Graduate Known For Activist Films Dies

Nishit Saran ’98, an award-winning filmmaker, gay rights activist and essayist in his native India, died last Wednesday after a car accident in New Delhi. He was 25.

Riding with Saran were four of his friends, including a popular Indian music TV host, all of whom were killed instantly when a speeding truck plowed into their car before fleeing the scene. The truck’s driver was arrested the following day on charges of homicide.

“If you think of the world between consumers and creators, Nishit was always a creator. He was constantly looking around for things he could do good with,” said Rahul Sagar, a friend of Saran’s and a visiting fellow in the government department. “He was inspiring not just for his individuality and his talents but for his willingness to use them.”

Saran was best known for his work as a filmmaker, a role he thrived in both at Harvard’s visual and environmental studies (VES) department and at international film festivals. His 1999 personal documentary, Summer in My Veins, won high praise from critics and became an inspiration to gays for its frank portrayal of his own reconcilement between family ties and homosexuality.

“It’s hard to be gay in India, but through his work he gave people the courage to be who they were,” Sagar said. “He’d get letters and phone calls from people who said he changed their life.”

After his success in the United States and abroad, Saran shied away from the allure of Hollywood and Wall Street to return to New Delhi, where he was born, so he could continue making films and raising awareness of homosexuality in India.

“For him film wasn’t just about telling the story. He made you care what he cared about,” said filmmaker Ross McElwee, who was Saran’s mentor and thesis advisor in the VES department. “And what he cared about had tremendous application for issues outside of his own life.”

Saran attended the Army Public School in New Delhi, eventually placing first in the country on the Senior Secondary Examination, the Indian equivalent of the SAT.

After coming to Harvard in 1994, Saran became an active presence in the Harvard’s Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters’ Alliance and was awarded a Detur Prize in 1996 for general academic distinction. As a senior, Saran was appointed to the Phi Beta Kappa academic honors society.

“He wanted to get the most out of Harvard,” said Leverett House tutor Karthik Muralidharan ’98, an acquaintance of Saran’s. “He loved it here most because the school allowed him to discover parts of himself.”

And that understanding, Muralidharan said, led to “his real passion for the power of film as a form of expression.”

When he came to Hooker Professor of Visual Arts Alfred F. Guzzetti’s introductory filmmaking class as a sophomore, Saran’s eagerness made waves in the VES department.

“He was a true enthusiast,” Guzzetti said, recollecting Saran as a prodigy, and the only VES concentrator who understood psychoanalyst Lacan, a famous name in film studies, “better than any of us.”

“He could be very quiet, but then all of a sudden he’d start talking a mile a minute with great brilliance and sparks flying,” Guzzetti said.

As he finished editing his thesis, a documentary about his mother’s battle with breast cancer, Saran began brainstorming for Summer in My Veins.

With a digital video camera in hand, Saran decided the film would document a trip across America with his mother and two of his aunts, who had come from India for his graduation.

The film centred around Saran’s announcement to his relatives of his homosexuality, along with the looming possibility that he had contracted HIV during a recent sexual encounter.

Even as he worked to edit his film, Saran also devoted his time and effort to fostering the talents of younger Harvard filmmakers when he became a teaching fellow in for the intermediate film course VES 150 in the spring of 1999.

Randy Bell ’00, who took VES 150, said he would never forget the long nights Saran spent in the editing room, helping Bell with his final project.

“Teaching assistants don’t come in at 11 on a Friday night, but Nish did that,” said Bell. “It was at the same time he was doing his own film, but he was always very willing to be there anytime, just to help us make something good.”

By late spring, Saran had completed a rough cut of Summer in My Veins, which he showed to students and colleagues within the department. The reaction was unanimously positive.

“It was a remarkable piece of work,” said McElwee, who along with others in the VES department encouraged Saran to share his movie with audiences outside Harvard. “He was only one year removed [from college] and look what he had done.”

Within three months Jane Balfour Films had bought the worldwide rights to the film. Soon, Saran found himself presenting his documentary at film festivals in Canada, Europe, New Zealand and eventually India.

While many—including Saran—doubted whether India’s traditional values would take kindly to his film’s serious treatment of homosexuality, Saran received a hero’s welcome.

In 2000, while writing regular social commentary essays for two major Indian newspapers, the Indian Express and Tehelka.com, Saran worked on A Perfect Day, a low-budget experimental film.

With a largely improvised script, minimal lighting and experimental cinematography, A Perfect Day ignored the typical characteristics of India’s commercial movie industry, known as Bollywood.

“He’s been an amazing breath of fresh air not just for gay circles, but for a lot of India,” said Sagar. “He was an incredible force for change.”

As a vocal commentator on the gay rights movement in India—a role he readily assumed—Saran urged gays to demand their rights fervently, without separating themselves from the rest of society.

“Across the West there has been this tendency [of gays] at first of not wanting to be heard,” he said in an interview last year with Tehelka.com. “Now there is an assimilationist movement that has shifted things to the other extreme. I hate both extremes.... I want gay issues to be valid to mainstream culture and be taken seriously by mainstream readers.”

Sagar noted that Saran’s legacy will ultimately be the way he raised important issues through his art, particularly with Summer in My Veins.

“That film will be seen and re-seen by a lot of people,” Sagar said. “And it will give people the courage to ask questions about who one is, to be curious about the world around us.”

Saran is survived by a brother, Mohit, and his parents, Minna and Raj.