One hot afternoon, when Mira Nair, all of 13 years old, was helping a friend with her homework in Defence Colony, Bhubaneswar, she dozed off. While her friend was out of the room, the girl’s father entered and, “Colonel or Brigadier or whatever he was, decided to practically lie on top of me,” Nair recalls. “I flung him off myself and I fought him. He was so embarrassed, he left. That was the seed which, 25 years later, became Monsoon Wedding.”
It might seem strange that a seed so dark and insidious produced a film so bright and celebratory — a wedding, after all. But perhaps it isn’t. Nair often invokes the “cheek-by-jowl” life of Nehruvian India, where the rich and poor existed in close proximity. So, it must also be between mirth and misery. Nothing is absolute, each inflecting the other.
25 years after its Venice premiere on August 30, 2001, where Nair won the prestigious Golden Lion, becoming the first female director to do so, before the film went on to become a commercial blockbuster, Monsoon Wedding still holds that candle. It floats between a commercial film and an indie darling; between wanting to say something about the world we inhabit and the sensuous desire to inhabit it; between being celebrated by Diet Sabya and the Criterion Collection.
Five days in the lives of 68 characters who descend on a wedding, only for a family secret to rip through the celebrations, but ultimately re-centre them, Monsoon Wedding is a film that made chaos its muse and ran with it. Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) and his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey) have arranged the marriage of their daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to an NRI, Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas). Aditi’s cousin Ria (Shefali Shah) has been shaded by Lalit and Pimmi since her father’s death; she is Aditi’s closest confidante. She is also carrying a terrible secret: she was sexually abused as a child by the family patriarch, Tej Puri (Rajat Kapoor), Lalit’s brother-in-law.
Tej, like Hemant, has moved to America and made both his fortune and peace there. He is framed as the moral and economic centre of the family, someone everyone looks up to. But the moment he enters the film, receiving reverence and adulation, Ria’s discomfort allows a sense of unease to creep in.
Five Loves
Nair’s method to this madness was to highlight five kinds of love. First is Lalit and Pimmi’s “old shoe love — they have been married 25-30 years now, and like old shoes, it is comfortable, but generally neglected,” Nair says. They sleep on separate beds, an essential detail, because in Lalit’s darkest moment, when he has to decide what to do with the information about Ria’s abuse, “he needs Pimmi and has to reach out for her, getting over himself to do that”. Here, set design becomes an anchor for character progression.
Then there is the “first” love of the bride and groom, each carrying an unresolved brush with the past and unfulfilled love. There is the “sick, twisted love” of Tej Puri. The teenage lust emanating from the younger generation. And finally, “Gandharva Vivah, one over the spirit, and not material love”, between the house help Alice (Tilottama Shome) and wedding planner P.K. Nair (Vijay Raaz).
The Seed
The script began as the germ of an idea while Nair was working on her documentary The Laughing Club of India in the summer of 1999. She floated it past Sabrina Dhawan, “a total Dilliwali, like me, but younger”, her assistant editor and student at Columbia University. Dhawan worked on the script, while Nair was “financing it on the gift of the gab”.
“I went to Cannes, and I literally financed it in an elevator with the first person I met. I said, ‘I need only $1 million to tell the story of this mad Indian family like mine, where secrets emerge.’”
With the money secured and Naseeruddin Shah’s contract inked, the film rolled on, while Nair and Dhawan kept shaving the screenplay down. Nair, who had already had an illustrious journey as a documentary filmmaker, a Cannes award and an Academy Award nomination under her belt for Salaam Bombay! (1988), was also trying to tell not just a new story, but a new way of telling one.
Inspired by the Dogme 95 movement, founded by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, she decided to shoot the film almost entirely handheld. Dogme’s principles demanded total austerity: handheld cameras, location shooting, no background music and no special lighting. It was about taking back control — what Nair characterises as “really stripping filmmaking down to the basics and making an inventive tale without being dictated by men in suits, except that I am a desi and I can’t do without music”.
Delhi Rains
Why the monsoon? “Because it is also my son Zohran’s (Mamdani) vacation from school, and I could take him along,” Nair says.
In July, Dhawan and Nair moved to Delhi, a month before shooting, to finalise locations and casting. The house they shot in was a modernist home in Brijwasan Farms, Gurugram, belonging to a close friend of Nair’s.
“That kund in the middle of the house, like a mud stepwell — that is by [renowned architect] Charles Correa. Finding that house was a big key-dropping moment, and we worked the screenplay around that home,” she says. Since the house wasn’t big enough to accommodate all the rooms needed for its rabble-rousing cast of characters, they picked another house in Defence Colony, owned by the same friend, for the interior scenes.
Growing Wild
The film was shot over 30 days, and it grew as it was being made. For example, Nair was so impressed with Vijay Raaz, who debuted with the film, and his “extraordinary physical comedy, his praying mantis-like body” that she kept texturing his character during lunch breaks, putting him on poles to recite dialogue and zinging up his plotline.
Music is an essential part of Nair’s universe — not only because it is nostalgic, but because it ripples through her worlds with a particular cinematic tint, even as she pursues a kind of realism. It bestows upon the film a fragile in-between-ness, from “Aaj Mausam Bada Beimaan Hai”, “the suggestion came from my husband Mehmood Mamdani” to “Chunari Chunari” and even “Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo”, moving from Sukhwinder Singh to Farida Khanum.
“Paisa diya (I paid),” she says of the music rights that had to be secured — a bill that today would hollow out the pockets of even the steeliest producer. It was a different time, and the fact that the film could cross-reference so many musical genres, so brazenly, is a testament to that. Music has never needed an excuse to be in our lives. Why, then, should cinema?
More Than Mirth
With Nair, you often get the sense that the plot is not enough.
While she revels in the chaos of circumstance, the sensual nostalgia and the easy beauty, she really wants to say something.
Aditi, for example, is pursuing an affair with a news anchor, and we see her entering the studio as a debate about censorship takes place. Nair had dealt with her share of that debate during Kama Sutra (1996). P.K. Nair’s obsession with gadgets — the man has a calculator watch — in his pursuit of upward mobility is sharply contrasted with Lalit, who refuses even to use a computer for his accounts, comfortable in his class position.
The diaspora, too, imbues the film: Australia, Oman and America.
It is as though Nair and Dhawan were trying to create a portrait of their time, with each character symbolising something not about a person, but about a people caught in the crossfire of a particular moment in history. Nair’s films lend themselves easily to ethnographic readings. It is why they so fiercely belong to their time: the attention she gives to advertisements, the quality of roads, the public life that filigrees private desires.
“I want you to come out of my movies looking at the world slightly anew — to think about things and feel things, not to just mann behlao and have a good time,” Nair says. But at the same time, she is careful about “revealing something without it being a message from above, but really from within a character — and then it’s the performances, the extraordinary performances”.
This is a useful distinction, because Nair’s cinema never quite makes the leap from ethnographic representation to moral conclusion.
She works with the desire to “make you recognise yourself somewhere in Monsoon Wedding”, be it the young gay boy who has not come out or someone “who has remained in a prison of silence and has not been allowed to speak about what has happened to her”.
By giving Alice and P.K. their own love story, which culminates in them joining the wedding dance, Nair broadens the lens, paying homage to the Nehruvian India she grew up in but has since left behind.
The Inspiration Behind Alice
The name Alice comes from the domestic help at Nair’s older brother’s home. “She was an Adivasi girl, a lovely girl who made an enormous impression on me because one day she came complaining of a stomach ache to my sister-in-law, who took her to the doctor right away. The doctor said that she’s giving birth in about half an hour. This 18-year-old Alice did not have a clue that she was having a child. I will never forget her."