Mira Nair Quotes

Many people have compared me to the Victorian adventure writer, Rider Haggard. I accept that as a compliment. As a boy growing up in Central Africa I read all Haggard's African novels.

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

I'm kind of a reluctant Anglophile. My mother's a children's librarian, and all of the children's literature I read was from her childhood - E. Nesbit and Dickens, which isn't children's literature at all, but I was sort of steeped in English literature. I thought I was of that world.

One of my favourite books when I was young was 'Wuthering Heights.'

Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians.

My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.

It is an Englishman who turns out to be the real villain of 'The Moonstone.' By contrast, the three Indian priests who dedicate their lives to returning the jewel to its proper home in the temple, though they have nothing personal to gain by doing so, are positively heroic.

I've been to India a lot, ever since when my mum was in 'Jewel In The Crown.'

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.

I can still remember. I was ill, and I was seven, and my father didn't want me to just read children's books. He came with Conan Doyle. I tried, and I liked it. I think the first I read was 'The Sign of the Four'; 'Study in Scarlet' was the next one. Then I guess I stayed home a few extra days from school to read.

I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.

I had a very happy childhood. But I was sent off to boarding school at quite a young age, this massive Victorian house that was suffocated in ivy. I think there is a part of that school in 'Heap House.'

The Indian education system, like the Indian bureaucratic system, is Victorian and still in the 19th century. Our schools are still designed to produce clerks for an empire that does not exist anymore.

The history of the white man in India really jumped up and bit me in the neck.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.

India is not the name of single country, nor the home of one single nation. It is in fact, the designation of a state created for the first time in history by the British.

England produced Shakespeare, and the British Empire the six-shilling novel.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.

Oscar Wilde was sort of my first love as a young reader. And then I went on to love Jane Austen's wonderful - this sort of comedy coming from her. I mean, all of her books are comic.

Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights" was extremely important to me.

In a country like India, the British were only able to rule the country because it had completely co-opted the elite of the country, who did their work for them.

I am the last Englishman to rule in India.