The Right Direction

With Mira Nair directing its adaptation, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy seems to have found safe hands

- Shreevatsa Nevatia

When we called Mira Nair last month, she was in Lucknow. Still in her yoga pants, with a hundred things to do, she told us, “We begin shooting A Suitable Boy tomorrow. I’m happy to make movies, but I’m still struggling. It never does become a cakewalk.” And the 61-year-old filmmaker insisted she wasn’t being modest: “Doing this is a lovely pleasure, but it’s a beautiful mountain ahead.”

Nair had wanted to adapt Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy since the moment it was published in 1993. Seth’s book was set in 1951. Nair’s parents were married in 1950. She had always imagined what it would have been like to live in a newly free India, “an India that was finding itself”. Directing a six-hour adaptation for the BBC, two years after she acquired the rights to the book, Nair sounds relieved.

In her interviews, all of Nair’s convictions seem hard to shake. She does, for instance, still stand by her view that “filmmaking is a political act”. She says, “That’s what fuels me to make A Suitable Boy.

It’s timelier than ever. It shows us who we were—a great nation of intermingling, one of coexistence. When seeing where we’re going, it’s sometimes very powerful to remember from whence we came.”