ByAlexandra Bregman
ByAlexandra Bregman,
Contributor.
Zohran Mamdani has made history with his successful nomination as New York City’s first Muslim primary candidate. The 33-year-old state assemblyman has ensnared a wide net of seasoned billionaires and enthusiastic young activists, presented as a regular New Yorker who lived in Africa as a child. Recently married to a stunning young Syrian-American illustrator, he is an active voice in the Free Palestine movement, who has also managed to charm many left-wing Jewish people, including the affable and quirky Kennedy family member Jack Schlossberg. But Mira Nair, the acclaimed filmmaker, is rarely explored as more than his mother.
Along the way on his incredibly charismatic and relatable journey to the top of New York’s political sphere, his mother, Hindu, Oriya-born Indian film director Mira Nair, has hardly been mentioned. Presenting as Muslim perhaps exempted him from comparisons to 2020 Democratic Congressional candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni from Texas, who used his polyglot skills to reach a wide array of voters, but was chastised for seemingly pandering to Hindu conservatives. Today, Mamdani’s mother is reportedly based in Africa, where his father is a subject specialist academic. But Nair taught film at Columbia University when Mamdani was a young man, and is a very important storyteller of Indian and broader South Asian narrative history in diaspora.
