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In December, the film director Mira Nair was in India preparing for her upcoming feature, Amri, about the life of the Indo-Hungarian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, whom she called “our Frida Kahlo.” She said these whirlwind weeks, which involved her jetting from Amritsar, next to the Pakistan border, to Kochi, near the subcontinent’s southern tip, were “deeply painstaking but thrilling because this particular film has taken me four years to cook and now we are lifted off.” The trip to India, she said, was also her “first time being in the rest of the world” since her 34-year-old son, Zohran Mamdani, won election as mayor of New York in November. “I’m in alleys and villages, and suddenly I hear people running behind me, shouting, ‘Mira Nair?!’ They’re young.” And what they were yelling was “‘We love your movies! But your son!’”

We were sitting in Nair’s Morningside Heights home above a Manhattan blanketed in slushy snow less than a week before New Year’s Day, when Mamdani would be sworn in as the city’s first Muslim mayor. Nair shares the apartment, which is owned by Columbia University, with her husband, Mahmood Mamdani, who has taught there since 1999. The space was packed with books and photographs and art and, on this morning, filled with siblings and in-laws who had arrived in recent days from India and East Africa. They had eaten bagels and lox from Zabar’s and sorted through a collection of hats, seeking garments that would protect them from what would turn out to be a bitterly cold Inauguration Day.

Nair may be the most globally famous living Indian filmmaker. Salaam Bombay! (1988) was the first Indian film ever to win the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and only the second to be nominated for a Foreign Language Film Oscar. Mississippi Masala (1991), starring a young Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury as the romantic leads, is a lush meditation on love and displacement, critically acclaimed for its nuanced depiction of the friction between marginalized groups. Her biggest commercial hit, Monsoon Wedding (2001), was among the highest-grossing foreign films ever released in the U.S. at the time and led to Nair becoming the first Indian woman to win Venice’s Golden Lion.

That Zohran Mamdani was highborn is no secret. It was among the curious features of his moon-shot mayoral campaign, in which critics often portrayed him as a nepo-baby product of the city’s most rarefied climes. According to common depictions of his family’s dynamic, Mamdani inherited his leftist political ideology from his father, the anti-colonialist Columbia professor, and his dimpled charm and flair for the theatrical from his filmmaker mother. But the connection between Nair’s career as an artist and her son’s as a politician is far more significant than the fact that they share some Hollywood stardust.

A hallmark of Nair’s work is her insistence on telling stories of exile, familial dysfunction, and prejudice with humor, sex, bright colors, and buoyant music. She believes it is her job to keep “bums on the seats,” to find the joy amid the tumult: “ ‘Anything but homework’ is what I say!” It’s a philosophy reflected in her son’s bread-and-roses mayoral campaign in which the cool fonts and scavenger hunts and exuberantly multi-lingual ads made a platform focused on affordability and inequality feel like anything but a lecture.

It’s just one of the ways Mamdani’s political persona is a close echo of his mother’s filmmaking sensibilities. “Sometimes art is spoken of with a lightness, as if it has a lack of rigor or depth,” Mamdani told me in January at City Hall. “Growing up with my mother, I learned just how difficult this work is. She would say, ‘You have to have the heart of a poet and the skin of an elephant.’”

She was describing life as a filmmaker, but it’s not bad advice for a politician. People who know them both agree that qualities mother and son share—sky-high ambitions for themselves, boundless confidence—are key to understanding the unlikely paths they have forged in the world.

“When I think about where Zohran comes from, I think about how Mira made history,” Nair’s longtime agent, Bart Walker, told me. “There was no woman auteur from India having films distributed in the U.S. to a general audience. There was no Mira before Mira, no precedent for her; she blazed her path with talent, charm, and will in superabundance. Sound familiar?”

Walker’s description so clearly applying to New York City’s mayor is not incidental: This is the woman who joked to the journalist Mehdi Hasan at her son’s Election Night party, “I am the producer of the candidate,” and who said at his inauguration, “I am going to be the mother of New York City.” These proclamations are loving, ebullient, and funny (Nair’s own mother used to tell reporters she was “the producer of the director”), but they also explain a lot about how Mamdani became Mamdani, who, in Nair’s telling, often seems as much her creation as her works of art.

Inadvertently or not, Nair raised her son to be the type of man who believes he could be mayor of America’s largest city despite having few credentials for the job, instilling him with determination, showing by example how to defy and exceed expectations, and swaddling him in layers of adoration. “I believe you have one chance to raise a child,” Nair told me, “and if you can marinate them in love like we have, with the notion that they will be secure and protected in that embrace of love, which is not a small one but a larger one, that gives a lot of strength for the life ahead.”

Another family might have produced a raging narcissist. So far, Mamdani is simply among the most exciting politicians of his generation. Nair added, “I don’t think our son has changed because he is so strongly buffered by this embrace. Really.”

Nair was born in 1957 in Rourkela, India, in the eastern state of Odisha, to an upper-middle-class family. Her father, Amrit, a high-ranking civil servant, was born in Punjab before the partition that divided the subcontinent. Nair was closer to her mother, Praveen, a social worker. (Her parents would eventually separate in 1990.) After a year at Delhi University, Nair left India in 1976 to attend Harvard on a scholarship.

At the time, there were only a handful of South Asian undergrads at Harvard. Among them was Sooni Taraporevala, who would become one of Nair’s best friends and a frequent screenwriting collaborator. Taraporevala recalled Nair, at 19, as “absolutely flamboyant,” wearing a winter coat that doubled as a cape, and driven like an engine toward what she wanted. When legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray came to Boston, Nair and Taraporevala lined up with friends around the block to see him. “Suddenly, she disappeared and we never saw her again,” said Taraporevala. “We never got in, but she had and was sitting at the master’s feet.” Taraporevala said that her grandmother, who loved mischievous people, adored Mira and used to call her “Tohfaani avee,” Parsi Gujarati for “the Storm Has Arrived.”

Nair had fallen in love with her Harvard photography teacher’s assistant, Mitch Epstein, and the couple spent the summer of 1978 in New York, then moved to the city full time after Nair’s 1979 graduation. “She was dynamic, on the go, with a Rolodex of people to meet,” said Taraporevala.

“I came here, really in many ways, to be an actor,” Nair told me in an earlier conversation we had before Thanksgiving. She had won Harvard’s Boylston Prize for Elocution, performing Jocasta’s speech from Seneca’s Oedipus, and in New York she became enraptured by the downtown theater scene. She apprenticed at La MaMa with Ellen Stewart and immersed herself in the work of other artists who electrified her: Joseph Chaikin, Andrei Serban, and Elizabeth Swados, whose 1978 musical Runaways, about homeless New York City youth, planted a seed for Nair that ten years later became Salaam Bombay!

For a time, Nair waited tables at the since-closed Indian Oven on Columbus. That job, she said, helped her understand “the levels of immigrants in our country. At that time, the illegals were in the basement, Mexicans skinning the chickens. The quasi legals were on the first floor above them, Bangladeshis cooking the food. Then it would be the legals above, who would run the show and, frankly, abuse us all.”

She and Epstein briefly lived on West 93rd Street and then West 19th, where they paid less than $300 in rent; their night-out meals cost $7 at Empire Szechuan on 96th and Broadway. “All the SROs were on Riverside; you........

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