When Irrfan Khan picked the wrong Bengali accent on ‘The Namesake’ set

New Delhi, Feb 16 (PTI) Award-winning director Mira Nair first met actor Irrfan Khan in a basement at Delhi’s National School of Drama to cast him for a single scene role in her 1988 film “Salaam Bombay!” and vowed to come back to him with a suitable part.

The two came together 15 years later for Khan’s memorable role of Ashoke Ganguli in “The Namesake” (2006), based on Jhumpa Lahiri’s eponymous book.

Khan, who had established himself as an actor with films like “Maqbool” (2003) and “Haasil” (2003), had never been to the US before filming for “The Namesake”, something that Nair found helpful in trying to retain the “newness of America” in his eyes.

“I loved that he had never been to America because you can’t almost act that. I guess you can act it but only if you really are experiencing it. And he is so precious. He retained that that view of this craziness,” Nair said during a session at India Habitat Centre’s Samanvay festival on Saturday.

In “The Namesake”, Khan and Tabu played Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, first-generation immigrants from West Bengal to the US.

Nair had planned to keep Khan and Tabu at Lahiri’s parents’ home in New York, especially to have the actors pick up the Bengali immigrant accent.

“He (Khan) didn’t live with Jhumpa’s parents, he lived in Times Square in a hotel and that is an insane part of America, the neon, the craziness, the pubs on the street, everything. But I introduced him on the very first day to Jhumpa’s parents, firstly to meet them but secondly, for the accent, because I was very aware that he was not Bengali,” the director recalled.

Nair wanted Jhumpa’s father Amar Lahiri, who worked as a librarian in the US, to be Khan’s standard for his role’s accent in the film.

“… But then we had a Bengali caterer on the sets of ‘The Namesake’… Slowly Irrfan began to sound like the caterer, which was much thicker and much harder for Americans and anyone to understand. So we had to tone down the caterer and up the librarian,” she said.

As the shooting of the movie progressed, Khan moved to the accent Nair wanted for the role.

“He was just so hungry, porous and he wanted to do all that. But we both strived to retain the newness of America and the bizarreness of America in his eyes, at least for the beginning part of the film,” the “Monsoon Wedding” director said.