Mira Nair’s first visit to India after Zohran Mamdani’s win brought an unexpected reaction: ‘Your son…’

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s mayoral race on November 5, 2025, was one of the most closely watched political upsets in recent memory. At just 34, Mamdani ran a campaign that defied conventional expectations, cutting across race, religion, ethnicity, and language to win the city’s top job.Mamdani is the son of celebrated Indian filmmaker Mira Nair and renowned Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani. While his own political ascent drew global attention, it was only after his election that Nair began experiencing a startling shift in how she was received, particularly in India. Nair, best known for films such as Monsoon Wedding and Salaam Bombay!, has long held an acclaimed place in global cinema. Salaam Bombay! made history as the first Indian film to win the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and was only the second Indian film ever nominated for a Foreign Language Film Oscar.Despite that legacy, Nair joked about her new role at her son’s Election Night party. Speaking to journalist Mehdi Hasan, she said, “I am the producer of the candidate.” At Mamdani’s inauguration, she added, “I am going to be the mother of New York City.”Friends and supporters around Mamdani have often described his public persona, warm, ebullient, and disarmingly funny, as something he inherited directly from his mother.Yet, according to a profile published by New York magazine, it was during a trip to India weeks after the election that Nair fully grasped the scale of her son’s impact. In December, she was in the country preparing for her upcoming feature Amri, a film about Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, whom she described as “our Frida Kahlo.”The project, she told the magazine, had been years in the making. These weeks, which took her from Amritsar near the Pakistan border to Kochi at the southern tip of the subcontinent, were “deeply painstaking but thrilling because this particular film has taken me four years to cook and now we are lifted off.”It was also, as she noted, her “first time being in the rest of the world” since her son’s election victory.What caught her off guard was how frequently she was recognized, often in places far removed from film festivals or urban centers.“I’m in alleys and villages, and suddenly I hear people running behind me, shouting, ‘Mira Nair?!’ They’re young,” she said. But the admiration quickly shifted from her films to her son’s political rise. “‘We love your movies! But your son!’”Mamdani’s campaign itself was notable for its inclusivity. It spanned multiple languages, embraced voters across religious communities, and attracted a diverse slate of high-profile supporters. Celebrities including Emily Ratajkowski, Cynthia Nixon, Ramy Youssef, Ashley Liao, and Sofia Coppola publicly backed his run.For Nair, the experience underscored how her son’s victory had resonated far beyond New York, reaching young people thousands of miles away, in places she had worked and traveled for decades, but in an entirely new way.