Mira Nair was born in Orissa, a remote state in North East India. And although she had become interested in acting whilst at school in Simla, she initially studied Sociology at Delhi University. Aged 19 she accepted a scholarship to Harvard University where she took a liberal arts degree and studied film-making for two years, with a focus on documentary films.
Nair’s first four documentaries, made prior to Salaam Bombay!, were: Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979), concerned with the traditional Muslim Community in Old Delhi; Children of a Desired Sex (1987), about Asian women aborting female foetuses; and So Far From India (1982), a portrait of an Indian newspaper seller in New York and his wife and child he has left behind in India. India Cabaret (1984), a controversial account of the lives of Bombay cabaret dancers, was her most successful early documentary, winning the Best Documentary Award at the American Film Festival.
It was whilst researching her fifth documentary on the street children of Bombay, that she decided that this would make a good subject for her first feature film. And developed a story with Sooni Taraporevala, who then wrote the screenplay.
Perhaps due to that initial impulse to study sociology, Nair readily admits she has always “Been drawn to stories of people who live on the margins of society: people who are on the edge, or outside, learning the language of being in between; dealing with the question, what, and where is home?” These notions of being an outsider and what is home can be traced from her feature film debut Salaam Bombay! (1988) through to her recent directing project the six-part BBC adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, shown on BBC in July/August 2020, and on Netflix later in the year.
Salaam Bombay! concerns the lives of the street children of Bombay, and in particular the life of Krishna, an 11 year old boy, who after being abandoned by a travelling circus finds himself in Bombay. There he has to struggle to survive amongst the other, elder street kids, drug dealers and users, prostitutes and pimps.
The entire film was made on location, including, the usually private “chiller rooms” (Indian slang for institutionalised children’s homes). The film topped the London film charts as the most popular film of the week [Source: Time Out] and won the Camera D’or award at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Salaam Bombay! was also nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film.
Financing Salaam Bombay! was difficult due to the film’s plot and the way in which Nair wished to make it. In Hindi with real street kids (including Shafiq Syed who plays Krishna around which the plot revolves), real brothels, train stations and the busy streets of Bombay. The final budget was only $900,000, very low considering that there were 52 locations and was shot in 52 days.
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Mira Nair found that making documentaries and making feature films totally different. The method she used when making her documentaries was to practically live with the subject and the situation for a long period of time, followed by filming what she considered the most significant and interesting. With fiction films the idea has to be conceived first and then translated into convincing and effective visual imagery.
Salaam Bombay! was praised for the ‘verité’ style which gives the film the authentic, gritty feeling of a documentary. It is this documentary approach which enables the viewer’s mind to be focused on the issues in the film. The audience easily becoming involved with the characters and their lives, as with a conventionally filmed film. But the audience is also introduced to the squalor in which the street people live, therefore high-lighting their plight via the world-wide media of film.
It would have been very easy for the story to have ended up as a superficial “tearjerker”. But luckily we were saved from that fate by the intelligent script (by Sooni Taraporevala), excellent performances (especially by Shafiq Syed), superb direction and outstanding cinematography (by Sandi Sissel).
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Given the film’s unflinching examination of the devastating circumstances that the street children were living, it was inevitable when promoting the film that Nair would be asked what she saw her role as a film-maker as. “To raise awareness or one of political intervention?”, Nair responded “I just like to stretch my imagination as much as possible to make the best films I can make in the situation. It is a question of making films about ideas that I am impassioned about. In that process, if people get involved enough to re-examine the world around them or do something directly, that’s wonderful.”
One direct result was that with the profits from Salaam Bombay! Nair set up a foundation to provide educational, medical and vocational services for street children in Bombay. Almost 35 years and The Salaam Bombay Foundation is now, perhaps, the largest NGO in India, working with vulnerable children between the ages of 11 and 17 who are most likely to drop out. You can donate here: https://www.salaambombay.org/
When studying A Level Film Studies almost 30 years, Ellen wrote an essay about Mira Nair, and in those pre-internet years actually wrote Mira Nair a letter posting it to an address in Uganda. You can find out what happened here: https://www.ellencheshire.com/post/2020/05/20/how-mira-nairs-mississippi-masala-changed-my-life