What Zohran Mamdani Might Have Learned from His Mother’s Films
Amardeep Singh
Zohran Mamdani, as most readers know by now, is the son of a filmmaker, Mira Nair. His parents met while she was working on Mississippi Masala (1992); his father, Mahmood Mamdani is a professor of international affairs and anthropology who had lived through the events from the 1970s described in the film.
Zohran was born 34 years ago (October 1991), and his mother’s film was released only a few months afterwards (in the U.S., February 1992). Obviously, one shouldn’t read the politics of one person through the lens of their parents, as some pro-Israel groups have been attempting to do. And in a New York Times interview with both parents from June, Mahmood Mamdani made it a point to differentiate his own ideas and beliefs from his son’s: “He’s his own person,” he said. Strikingly, Mira Nair immediately jumped in to express a contrary point of view: “I don’t agree… Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.” I’m curious what might happen if we take that seriously: What can we learn about Zohran’s approach to politics through his mother’s approach to filmmaking?
Admittedly, what Mamdani has done as a politician in his brief career really has no template or precedent, though he has often cited Michelle Wu in Boston as a model for the kind of Mayor he wants to become; one can also look at the insurgent, social-media fueled candidacy of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 as a model as well. And in recent campaign videos, we have seen Zohran appearing with other senior role models like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But despite the novelty of Zohran’s impressive political campaign, I believe there are certain core ideas about ethics and life in multicultural societies in Mira Nair’s film that circulate in Zohran’s own approach to politics. To understand where he’s coming from, I would propose readers take some time and watch these two films.
The two films I’m going to talk about are Mississippi Masala (1992) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). There are, of course, many other films of Nair’s I love – I wrote a whole book about her in 2018! But these are the two that seem to speak the most to the moment we’re living in, as many of us are struggling to make sense of extreme anti-immigrant policies from the Trump administration leading to widespread ICE crackdowns, families being broken up, and subtle and not so suble changes in the fabric of American society. Alongside that, many are grappling with the question of how to respond to the ongoing horror and tragedy in Gaza, including the Hamas attack of October 7 as well as the two years of vast killing and destruction by the Israeli army, funded and supported by the American military under both Biden and Trump.
Mississippi Masala a film featuring a romance between an Indian woman whose parents were forced out of Uganda during the Asian Expulsion in 1971, and an African American man. It was the first film of Nair’s that I myself saw, and I remember being entranced by what I was seeing on screen. Both leads were people of color (highly unusual in a Hollywood studio-financed film in the early 1990s), and Indian communities in the U.S. were being shown on screen as something other than convenience store clerks.
In my book chapter on Mississippi Masala (I posted an excerpt of it online here a few weeks ago), I was struck by the similarity between the narrative of Nair’s film and some of the stories in Mahmood Mamdani’s published memoir of the Ugandan Asian Expulsion, From Citizen to Refugee. Mamdani’s book and Nair’s film both show how a culturally and racially mixed society can become internally polarized. As the deadline to the expulsion approaches, friendships between Indian and African Ugandans become strained under the pressure of the dictator Idi Amin’s plan to force all people of Indian descent to leave the country. At one point early in the film, Jay and Okelo are discussing Jay’s decision to talk to the BBC and publicly criticize Idi Amin:
Okelo: Don’t talk to me about cowards. That’s what you are. You’re not leaving because you’re scared to leave? You are scared of leaving Uganda.”
Jay: “Why should I go? Why should I go? Okelo, this is my home.”
Okelo: “Not any more, Jay. Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.”
At the moment, this rejection from Okelo is hurtful – it seems as if his friend (who is a Black Ugandan) has picked up the chauvinism of the country’s leader. But later, we come to understand that this was a subtle way for Okelo to pressure his friend to do the safe thing, and get his family out of the country before it was too late.
Later, Jay and his family are living in Mississippi, where they are in close social and cultural proximity to the state’s African American community. There is a risk, here, of internalizing the anti-Blackness of the U.S. South as well as the sense of grievance coming from past experiences to color their attitudes towards the Black folks they encounter. Jay learns over the course of the film to let go of the old and embrace the new – and that includes coming to accept his daughter’s decision to be with an African American man as her romantic partner.
For Mamdani’s politics, the lessons of Mississippi Masala might be:
1) We should double down on embracing immigrant cultures and communities even if the Great Leader says otherwise. Immigrants to the U.S. come from many different backgrounds. Some are fleeing from violent situations or unsustainable poverty. Their stories and cultures are valuable and worth sharing. Mamdani himself is part of that story, but so are millions of other New Yorkers. We have to be on guard against attempts from our country’s leaders – and I am thinking of both Idi Amin and Donald Trump – to divide us against each other, or to allow the violent exclusion of migrants to become the norm.
2) Relationships between different ethnic and racial communities can still be tricky. One mistake of both anti-immigrant groups and some progressive activists is to think that all “people of color” are essentially aligned together. It’s not true. Latinos who identify, racially, as White are increasingly drifting towards the Republican party and Trump. And within big cities like New York and Philadelphia, there can be deep tensions within and between minoritized communities, and these need to be understood and addressed. And finally, the beliefs and values of other minoritized community can change over time. Mississippi Masala is about the tensions that can divide us – including between minoritized communities – but also about the path to healing.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a loose adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel. Hamid’s novel is a relatively tight and narrow story about a young Pakistani who moved to the U.S. in search of the American dream, and rose through the corporate ladder – only to become disillusioned after 9/11 and the advent of the War on Terror. He returns home to Pakistan, and has a tense encounter with a shadowy American intelligence officer who may be there to assassinate him or take him into custody. Nair’s adaptation expands its scope and makes the action plot of the novel much more dramatic. It admittedly doesn’t all hang together perfectly well, and when the film was released in the U.S. in 2012 reviewers found it to be a bit uneven. In my view, it’s still worth watching, especially as we think about the moment we are in now – two years into a bloody, senseless war in Gaza and a fragile ceasefire.
While the anti-immigrant ideologues in the Trump administration like Stephen Miller, seem adverse to any immigration from non-European countries, Nair’s film and Hamid’s novel remind us that the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S., including from Muslim countries, come here as admirers of core American values like individualism, economic opportunity, and multicultural acceptance. As Changez says repeatedly in the film, “I am a lover of America.” He graduates from Princeton; he gets a job at a top multinational financial firm in New York; he meets and falls in love with Erica, a young artist.
For Changez, a confluence of professional and personal crises lead him to give it all up, and returning to Pakistan. The professional crisis is a sense of confusion over the purpose of his activities: increasingly, it seems the work of U.S.-based globalization and transnational finance is a proxy for a kind of global dominance that Changez no longer believes in: “I was a soldier in your economic army.” And culturally, Changez comes to understand the point of view of communities resistant to American military and political dominance as well, as we see in the growing gap between Changez’s character (played by Riz Ahmed) and the film’s Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schrieber).
Just as it was a challenge for Nair to show an interracial romance between two people of color in a mainstream film in Mississippi Masala, it was tough going to make a mainstream film with a Muslim protagonist who comes to sharply criticize the American War on Terror. (In the end, the bulk of the film’s financing came from an organization in Qatar (the Doha Film Institute).
All of this is relevant at the present moment, as more and more Americans have come to reexamine their assumptions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zohran’s most frequently challenged position – one that would have been unthinkable for a mainstream politician in New York in the years following 9/11 – is his sharp criticism of the Israeli government. Just a couple of weeks ago, the New York Times did a helpful profile of his background and experience on this topic, leading back to his undergraduate activism with Students for Justice in Palestine at Bowdoin College.
One important lesson from Nair’s film – and one that’s hard to swallow for many liberal Americans – is that the U.S. role in other parts of the world has not always been constructive or helpful. Indeed, many of its policies, economic and military, have led to growing grievances from large numbers of people elsewhere, including in the Arab world. In the case of Gaza, a large percentage of the bombs that have, in effect, leveled the territory and caused tens of thousands of civilian deaths were supplied directly by the U.S. government – American taxpayers.
Nair’s film helps us understand how received and mainstream political views in the U.S. can seem so far afield from how the rest of the world might see and experience things. In the U.S., the “two-state” solution has been the mainstream goal for a lasting peace for several decades, but Zohran Mamdani, echoing the arguments from activist groups such as SJP and the JVP, along with activists in other parts of the world, have come to see that end as unlikely – and perhaps as a distraction from what they view as the only real solution – a multiethnic, pluri-religious democracy consisting of Jews and Arabs together.
Nair’s film does not specifically address Israel-Palestine, but it helps us understand where someone like Zohran Mamdani might be coming from on this issue. The film makes a subtle case that it’s not just explicit military and intelligence agencies that are responsible; the financial system and other facets of economic and cultural mainstream are also a part of it (“I was a soldier in your economic army”). Who are the good guys in this story? Whose voices can mainstream film-goers in North America or Europe actually hear?
Zohran’s politics on Israel and Palestine probably shouldn’t matter as much as they do; as mayor of New York, he will have little power to affect U.S. foreign policy. But the truth is, they do matter, and they signify a change of attitude especially among younger people and within minoritized communities that Democratic leaders would be foolish to ignore. If Zohran Mamdani is a harbinger of generational change in American politics, one of the most significant changes he may usher in is a dramatic realignment of the U.S. orientation to Israel.