'HAVE you ever been mistaken for a Muslim?" a New York Times reporter asked Mira Nair just after her movie Monsoon Wedding became the highest-grossing Indian film ever released in the US.

"The last time I checked, " Nair replied, "Muslims looked the same as anyone else."

If anyone defies racial stereotyping it is surely this exuberant daughter of a senior civil servant who was brought up a Hindu in the remote Orissa province, just north of where the tsunami hit the Indian coast. She turned down a scholarship to Cambridge when she was 18 choosing Harvard instead ("I'd seen it in the film Love Story") and then married a Jewish photographer, through whom she found her way into filming . . . first with documentaries and then with her debut feature about street urchins, Salaam Bombay.

While she was researching Mississippi Masala, an interracial romance between an Asian immigrant and a young black man played by Denzil Washington, she met her second husband, the Ugandan writer and academic Mahmood Mamdani. They now live with their 15-year-old son Zoharan in Manhattan . . . they are both professors at Columbia University . . . and spend their summers on a farm in Kampala, where she cultivates flowers and plants trees.

"The rhythm of nature helps my rhythm of cinema, " she tells me. "I wake up and see what has blossomed and what has died. It's like laughter and sorrow in life.

Nature has taught me that one is sweeter for the other."

Whenever you meet her, the dazzling colours of Nair's exquisite Indian attire make it seem like you're suddenly in the tropics. She offers tea in her room in London's Soho Hotel wearing a coat of several greens over orange churidar trousers and a kurta blouse as brilliant as the plumage of a bird.

"Are you still in Ireland?" she asks. "And your Spanish wife?"

She remembers Galway vividly. "I want to go back some day, " she says. "The people are old souls, like in India." She was there for the Film Fleadh a few years ago with Declan Quinn, the cinematographer on several of her movies.

Stephanie Carroll, who studied literature at Trinity College before becoming a production designer, is another regular collaborator. "I can't work without her, " says Nair.

"She really gets the Indian soul."

Carroll devised a scheme of emotional colours that give a flowing visual coherence to The Namesake, Nair's adaptation of Pulitzer Prizewinning author Jhumpa Lahiri's bestseller. The sprawling immigrant family saga, set in Calcutta and Manhattan, spans three generations and has at its heart an arranged marriage.

"I think it's erotically intriguing to marry a stranger you've never met and then over the years to fall in love gradually and build a life together, " says Nair. "Gabriel Byrne was raving to me about the novel when we were filming Vanity Fair. By coincidence, I'd just read it coming back from my mother-inlaw Ammy's funeral in New Jersey.

She'd spent her life in the red earth of east Africa but she died on a freaky cold winter's day. We buried her in the snow under jet-strewn skies near Newark Airport, far from what she had known at home.

It was my first time to lose a beloved one and it's completely the force that drew me to make this film, the grief and the mourning."

The Namesake has uncanny parallels with Nair's own life. "The road of the story was the road I had taken, " she says. "The Calcutta I left behind as a teenager in the 1970s, the current-day Manhattan where I live now. It was a piece of my heart, it just possessed me.

Most of the stuff I do is like that, but this I just had to make. I'd two other things I was supposed to do and I just put everything aside.

Eight months after reading the book, I was making the movie.

"The book is restrained, almost shy. The most important things happen off the page, or have already happened. My job was to make it more unbridled and make you feel the immediacy of it rather than the past or the future of it."

The challenge for Nair was to make the two cities feel like one.

"Because that is the state of the heart when you live in two places, " she says. "You can look out of your window, as I do where I live on the Hudson River, and so often it could be the Ganges, just as the bridge Ashima sees when she looks out from her hospital bed after giving birth to her son Gogol becomes to her the Howrah and not the Queensboro. The two cities mirror each other and this became a way of providing transitions in such a long two-hour narrative without having to use those terrible subtitles and voiceovers."

The emotional tug between the two cities is a lightening rod for the generation gap between Ashima and her husband and their son, whose instinct growing up is to reject their traditions and fully embrace his future as an American. "Being a mother helped me with that, " Nair laughs.

It's prompted her to do an American remake of the Bollywood blockbuster Munna Bhai called Gangsta MD. "It's a movie for my son that I may or may not direct but will produce, " she says.

"It's a wonderful concept of how a lowlife hustler in Harlem pretends to be a doctor whenever his mother comes to visit. Then she finds out and he determines to win back her love by going to medical school, but of course his gangsta ways create havoc there. It's a hilariously goodhearted story that's proving tiresome in the Hollywood machine because they want everything to be politically correct. If I make a comedy like that I want it to be fairly outrageous."

The Namesake has opened initially in just six cinemas in the US, where its sensational screen average of $41,425 put it quickly into the box-office Top 20 chart. "An American lady who was completely moved by it nevertheless told me that 'you know, we missed a few of the lines, you should really sub-title it', " Nair says. "Nothing is more condescending than subtitling English with English. People speak differently because they are different. Why should we all speak the same English? The west is always trying to create conformity, but on its terms."

Nair picks up on this . . . and on the New York Times journalist's question about being mistaken for a Muslim . . . in an art installation she created for the French city of Lille. It's called 'Have You Ever Been Mistaken For A?' "Twenty panels 10-foot tall and four-foot wide, displayed along the main boulevard, show 20 different full-size people making a gesture, or giving a look, over and over again, that could be interpreted as friendly or threatening or just banal depending on how you see it.

For instance, a Caucasian woman is shown putting on a scarf, something Catherine Deneuve does in every movie, but it's banned in France for Muslim women."

Nair now unexpectedly finds herself caught in the art world.

Galleries are ringing up asking to show the work everywhere from Barcelona to Bombay. "As a filmmaker what I do is seduce you in a cocoon of darkness, and this is seducing you out in the open air, " she says. "It's as if yet again I've reinvented myself."

'The Namesake' opened on Friday