A Suitable Boy: In conversation with Mira Nair

This interview was originally published in Platform magazine’s June 2020 issue. Cover photo by Taha Ahmad.

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 a 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 says 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, which recently released on 26th July on BBC One.

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. 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 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 four families, was something that I wanted to explore.

Mira Nair directing the cast of 'A Suitable Boy'. Photo: Taha Ahmad, Courtesy: BBC/Lookout Point.

You often pick 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?

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 one feels while 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—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.

Lata Mehra with her mother, Rupa Mehra (portrayed by Tanya Maniktala and Mahira Kakkar, respectively) in ‘A Suitable Boy’. Photo: Supriya Kantak, Courtesy: BBC/Lookout Point.

Tell me about Lata. How do you make a character from the 1950s fascinating to an audience in 2020?


Lata is an 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.


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 timeless. 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.

Also, for me, the film is even more timely now than ever. I wanted the film to speak to today’s times—whether it’s in matters of love or the nation. 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.”

What was your process behind creating a 1950’s India?

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 be demolished the moment we’d stopped shooting to make it into an income tax office. We refurbished that to absolute excellence.

Some homes had plexiglass for windows. 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.

Mira Nair with Lata Mehra (portrayed by Tanya Maniktala) and Saeeda Bai (portrayed by Tabu). Photo: Taha Ahmad, Courtesy: BBC/Lookout Point.

What about the costumes?

In Lucknow, we had to shoot masses: two hundred extras for a scene was normal for us. Almost everywhere, however, 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 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.

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 themselves 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, a 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’. For Monsoon Wedding, 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 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 feels so natural, that as viewers, you begin to really trust this universe that has been created.

Maan Kapoor (portrayed by Ishaan Khattar) with Saeeda Bai (portrayed by Tabu). Photo: Taha Ahmad, Courtesy: BBC/Lookout Point.

The character of the courtesan, Saeeda Bai (portrayed by Tabu), is based on Begum Akhtar. 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 Saeeda Bai, 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.