The Archives of Mira Nair

“My biggest joy was to go to Hilles Library,” says Mira Nair ’79, recalling her time as a resident of Currier House, “and go into the audio section, and listen to my favorite poet, Dylan Thomas — records of him reciting the poems I loved.”

Only a few decades later, the archives of her own artistic career have a home at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, where you can see for yourself the gray boxes that include her undergraduate exams a few manila folders away from The New Yorker articles and lists of awards, all testaments to a career of activism and art.

After a year of theater and sociology at Delhi University and three years of studying film at Harvard College, Nair began her filmmaking career with her senior thesis, the documentary “Jama Masjid Street Journal,” and has since received widespread critical acclaim. Her accolades include the Camera d’Or and the Prix du Publique at the Cannes Film Festival, and Academy Award nominations for “Salaam Bombay!” and the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival for “Monsoon Wedding.”.

But Nair didn’t go into filmmaking “to seek fame and fortune.” From her time at Harvard, she was influenced by cinéma vérité, the cinema of truth, which, as she puts it, gave her “a home of using or working in art to try to reflect or change the world.”

She doesn’t only reflect an unjust world in her films, but feels a responsibility to mend the injustices she sees. “I can’t accept the injustice and the inequality always, and that has to be fueled into activism,” she says. “Otherwise it just is useless, isn’t it?”

“Salaam Bombay!” was “the first film to actually change the world in some way and still continues to with our Salaam Baalak Trust,” Nair says. The work, her first feature film, follows the lives of children on the streets of Delhi. With the proceeds, Nair established Salaam Baalak Trust, a nonprofit in Delhi that offers support to the same community of children in Delhi the film featured.

Inspired by the time she spent in Uganda for “Mississippi Masala,” in 2004, Nair founded Maisha Foundation and the Maisha Film Lab, a school for cinema in East Africa, which she says has now “trained more than 1000 alumni of young filmmakers from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda, in Kampala,” and created a “thriving East African film culture 16 years later.” She intends for Maisha to give its students training “in a way that is excellent and deep and total, and is taught by the people who practice,” for its alumni to begin “ telling the stories that no one else can tell.”

Despite her work as an activist, Nair is careful about the characterization of the relationship between her activism and filmmaking. “I wanted to be a filmmaker, an artist, a visual person,” she explains, “not just an agitprop, not just a bandwagon, to proclaim things.”

Nair said she wanted to “do what called out to me.”

“And often what calls out to me is a world unseen,” she added.

Throughout her career, Nair has followed that call. “I went towards the worlds that I could access that anyone else couldn’t or didn’t want to, or didn’t need. Or more importantly, they didn’t see,” she says. That work began in her documentaries; in “So Far From India,” her first documentary after her thesis, which follows a subway newsstand worker and the family he left behind in India, she captures “the pull of the dream of America in the eyes of a humble Indian family.”

“Being a person who grew up elsewhere, an Indian woman, who felt very rooted in where I came from,” she recalls, “I didn’t want to ever think of myself as subduing where I came from, or my identity.” Her filmography reflects that. India is central to Nair’s work, from documentaries like “So Far From India” to feature films like “Salaam Bombay!” and “Monsoon Wedding,” which follows the shifting relationships surrounding an Indian wedding.

Nair’s gaze, however, is not limited to one world. “Crossing the oceans from the age of 18 to come to this country, then back-and-forth” later in life, she is a person who has “lived in many worlds.” She believes in the ability of cinema to “reflect that seesaw between worlds in a very powerful way.”

1991’s “Mississippi Masala” is a story of interracial and intercultural love in America. It’s important to Nair that the eyes of that film are not “the eyes of an outsider looking in.” For her, “you have to be part of that world, to love it and be reverent about it” in order to make a film about it. “The commonality we shared was so deep of families being together, of even religion, for even of food,” Nair says.

Even in making “Hysterical Blindness,” which stands out in her filmography for being a self-admittedly “entirely American film,” Nair believes she is expressing something universal. “The universality of the search for love, in a different vocabulary, but the yearning, the emotion, the need, is us all,” she explains.

“What I love to do,” shares Nair, “is not just make films about the subcontinent or the Indian universe, but to make them about human beings with my own sensibility, which may not be like everyone else’s.”