All About Mira Nair And Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran Mamdani's Parents

Zohran Kwame Mamdani today was elected mayor of New York City, after he defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo, who ran as an independent, and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

With more than half the votes counted, Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and state assembly member from Queens, secured a decisive win, becoming the first Muslim and one of the youngest mayors in the city's history.

He will take office as New York's 111th mayor on January 1.

Who Are Zohran Mamdani's Parents?

Zohran Mamdani was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991 to Indian-origin filmmaker Mira Nair and Ugandan scholar Mahmood Mamdani.

Who Is Mira Nair?

Born in Rourkela, Odisha, in 1957, Mira Nair studied sociology at Delhi University before earning a scholarship to Harvard University. Her debut feature, Salaam Bombay! (1988), which portrays the lives of Mumbai's street children, won the Camera d'Or at Cannes and an Academy Award nomination.

Nair's four-decade career has been defined by stories that cross borders. Her 1991 film Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury, broke ground for its portrayal of a romance between a Black American man and an Indian-Ugandan woman. Her 2001 hit Monsoon Wedding, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, remains one of the most acclaimed Indian films globally.

She is also outspoken politically. In 2013, she refused to attend the Haifa International Film Festival, saying she would visit Israel “when the walls come down” and “when the state does not privilege one religion over another.”

Who Is Mahmood Mamdani?

Mira Nair met Mahmood Mamdani in Uganda in 1989 while researching on Mississippi Masala. They married two years later, and their son Zohran was born the same year.

Mahmood Mamdani, born in Mumbai in 1946 and raised in Kampala, is one of Africa's most influential scholars of colonialism and political violence. In 1972, as a young academic, he was among 60,000 Asians expelled from Uganda by dictator Idi Amin.

After earning his PhD from Harvard University in 1974, Mahmood Mamdani's teaching career spanned Tanzania, South Africa, Uganda, and the United States. He now holds the Herbert Lehman Professorship of Government at Columbia University. From 2010 to 2022, he directed the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, transforming it into a leading center for postcolonial studies.

Mamdani's other major works include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004), When Victims Become Killers (2001), and Neither Settler Nor Native (2020), which was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding. He was named among the Top 20 Public Intellectuals in the World by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in 2008.

Throughout his career, Mamdani has courted controversy for his critiques of Western foreign policy and Zionism. During the 2024 campus protests over Gaza, he publicly condemned Columbia University's suspension of students, saying “there has been no due process.”