“Nair’s films certainly don’t typify the Bollywood formula,” Fonseca says. “They are generally more sophisticated. Her films are successful and compelling precisely because [of their] frankness and storytelling flair…The viewer can identify with the characters and is soon completely hooked.”

Far from the stock characters of Bollywood, Nair’s subjects are compelling and unusual. She depicts the life of prostitutes in Salaam Bombay and young American immigrants in Mississippi Masala. The protagonist of Monsoon Wedding is worldly and daring as she attempts to deal with her family’s wish for an arranged marriage and her own desire for the man she actually loves. Nair’s 1996 film Kama Sutra was censored in parts of India for its depiction of homosexuality.

“I tend to find great strength in characters who are not easily accepted by society, considered marginal in some way,” she says.

Nair’s best known work, Monsoon Wedding, is the eighth-highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the U.S. Shot in just 30 days on real sets, this story of a Punjabi-arranged wedding received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Golden Lion at the 2001 Venice Film Festival.

Monsoon’s characters speak in Hindi, Punjabi and English. Nair has said the use of these languages adds to the family aspect of the film, making the relationships and interactions true to India. While many Bollywood films concentrate on the upper- and middle-class, Monsoon Wedding ties together characters from all social strata.

A large portion of film’s negative was damaged during shipment to New York City—including an irreplaceable scene shot during an actual monsoon. Luckily, insurance claims allowed Nair to reshoot three of the damaged scenes and use digital technology to recreate the rain storm. She says the lost film was a blessing in disguise, forcing her to reexamine areas of the story that needed strengthening.

Elvis Mitchell’s New York Times review of Monsoon Wedding praised the realism of its hand-held camera work and Nair’s ability to turn the slightly clichéd plot into something beyond soap opera.

“‘Wedding’ captures the small, hilarious, skirmishes of a culture at war with itself and the families trying to hold their ground against change; it is enchanting. It also evokes a marriage of temperaments and subcultures, subtly defining the differences between them,” Mitchell writes.

Nair says she plans to turn the movie into a Broadway musical through her Manhattan-based production company, Mirabai Films.

“Personally, I still think Nair’s best film, and her most serious work, was Salaam Bombay!, which, while not a documentary…was powerful and affecting,” Fonseca says.

Next fall Fonseca will teach the seminar Indian Studies 115: “Voices of Indian Women in Literature and Film.” When she last offered a similar course, she says students frequently referred to Nair’s films in discussion. The class watched clips from Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, examining issues of race, gender and culture.

Nair explored patriotism in 11.09.01, a post-Sept. 11 collaborative project with 10 other renowned filmmakers. In exactly 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame, Nair chronicles the experience of a Hamdani family in Queens whose eldest son went missing after the World Trade Center attacks.

11.09.01 brought accusations of supporting terrorism against Nair and her fellow collaborators for what some called the films’ anti-Americanism. The movie has been distributed in twenty countries, but not in the U.S.

These days, Mira Nair is busy editing Vanity Fair, an interpretation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel.

“It’s very exciting because it’s a great big swirl of a movie and a story I’ve loved since I was 16,” Nair says. Despite the long hours and tedium of editing, she sounds says she is excited about the process: “We’re jamming, baby!”