Indian directors Mira Nair and Bijoy Shetty chat about changing how the world sees India

Mira Nair: I am not into being an ambassador and saying my country is so wonderful, so rich. I don’t approach filmmaking like a Benetton ad. The point is to plunge into the layers of life in front of you and extricate the humanity that is local to that place. And to do it in a way that is so truthful that it becomes universal. The point is that we’re not islands among ourselves; we are actually all utterly human. That said, as an Indian filmmaker living in New York, then in East Africa, I was always in these places where I was a novelty, where I may have been forced to explain myself. But I grew up with a kind of fierceness, that I’m not going to justify myself or give you lessons on my bindi. I refuse to let people who haven’t lived in our streets take our culture and bugger it up.

Where much of Indian hip-hop has chased Western aesthetics with token Indian flourishes, Bijoy Shetty is developing an alternate visual grammar. Photographed by Rohan Johnson.

Bijoy Shetty: Sadly, colonisation is in our DNA, where we assume that Western culture is the superior one. But in all honesty, I’ve benefited from that perception. With ‘Big Dawgs’, a lot of the reaction was because they never thought that an Indian could rap like this. It’s not like this tremendous video with high production value. It’s just the shock of it being an Indian rapper and an Indian music video that has taken it wherever it’s gone. But once that novelty wears off, does your work have a strong enough identity to keep the viewer’s attention? That’s what really matters.

Vogue India: Mira, you’ve spoken about how your primary influence is the street, whether it’s where your stories come from or your tendency to cast non-actors in your films. Bijoy, hip-hop was born on the streets of the Bronx. Can you talk about what the street means to you as a ­ character, and how you look to it for inspiration?