Who are Zohran Mamdani’s parents? An award-winning Indian-American director and a political commentator
New Yorkers went to the mayoral election Tuesday with an unlikely frontrunner on the ballot: a Democratic Socialist whose rise from community organiser to likely next mayor has upended many assumptions about politics in America.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani, 34, defeated former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, a former Democrat running as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Mamdani will enter office as the first Muslim mayor in the city’s history and one of its youngest, now set to run one of the largest and most diverse cities in the U.S.
The race was called by the Associated Press with roughly 75 percent of ballots counted.
Before addressing jubilant supporters in Brooklyn, Mamdani celebrated his victory with a video on X that showed New York subway doors opening as a voice announced: “The next and last stop is City Hall.”
Mamdani, who was born in Kampala to Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani, framed his campaign, and politics more generally, as shaped by the experiences he grew up around.
Nair was born in Rourkela in the eastern Indian state of Odisha in 1957. She studied sociology and went on to win a scholarship to Harvard University.
Nair’s breakthrough 1988 film Salaam Bombay! sprang from her experiences on the streets of Mumbai, home of the Indian film industry, and sought to put a spotlight on the lives of the city’s homeless children.
“The biggest conviction stemmed from the life of these children. Their attitude was about grabbing life and enjoying, and that impresses me and inspires me even now,” Nair told Reuters in 2013. “They want to have a full life and there is no self-pity.”
Salaam Bombay! won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes and received an Academy Award nomination.
In her career spanning over four decades, Nair has repeatedly turned to stories that traverse culture, migration and belonging, and talked about her desire to tell stories from the margins.
“You know what is so startling, or not startling because I’m used to it now, is the ignorance that people here have of any other culture,” she told Believer in 2007.
“That ignorance, which is acceptable to have, coupled with a slight arrogance is a deadly combination, and sadly one encounters it a lot in America.”
Nair’s body of work spans continents and identities: from Mississippi Masala, which she describes as “a radical film” for centring a romance between a Black American man and an Indian-Ugandan woman at a time when such relationships were almost never shown on screen, to 2001’s Venice Golden Lion-winning ensemble drama Monsoon Wedding, which examines the clash between tradition and modernity inside a Delhi family.
