In the pantheon of South Asian diasporic film-makers, uniformly slotted into the container category of ¡°world cinema¡±, Mira Nair stands out as a boundary-breaking female auteur. Amardeep Singh¡¯s rigorously researched and meticulously detailed exploration of her films is a much-needed first foray into chronicling and mapping the cinematic catalogue of this distinctive film voice.

The most conspicuous attribute of Singh¡¯s book is its spectrum-spanning appraisal of Nair¡¯s eclectic oeuvre. Due diligence is accorded to her formative early works. A bespoke chapter focuses on her esoteric documentary short films ¨C the incubators of film form, style and content in whose precincts Nair honed her film-making skills.

Singh asks the self-reflexive question ¡°Why a book on Mira Nair?¡± rather than a more egalitarian appraisal of other diasporic directors. His answer is that a singular documentary-style ¡°through-line¡± runs from her inchoate short films to her more celebrated later fiction features ¨C from Jama Masjid Street Journal (1979) to Salaam Bombay! (1988). This premise sets up Singh¡¯s titular paradigm of ¡°diaspora ±¹¨¦°ù¾±³Ù¨¦¡± as a conceptual Rosetta Stone to decipher the riddles of Nair¡¯s multifaceted modes of film-making. While the book endeavours to fashion these documentary realist continuities and consanguinities, its revelation of Nair¡¯s own shape-shifting odyssey of filmic self-discovery from India to America provides deeper disclosures about her transition from fledgling documentarian to empowered female auteur.

Singh is appreciably candid in acknowledging that his self-coined concept¡¯s dependence on documentary realism sits uneasily with several films such as Mississippi Masala (1991), which is punctuated with copious elements of domestic (melo)drama and emotional affect, as is Nair¡¯s family-oriented magnum opus, Monsoon Wedding (2001). Also mentioned is Nair¡¯s idiosyncratic and eyebrow-raising dalliance with Disney Pictures, the financial custodian of Queen of Katwe (2016). Singh¡¯s chapters, therefore, paint a vivid portrait of a versatile and hybrid artist who is willing to operate within the orbits and interstitial spaces of mainstream and marginal film circuits. These sections lead one to ponder whether Nair¡¯s innate protean fluidity may resist even compelling categorisations such as the ¡°diaspora ±¹¨¦°ù¾±³Ù¨¦¡± that Singh adopts as the lodestone of his book. There is scope to scrutinise this concept in more granular detail, and to address similar taxonomies such as Hamid Naficy¡¯s notion of ¡°accented¡±, ¡°diasporic¡± and ¡°exilic¡± cinema. Yet the notion of diaspora ±¹¨¦°ù¾±³Ù¨¦ will prove a useful springboard and transposable template to appraise the output of a diverse array of diasporic film-makers, specifically Nair¡¯s Canadian and British compatriots Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha.

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Singh¡¯s lucid and accessible prose is bound to appeal to general readers and aficionados of Nair¡¯s portfolio, in addition to specialist researchers and scholars. Comprehensive case studies of seminal Nair films are facilitated through a persuasive thematic and cinematic matrix: transgressive feminism in Monsoon Wedding; transcontinental hybrid identities in The Namesake (2006); ghosts of the colonial past conjured in the post-colonial present in Mississippi Masala; post-9/11 ¡°cross-cultural chaos¡± in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012); and censorship-related controversy aroused by Kama Sutra: A?Tale of Love (1996). Particularly compelling is Singh¡¯s analysis of Nair¡¯s aforementioned tour de force, Queen of Katwe, which bears the hallmarks of her previous meditations on marginalised individuals in erstwhile British colonies.

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This book is a significant milestone in shining a spotlight on the cinematic canon of a pioneering female film auteur ¨C one who has resided too long in the shadows of scholarly literature.

Ashvin Devasundaram is lecturer in world cinema at Queen Mary University of London.

The Films of Mira Nair: Diaspora V¨¦rit¨¦
By Amardeep Singh
University Press of Mississippi 240pp, ?86.50 and ?22.50
ISBN 9781496819116 and 21164
Published 15 October 2018