Zohran Mamdani: Manhattan masala

New Indian Express

05-07-2025

Zohran Mamdani is fond of reminding the world that he 'exists' because his mother had travelled to Uganda to shoot Mississippi Masala. The masala packed in that tiny sachet of information gives a taste of the broth Zohran—now the Democratic nominee to be the mayor of New York—was cooked in.
The mother, Mira Nair, is a Punjabi born in Rourkela who studied literature and visual arts at Delhi and Harvard universities. In an aside that speaks to her feistiness, Nair claims that while playing Cleopatra at St Stephen's College, she ate onions to keep Shashi Tharoor's Antony at a distance. In Kampala to shoot her second film, Nair met Mahmood Mamdani, a Gujarati-origin, Uganda-born scholar who had come back to research his Harvard PhD thesis. The rest is the rolling history of an immigrant family.
Born in Kampala and given the middle name Kwame after Ghana's first president, Zohran moved to New York just after hitting his school years when Mahmood got a teaching job at Columbia University. In the US, Zohran first attended a posh Manhattan private school before passing through a Bronx public school and graduating in 'Africana studies' from Bowdoin, a liberal arts college.
He dived headlong into politics after Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential bid and won a seat in the New York state legislature in 2019. As a young assemblyman who had signed up as a democratic socialist—considered an extreme leftist fringe within the Democratic tent—Zohran championed affordable housing and debt relief for cabbies.
But it was not until he announced his bid to be the mayor of America's largest city and surged from near-nothing to challenging Andrew Cuomo for the Democratic ticket that the political establishment looked closely at him. The task was indeed formidable. Zohran, 33, was an underfunded upstart facing Cuomo, 67, a former governor from a well-known political family who had millions of dollar in his war chest.
There were also Democratic party members to charm. In a city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel, a majority of them Democrat voters, Islamophobia had peaked at a time when Israel was waging a brutal war in Gaza. As it would happen, the June 24 vote also came just two days after Donald Trump directed the US military to strike three nuclear facilities in Iran.