Traveler: Mira Nair

This activity corresponds to the "Traveler: Mira Nair" feature in your textbook. The questions below are designed to help you learn more about the topic. Once you have answered the Comprehension questions, submit your answers and move on to the subsequent questions included in the Analysis and Outside Sources sections. Each section is designed to build upon the one before it, taking you progressively deeper into the subject you are studying. After you have answered all of the questions, you will have the option of emailing your responses to your instructor.

Introduction

As your text suggests, Mira Nair's career as a filmmaker exemplifies the positive aspects of globalization. Her life and education, both in India and abroad, nourished a perspective that is at once international and intensely local. Below you will encounter more of Nair's own reflections on her art. As you read the interview, be alert to the complexities of Nair's response to the forces of globalization about which you read in Chapter 32 of your textbook.

Comprehension

1. Where was Mira Nair raised?

2. Where is the Indian film industry centered?

3. Where does Nair live now?

Analysis

Go to http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,736168,00.html and read the interview with Mira Nair.

1. What, according to Nair, interests her about marginal figures? What kinds of marginal figures has she examined, and what is the unifying connection among them?

2. Discussing her film "Monsoon Wedding," Nair notes a "fascination with the international that was totally wrong-headed." What do you think she means by this formulation, and what does it suggest about the effects of globalization?

3. What does Nair define as specifically Indian in her films?

Outside Sources

1. At http://www.maishafilmlab.com/index.php, visit the website of the Maisha Film Lab, founded by Mira Nair in Kampala, Uganda. Read the Lab's mission statement. How does that mission reflect Mira Nair's artistic and social vision as you understand it?

2. Nair's Maisha Film Lab received support from the Commonwealth Foundation, about which you can learn more at http://www.commonwealthfoundation.com/about/. In what ways is the work of the Lab and, by extension, Mira Nair's work a legacy of the British Empire?

3. Mira Nair claims Bollywood as one of her principal influences. Read more about Bollywood at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0502/feature3/?fs=www7.nationalgeographic.com. What are the staple elements of Bollywood films, and what role did Yash Chopra play in establishing them?