis; one of them was going to get demolished the moment we’d stopped shooting to make it into an income tax office or some- thing. We refurbished that to absolute excellence.
Some homes had plexiglass for windows, so we removed them and put real, old-world jaalis (latticed screens); we stripped the plywood doors and replaced them with walnut doors. We did it painstakingly and all on location. In the end, everyone wanted us to come back because we made their old homes look so great. For crowd scenes in public locations, we had to take down the hoardings and a lot of other things to make it look completely authentic. In the end, everyone wanted us to come back because we made their old homes look so great.
What about the costumes?
In Lucknow, we had to shoot masses: two hundred extras for a scene was normal for us. But almost everywhere, we saw these Salman Khan-types walking about. So, we had to dress – or undress in this case – the extras. I mean, we took it all off: the Adidas t-shirts, the faded jeans, and we shaved off all that coloured hair. We wanted to create an extraordinary world of not entirely khadi, but basically of the ‘hand-made Indian’ – the saris, dhotis, kurta-pyjamas and suits.
Some people wanted to be in our film so much, that many funny incidents happened. When I was shooting at the Charbagh railway station in Lucknow, for instance, we had been prepping the shot for over an hour. The scene was that at ‘action’, people had to emerge from inside the train compartments onto the platform and walk past the camera. So, when everything was ready, I said, “Action!”. Everything was going beautifully when in the middle of the shot, suddenly there were these two skinny guys in Adidas t-shirts and denim jeans walking with a swag amongst the crowd. And I asked, “Who the hell are those guys?” Turns out they were two locals who wanted to be in the shot, and they had sneaked inside the train compartment and were waiting with all the others just to be in the shot! We also went to places like Maheshwar (in Madhya Pradesh), where people often don’t film, so the locals were more authentic and natural for camera. So, we managed to get a nice evocation of the older world.
Tell me about Lata. How do you make a character from the 1950s fascinating to an audience in 2020?
Lata is intellectual, she’s bookish, she believes in love but hasn’t personally known it. It’s essentially about her journey. One of my favourite lines is, where Vikram (Seth) asks through Lata, “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” As human beings, we are all part of many things. As they say in Swahili, “A person is a person through other people”. Lata is that too. She’s about her mother, her family, her dreams, what is possible and not possible for her; and then experiencing love deeply and not knowing whether that is good or not. In that way, it’s a coming- of-age story of Lata, while the country comes of age as well. This is the parallel that we are trying to draw in the film.
So, we’ve tried to make a film that has a beating heart – keeping everything in the period, while ensuring that the emotions are absolutely human and time- less. There was a funny incident when my brother was visiting me in Delhi while I was shooting. I remember telling him, “Listen Vicky, I got to go because tomorrow I am shooting an erotic dream and I only have forty five minutes to shoot it”. He turned to me and said, “But I thought you were making a period film.” And my response to him was, “Even in the 1950s, how do you know that people did not have erotic dreams?” And we both laughed. But to answer your question, what I’m trying to show is how we as individuals are so tied to the world that we live in, and how we navigate this world in order to eventually find ourselves or find out who we are. That is the story.
Also, for me, the film is even more timely than ever. I wanted the film to speak to today’s times – whether it’s in matters of love or the nation. We had to stop shooting when the Ayodhya verdict came out, since Babri Masjid is in the heart of our story. Also, it was it was uncannily timely that we finished shooting on 17th December 2019 and the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests began on 19th December – where the citizens of India refused to accept the defeat of secularism, which was, of course, written in the Constitution of India. The latter was written in the ‘50s when our story is set. So, through this film, I hope to speak to the people of today, to show them that, “Look, this is where we came from, this is what existed. Don’t forget what we made our country for.”
You have a penchant for holding a metaphorical mirror, where you depict family dynamics through intense events, where you strip the characters down to their truest, most human form. It’s at this point that the viewers begin to identify ourselves with these characters. Why is holding this metaphorical mirror so important to you?
I sometimes say that my films are like accordions – they expand and then they squeeze your heart. I believe that if your heart (as a viewer) expands with laughter while watching a character, it will feel much more when the same character is hurting. So, I really believe in this yin and yang, this kind of balance, in order to make the audience more receptive to the characters in the story. It is creating that rhythm in the story, which is what is beautiful for me and A Suitable Boy gave me such ample chances. That is why I often love to make ensemble films, because I don’t think of life as solely a hero-heroine story – it’s the whole world that I’m fascinated about. However, in that world, if you don’t make each character distinctive, then you’re screwed.
You mentioned in an interview that ‘for a filmmaker, literally everything has to be chosen – you have to be mindful and aware of every single thing’. When you were filming Monsoon Wedding, I read that you had picked up the china, paintings and jewellery from your house to decorate the set to make it look more lived in. Did you do that for A Suitable Boy as well?
I do whatever it takes to make a set come alive. In A Suitable Boy, since it was a period film, everything was preordained. However, when we were filming in a number of ancestral homes, I decided to cast the servants of those particular homes. In India, upper middle class families can only live the way they do because they have staff. I was raised in a bungalow; my father was in the civil services, he had two peons and we had a nanny, a driver, a maali (gardener). There were always many people who populated the house, who made the bungalow look and function like it did. I wanted to show this in A Suitable Boy too. So, in almost every shot, you will see some staff member doing something in the background. In each of the four homes where we shot, we chose the real staff that had been actually working in those homes for years. Of course, we dressed them appropriately, according to the period, but it was great because each of them moved in these homes so naturally, since they knew it inside out. Then, everything feels rooted, everything felt so natural, that as viewers, you begin to really trust this universe that has been created.
The character of the courtesan, Saeeda Bai (portrayed by Tabu), is based on Begum Akhtar. You once told me that while you were growing up, Begum Akhtar had stayed at your parents’ home. Did you stick to the character drawn out in the book or did you choose to add your own nuances to Tabu’s character, through your memory of Begum Akhtar?
Saeeda Bai is a great character, but I didn’t weave in my childhood memory in that sense. However, the love for the ghazal runs deep in me from the old times. In his book, Vikram writes about the Urdu poems of Ghalib and Mir. So, what we did was that we took the poems and then composed them to music for Tabu to sing. We were so lucky that we found Kavita Seth, a great composer and singer in Bombay, whose voice resembled Tabu’s. Kavita composed and sang the poems that Tabu sings in the film. So, in that sense, I stuck to the spirit of the text, but did this as well, and this is a very powerful part of our film.
Was it memorable to work with a vast cast?
I think the best part was that they really bonded as families. The actors lived together over a period of time in the same place during the shoot. So, the Mehras, the Kapoors – everyone basically – really got to be the ‘maas’ (mothers) and the ‘bhais’ (brothers) of each other. They all behaved like real family members and the bonding between them was really a lovely sight. There were times when they used to miss each other: Maa nahin aayi abhi tak (My mother hasn’t arrived yet). It was very harmonious. It’s usually hard to be harmonious with such a big crew and cast, but it was. We also had our yoga session in the mornings. Every month there would be a new Iyengar yoga teacher who would join us and live with us for a month. We would do yoga either before or after the shoot, but we would not do it more than three days a week.
Text Radhika Iyengar
Film Stills Taha Ahmad