In 1989, Hollywood had come calling for Mira Nair. Her debut feature film âSalaam Bombay!â premiered at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the CamĂ©ra dâOr and Audience awards. The following spring, it received an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature, only the second time a film from India had been nominated.
The acclaim brought Nair some enticing directing offers. But she wasnât interested. As demonstrated by her rich and varied career in the decades since â with beautifully realized stories that are simultaneously specific and universal, timely and timeless, like âMississippi Masala,â âMonsoon Wedding,â âThe Namesakeâ and âQueen of Katweâ â she wanted to make the films that she wanted to make.
âPeople would say, âJust make a rom-com, babe. Just go to Los Angeles, and just be one of the pack.â But anybody can be one of the pack,â the director said in a recent interview. âWhat I learned from that film, which carried into âMississippi Masala,â was that I should follow my own heart, always, and do what I want to do, and do what is actually very difficult to do, and do what you think you canât do.â
After âSalaam Bombay,â Nair had been kicking around an idea about âthe hierarchy of color â what I called being brown between Black and white â which was my experience as a scholarship student at Harvard, when I first left India at 19,â she said. âI was somebody who was in between both communities and completely accessible to both, and yet invisible lines were drawn.â
She had also read about Indians living in Uganda who were brought over during British colonial rule to build the railroads. Generations of Indians lived there until 1972, when dictator Idi Amin expelled them. Through articles in the Indian diaspora newspaper India Abroad, Nair uncovered âthis other strange trick of historyâ: Some of those Ugandan Indians had settled in Mississippi and become motel owners.
Nair and her frequent collaborator, screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala, combined all of these ideas into âMississippi Masala.â Released in the U.S. in early 1992, itâs a gorgeous and resplendent drama featuring off-the-charts chemistry between Mina (Sarita Choudhury) â a young Indian immigrant woman who works at a motel in Greenwood, Mississippi, where her family settled after being expelled from Uganda â and Demetrius (Denzel Washington), a young Black man who runs a local carpet cleaning business. Their romance creates tensions in their families and communities. (Nair plays a brief but memorable role as a gossiping auntie.)
The movieâs deep, sometimes unnervingly honest explorations of racism â not to mention colorism, white supremacy, colonialism and displacement â still feel groundbreaking 30 years later. A frame-by-frame restoration of the filmâs stunning visuals and soundtrack, done by the Criterion Collection, is now playing at the IFC Center in New York and will be shown at various theaters around the country in the coming weeks. It will also be available on DVD and Blu-ray on May 24.
A confluence of events led to the restored version, according to Nair. In 2020, the London Indian Film Festival wanted to screen the film and asked her for a print of it. The rights to âMississippi Masalaâ had been sold and resold several times, and it turned out the only print was now owned by a music company in Nashville, which agreed to return the rights to Nair. She sent the print to LIFF, where it won an audience award as the festivalâs most popular film.
That renewed buzz, along with the filmâs 30th anniversary, got Nair thinking about how to bring âMississippi Masalaâ back to the big screen. (Adding to the filmâs resurgent relevance: Kamala Harris â âthe Black brown queen,â as Nair put it, and the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica â had just become the first Black and Asian American vice president.)
Itâs hard to believe now, given Choudhuryâs long career in film and television, but âMississippi Masalaâ was her debut role. She had studied film in college and was an avid fan of Nairâs work. She auditioned for âMississippi Masalaâ thinking that even if she didnât land the role, she could at least meet Nair and potentially work on the film as a production assistant. Most of Choudhuryâs coursework had focused on film theory. But she also harbored âprivate dreamsâ of acting, as she recalled in an interview.
âI was feeling a little jaded, and I think I fell into the acting as a way of escape,â Choudhury said. âAnd so, the dream began. But with Indian parents, it was already enough that I was in film school, let alone I was going to be an actress. So I think I just kept it to myself. So even though it was so important when I went to the audition, I donât think the dream was in the forefront yet.â
Nair remembers casting Choudhury for her âfierce intelligence and a total absence of vanity in her.â
âI just saw a picture of her, this wild chick on a bicycle with this hair. And that was the image for me: somebody who didnât care how she looked,â Nair said. âI just loved that she had this kind of intelligence. For me, vanity is the biggest blow to performance. And she just was not interested.â
To this day, itâs a quality that Choudhury, who also starred in Nairâs 1996 film âKama Sutra: A Tale of Love,â hasnât lost, according to Nair. She recalled that last year, when Choudhury was shooting âAnd Just Like That,â HBO Maxâs âSex and the Cityâ revival, âshe said, âOh, Mira, they got to scrub me when I come on set,â because theyâve got to pretty her up. Theyâve got to put all the glam on her.â
âSheâs not bothered. And sheâs inimitable, really,â Nair continued. âShe is therefore, in some inner way, the most beautiful creature that walks because it comes from an intelligence. It comes from that spirit, rather than the stuff you put on yourself. And I love that about her. And thatâs Mina. Mina is brave and fearless, and sheâs a product of her parents and her community. But basically, sheâs got her own compass. And sheâs not unfeeling and sheâs not selfish, but sheâs going to do what sheâs going to do. And that spirit of fierce independence, she just imbues it, Sarita.â
Over the years, Choudhury has talked about her disastrous audition for the film, when she decided to change her look by not washing her hair for a few days and then putting oil in it, âthinking I was cool.â The confused casting director, who had seen Choudhury before with her regular hair, told her to wash it. âIt was crazy. I had half an hour, and I was like, âWhere am I going to wash my hair?â So the whole thing was odd,â she said. âAlso, at that age, I didnât like having healthy, beautiful hair. I thought it was ridiculous. So I was very rebellious, but I was also a good girl.â
I mention to Choudhury that itâs not unlike Mina, who is trying to weigh doing whatâs expected of her versus charting her own path. âMira often says itâs because of all those things, she saw it,â Choudhury said. âItâs interesting, because when youâre auditioning, you are just trying to behave, trying to calm all these things down. And yeah, youâre right â in the end, itâs those things that actually book you the job.â
Rehearsals for the film began in New York, where Washington, fresh off winning an Oscar for âGlory,â was starring in Shakespeare in the Park. Production then moved to Mississippi, where Choudhury spent time with the Indian immigrant community, âhanging out with other girls there,â she said. âI saw their complete rebellion, whatever the rebellion was, even if it was small. But they were able to hang in a very languid way.â
In creating the electrifying chemistry with Washington, Choudhury thinks that since this was her debut role opposite a more established actor, it helped her channel the initial reticence between Mina and Demetrius. âHe was watching me to see what this first-time actress is going to do. I was watching him thinking, âOh God, I hope Iâm not failing him,ââ she said of working with Washington. âAnd it creates this beautiful tension because youâre so different. And the minute they said âcut,â I would just walk away. I was always scared to talk to him or hang out with him, and in a weird way, that fed into the on-screen moments.â
Choudhury remembers that some of the best direction she got from Nair came from the director picking up on real-life details that helped enhance the actorsâ performances. âShe would say things like, âAs youâre walking, you know that thing you do with your hair? Do it while youâre talking,ââ Choudhury said. âI always love directors who give physical directions, because I feel like descriptive directions are not useful at all. And sheâs very good at that, just sensing things I did in life and pulling it in.â
Choudhuryâs unforgettable, lightning-in-a-bottle debut performance should have opened the floodgates for her career. But as a South Asian actor, the roles were more like a trickle at best. âIt was hard,â she said. âI got a lot of attention and love from the industry, but it didnât open up opportunities. No one knew what to do with me. There were no roles for people like me then. So it was confusing, because on one hand, I was doing a lot of interviews, I was being flown to festivals, I was meeting other directors who were like, âOh, I want to work with you.â But then, they didnât know in what role.â
âI didnât work for a while,â she continued. âLuckily, I joined a theater company and worked there for a year, which was great anyway, because it taught me so much. It wouldâve been so different today, probably. But no, there was no opportunity at the beginning.â
These days, roles for South Asian actors in Hollywood are still not exactly plentiful. But the range of Choudhuryâs recent work suggests things are gradually changing for the better. Over the past year, she was on âAnd Just Like That...â and in the films âAfter Yangâ and âThe Green Knight,â works that could not be more different from one another. In particular, her âAJLTâ character, the glamorous Manhattan real estate agent Seema Patel, feels like a breath of fresh air. Itâs so rare to see a character on a major TV show whoâs a proudly single South Asian woman in her 50s â and to see a character of color whoâs not specifically defined by her identity. In Season One, we get brief glimpses into Seemaâs backstory, and we meet her parents, played by the legendary Indian actors Madhur Jaffrey and Ajay Mehta. In the showâs upcoming second season, Choudhury hopes weâll get to see more of Seemaâs life.
âWhat does Seemaâs house look like? And does she do the dishes? Maybe she loves doing dishes to ground herself. Iâm curious to see who she is in her own house, and maybe what would happen if Carrie hung out with her there or met her friends,â Choudhury said. âJust even where she keeps her shoes. Because sometimes people, the way they present themselves on the outside, theyâre completely different at home. Especially if youâre a real estate agent, you spend so much time with other peopleâs homes. Who knows? Maybe your own has got one statue, and itâs not furnished. I donât even know. But Iâm curious.â
Nair also has a full plate of upcoming projects. At the time of our interview, she was in Mumbai, where sheâs casting for her long-gestating stage musical adaptation of âMonsoon Wedding,â which was delayed by the pandemic. The musical is set to premiere in Doha, Qatar, in November, before heading to London and New York in 2023. Nair also just directed the pilot for a new Disney+ âNational Treasureâ series, which reimagines the franchise by featuring a Latina protagonist who is a DACA recipient. And sheâs writing the script for âa very cool musical feature film with Pharrell Williamsâ that features âa Black and brown relationshipâ â like âMississippi Masalaâ â âbut united by music.â
Nair and Choudhury agree that the issues raised in âMississippi Masalaâ hadnât really been addressed in film before â and have seldom been depicted on screen in the 30 years since.
âIâm trying to think why that it is,â Choudhury said. âOn one hand, it scares me, because Iâm like, âHave we not come far in [30 years]? Why are these things radical?ââ
âOr, part of me thinks Mira made a very timeless movie without meaning to, because it takes on such huge eternal dilemmas of leaving home, falling in love â the whole âWest Side Storyâ thing, falling in love with the person youâre not allowed to be with,â she continued. âI think she created a beautiful, timeless puzzle.â