How Kerala ‘lost’ Mira Nair to Punjab

FOR a few thrilling hours, Kerala’s Nairs were glowing with pride. WhatsApp groups lit up with congratulatory messages as word spread that filmmaker Mira Nair’s son Zohran Mamdani had been elected Mayor of New York City.

It felt like history coming full circle. Here was an internationally celebrated Nair whose son now ruled one of the world’s greatest cities. The excitement was electric. Someone even circulated a story that Mira’s ancestral home was near Ottapalam in Kerala’s Palakkad district.

Then came the heartbreak: She was not a Malayali Nair at all. Her grandfather, a Punjabi Nayyar from Delhi, had changed his surname to Nair for reasons that remain unknown. That one small spelling decision, made decades ago, had fooled an entire state.

It was an easy mistake to make. Nayyars and Nairs sound similar, but the resemblance ends there. The Nayyars are a Hindu Khatri sub-caste from Punjab, known for trade and enterprise. The Nairs of Kerala were once the state’s feudal elite, matrilineal warriors and landlords who proudly called themselves Kshatriyas.

One community built cities and businesses in the plains of Punjab. The other ruled over paddy fields and temples in Kerala. When their names collided, the result was a comic cultural collision.

The Mira episode unfolded at a time when Kerala’s Nairs are already feeling politically sidelined. Once the most influential caste in the state, they now find themselves struggling for relevance in a changing society. The BJP accuses them of weakening Hindu unity. The Left mocks them as former feudalists. The Congress takes them for granted. In the end, the Nairs have become political orphans of their own making, trapped between nostalgia and negotiation.

Just when the Mira Nair confusion seemed to have faded, Kerala’s social media remembered Chunchu Nair. In 2019, a Nair family in Mumbai placed a newspaper advertisement to mark the first death anniversary of their beloved pet cat. They signed off with the cat’s full name, Chunchu Nair. Within hours, the trolls arrived. They mocked the family for giving their cat a caste surname. Memes and jokes flooded the Internet. Chunchu became an international curiosity, proof that in India even cats cannot escape the caste system. Even six years later, her name resurfaces whenever someone mocks the Nairs for their vanity.

It is tempting to laugh at all this, but the humour hides a deeper unease. The Nairs are a community caught between past glory and present confusion. Perhaps that is why the Mira mix-up hurt so much. For a community craving recognition, even an accidental surname felt like redemption. And when that illusion vanished, it left behind a silence filled with self-mockery.

Mira Nair turned out to be a Nayyar, and Kerala’s Nairs were left claiming a cat. Because in Kerala, caste never truly dies. Sometimes it just reincarnates as a joke, or a cat with a surname.