WHIRLWIND.(Mira Nair and her Chelsea production company Mirabai Films)(Biography)

To get to the director Mira Nair's house in Kampala, Uganda, you follow a single-lane highway north from Entebbe, dogleg right at the roundabout as you enter town, pass a service station where a sign announces "TOILETS NOW HALF OPEN," and proceed south toward the once unfashionable section called Buziga Hill, where real-estate prices have tripled since 1990, when Nair and her husband, the scholar Mahmood Mamdani, bought their two-acre property for about seventy thousand dollars. As Nair barrels along in a secondhand green Toyota RAV4, the road is an embodiment of the extremes in which her films revel--a confusion of enterprise and collapse, of modernity and tradition. On either side, raggedy shops are jammed together like rows of bad teeth. We pass Harrod's Tailors, a shipping container that's now a haberdashery. "People here use everything," Nair says. "There are no fripperies." Boys ride bicycles with fringed back seats; women hurry to work in colorful gomesi, weaving past swarms of boda-bodas--passenger motorcycles--and reckless matatus, the Volkswagen vans that ferry Ugandans around town; red dust rises from dirt roads that meander off into subtropical vegetation. By a rusted sign for the Kiwumulo Country Club ("Cold Beers, Soda, Snacks--Soft Music in Background"), Nair hangs a sharp right. The car jounces up a rutted road that winds a mile and a half, past shanties and the orange-roofed cinder-block vulgarities that have sprung up like gigantic barbed-wire mushrooms, to her house. Nair, who divides her time among Kampala, New York, and New Delhi, found her modest bungalow, which has a magnificent view of Lake Victoria, while scouting locations for her second feature, "Mississippi Masala." "I was looking for something unforgettable," she says. "Like Marilyn Monroe is shorthand for sex, I wanted something you could be nostalgic for. The sun was falling. It was a complete ruin. I fell in love with it instantly."

"Enjoy every part of the frame and make it pulsate with life," Nair tells her students at Columbia University's film school, where she is an adjunct professor. Her own frames are crammed with the contrasting textures of sight, sound, and sociology, and she often invokes Andre Gide's dictum that tyranny is the absence of complexity. "I have an eye and ear for paradox," she has said. "That is life--the gray area where no one person is less or more virtuous than the other." Nair ("It's Nair like 'fire' ") exudes a cheeky dynamism that, in an earlier age, would have earned her the label of "bright spark." In 2000, she took on the seemingly lunatic task of making a film in thirty days in New Delhi, with a cast of sixty-eight and a budget of $1.2 million. Two years later, "Monsoon Wedding," a joyful and lyrical dissection of a Punjabi family and an upper-middle-class arranged marriage, has become the eighth-highest-grossing foreign film of all time in the United States. (Nair is planning a musical adaptation, which she will direct on Broadway.) The movie took the top prize at last year's Venice International Film Festival, and its popularity accounted for why Nair's Chelsea production company, Mirabai Films, had been approached with three new proposals: a Ted Hughes- Sylvia Plath bio-pic, and film adaptations of Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch" and Thackeray's "Vanity Fair." It was why Carsey-Werner-Mandabach Productions, which brought the world "Roseanne" and "The Cosby Show," had invited Nair to write a sitcom about an Indian-American family; and why Harvard University, which she attended in the late seventies, was planning to award her the 2003 Harvard Arts Medal.

"To be a filmmaker, you have to be diseased," Nair once said. She is, she explains, "permanently afflicted." Among the many accomplishments of "Monsoon Wedding," the most startling is that it conveys onscreen something that is palpable in Nair herself, what the Punjabis call masti--an intoxication with life. In film, which she chose as her metier at the age of twenty, Nair has found a form "where I can embrace life completely." She is now forty-five, and her relish for the world around her is fuelled, in part, by the knowledge that three horoscopes have predicted that she'll die at sixty-one. "I don't really believe it, but I don't forget it, either," she says. Nair, who is the youngest of three children reared in an upper-middle-class home in Bhubaneswar, a backwater--"remote even in Indian terms"--some two hundred and forty miles southwest of Calcutta, is a person of color, and she celebrates color. Whether she is showing us Bombay strippers in her documentary "India Cabaret" (1985), the racial divide between blacks and browns in the South in "Mississippi Masala" (1991), or even a white-trash Bayonne, New Jersey, no-hoper, who can't get a date (played, improbably, by Uma Thurman) in the HBO movie "Hysterical Blindness" (2002), Nair's films negotiate disparate ethnic geographies with the same kind of sly civility she practices in life. Her approach is sometimes oblique: she doesn't make political films, but she does make her films politically. Her gift, to which "Monsoon Wedding" attests, is to make diversity irresistible.

Nair is, above all, a populist--a mass communicator who actually maintains contact with the masses. When she was showing her 1996 erotic movie "Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love" in India, where cinemagoing is a vocal, largely male-dominated experience, she insisted that there be special screenings for women. After making "Salaam Bombay!" (1988), her audacious first feature, about street children in India, she started the Salaam Baalak Trust, a program that now assists some four thousand homeless kids a year in India. "I have always been drawn to the stories of people who live on the margins of society--on the edge, or outside, always dealing with the question of what and where is home," she says. Nair herself, who set off for America at eighteen, exists in that weird, liminal expatriate zone, and the complex negotiation of identity across cultural boundaries has become an inevitable theme in her work. "To have a world view--to look at the world through a point outside America--is crucial," she says. Even in India, she notes, "the process of day-to-day living stops people from seeing the things that I see when I come from the outside." One day in 1983, when she was in Bombay, as her taxi idled in traffic, she recalls that a boy "with just a torso and head, on a wooden platform with wheels," grabbed onto her cab. "As we approached the junction, he let go of the cab, pirouetted with the extra velocity, and then made a big gesture, like he'd just finished his most important circus routine. It was just fantastic to have this flamboyant lack of self-pity." She adds, "If I lived there, I might not have noticed the extraordinariness of that." The moment was her inspiration for "Salaam Bombay!"

When Nair was eight, her mischievousness and her fascination with the life stories of the village elders she befriended earned her the nickname Pagli--Hindi for "mad." Once, she even brought the milkman home. Nair grew up a tomboy--"I never had a doll"--with two older, athletic brothers, Vikram and Gautam. She has memories of ...