Far From Here, Far From Home: A Reading of Mira Nair’s "So Far From India"

A banjara man singing in the characteristic, old, narrow alleyways of Ahmedabad:

“I sing the story of Ram, who crossed the oceans to save his wife from the evil Ravan… a journey filled with troubles and God's blessings… a journey alone… I sing of these comings and goings.”

These opening verses are histories passed down through generations, layered with myth, longing, and movement. As the song fades, the frame shifts to the skyscrapers and bridges of New York, of glass and steel, clean and cold. Against this backdrop, we see a young Indian man in formals smoking. The scene then cuts harshly to Hansa, a woman crouched in a wet alley in Ahmedabad, her hands soaked from washing clothes. The noise, the dirt, and the textured domesticity of her life stand in stark contrast to New York’s sanitised skyline—and the man in a cinched suit in it. We soon learn that Hansa is married to this man, Ashok Seth, who now sells newspapers in New York’s subway stations to make a living. He is married to Hansa, a village merchant’s daughter, so that he doesn’t run off and marry a foreign girl while he is in New York. The two lived together for only two weeks after their wedding before he left for America, like so many others in his neighbourhood at that time. She now raises their infant alone. Yet, even in his absence, Hansa holds onto the hope of joining him in the US one day.

Stills from the opening scene of Mira Nair's documentary, So Far From India (1983). From the publicly available version on YouTube.

This was the opening scene and the material of the documentary, So Far From India (1983). It is an early Mira Nair documentary,  belonging to a lesser-known but remarkable body of work that marked the beginning of her filmmaking journey– documentaries she made between the late 1970s and 2001, ending with The Laughing Club of India, where she explores the rise of laughter yoga across India and the world. The traces of this early documentary sensibility are palpable elsewhere, too— most notably in Salaam Bombay!, her 1988 fiction debut, which breathes with the same realism that shaped her non-fiction work. The film carries a documentary-like quality in the way the camera lingers to capture both the expanse and the intimacy of Mumbai’s underbelly. This realism is further sharpened by the fact that many of the actors were children from the very slums the film portrays.

I chanced upon it after watching Indian Cabaret (1985), another brilliant film that follows the life and inner worlds of cabaret dancers. It made me realise how overlooked her early-career documentary work is, despite how deeply textured and emotionally honest they are in capturing the time and contexts. This was India before liberalisation, in the early 1980s. Unlike the masala films of the 1980s, Nair was capturing the quiet dissonances of migration, gender, and the disarrayed effects of globalisation, sometimes even before we had the vocabulary for it.

The displacement of cultures and re-imagination of place-bound identities is a common thread that binds many of Nair's films. Whether it’s Mississippi Masala (1991), The Namesake (2006), or even The Perez Family, a 1995 American comedy about Cuban refugees who pose as a family to navigate immigration systems, her films consistently dwell in this in-between—where the ideas of home and belonging are constantly negotiated using memory, language, rituals and emotional adjustments. They move across geographies, languages, and emotional registers, often staging belonging as something provisional, negotiated, and at the same time deeply felt. Operating on multiple levels of crossover cinematic philosophies–borrowing from Bollywood’s emotional depth, Hollywood's narrative arc and documentaries’ observational eye, they grow out of transnational socio-political contexts, making her repertoire an ideal case study for the processes of modern globalism.

Hansa’s desire in So Far From India is not just for physical nearness to her husband; it is the desire to be seen, heard, and held not as an obligation left behind, but as a person with interiority and dreams of her own. When asked how she will adjust in America, she says she’s willing to learn English (the fact that she can’t even speak Hindi, her language being Gujarati) and to wear dresses instead of saris— she is, then, already imagining a self in transition. “I’ll do whatever work I am capable of to support him there,” she says. But Ashok is silent, evasive. “I’m struggling,” he says. “I can’t support three people.” He never tells her about his life in New York, the cold subway tunnels, the indifference, the loneliness. In this void, Hansa has filled her world with dreams that are already being deferred.

For me, it was the displacement of ‘desires’ that seemed to hover over almost every frame in the film. Not just the physical movement of people or the crossing of borders, but the quiet, unsettling unmooring of what it means to want. Here, it is the desires themselves that feel most displaced from place, certainty, and any promise of belonging. One also wonders: What does it mean to want something in a world that has already decided where you belong?

When the interviewer asked her if she was ready for whatever answers he might have, she responded, “Whatever it is, at least I will get to know what’s in his mind,” firmly, as though she is asking for something too small even to be denied. “Only if he talks to me can I tell,” she admits when asked what she thinks he wants. There’s no bitterness in her voice, only an uncertainty she has learned to live with. “Whenever I ask him something, he gets angry.” Her attempts at closeness are met not with care but with deflection. Just her capacity to want, to question, and simply express is unsettling to Ashok, perhaps because it disrupts the script of sacrifice and passivity written for her by him.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me while watching this scene is how Hansa is not only denied the companionship of marriage but is also expected to wait, support, and ‘silently’ (if only silence is the opposite of speaking) adjust in these circumstances. We never really see Hansa and Ashok engage in meaningful conversation with each other. The only interaction captured on camera is a brief moment during dinner, where Hansa, wordless, serves him food.

In a moment of light banter with his in-laws, Ashok says, “Who has asked Hansa to worry for me? I never worry about her.” The casualness with which he says this is startling, a subtle dismissal of her care, as if it were a mistake she’s made. His expectations of her become clearer still when he says in an early scene, “She should not write anything wrong to me. If she wants to write, write good words, she should not write bad words which can hurt me.” Later, he complains, “Why doesn’t she have time to write letters to me? When I first arrived in New York, I sent her twenty letters. I received only four. Why doesn’t she have time to write? She only just delivered a baby. What happened before that?”

The irony is almost unbearable. Hansa, who is expected to anchor a marriage in which she has barely been a participant, is judged for not maintaining the emotional labour of connection—letters, care, quiet compliance—while also carrying the full weight of separation, childbirth, and domestic survival. Her silence becomes something Ashok reads as indifference, not weariness. Her dreams are invisible, and her work is unacknowledged. Her desires that are always meant to be folded neatly between service and self-erasure become too loud when spoken.

Displacement, migration, or even just the act of moving out, was never simply about crossing borders or the unsettling of the familiar that follows, but also the shifting and suppression of desires. For while the desire for mobility and a better life may be shared, the cost of that imagination is not evenly borne. This cost is also gendered, economic, and deeply intimate in the way it reshapes the very terms of love, kinship, and reciprocity. 

Hansa imagines her life in New York not just as a reunion with her husband, but also as a transformation of her own subjecthood. Her desires are more than mimetic consumption of  the “American Dream.” They are deeply intimate acts of hope and survival in the face of abandonment. 

Ashok’s sister, in another moment, says, “People here have a hunger for America, but I feel bad… the humanness we have here, we don’t have there.” It’s a rare flash of doubt in what is otherwise shown to be a transnational aspiration. And yet that hunger continues. America– an idea more than a place. A place to escape to, to work hard in, to earn money from. But never truly to belong. And for women like Hansa, whose lives are structured around someone else's migration, deterritorialization brings not only separation from land but also from voice, visibility, and emotional reciprocity.

Just like Indian Cabaret, which portrays a layered politics of performance, female agency, and the desire for freedom (even if only staged under neon lights), So Far From India peels back the layers of what it means to be caught between places, expectations, and identities. Both these documentaries, like most of Nair’s oeuvre, force us to ask: what happens to women’s desires, whether sexual, economic, or emotional, in the global flows of capital and migration? What happens when mobility itself is mapped unevenly across gendered lines?

Mira Nair doesn’t give us easy answers. She lets us sit in the discomfort, in the silences, in the whispered questions Hansa asks while looking into the camera. And that’s precisely what makes her work so powerful–a kind of visual studies of globalisation from the ground up through small kitchens, alleyways, dance stages, and the inner rooms of women’s lives.

(Edited by Teista Dwivedi and Giya Sood.)