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.
But other demographics worked in the challenger’s favour. His smart social media campaign drew in a large number of new voters in a city where two in five residents are foreign-born, like Zohran himself. And Cuomo’s reputation as a disgraced former governor who had to resign when allegations of sexual impropriety surfaced was not lost among New Yorkers.
Perhaps the canniest move to wade through a multi-cornered field—which included the memorably named rapper, Paperboy Love Prince—was tying up with an old hand, comptroller Brad Lander. In a ranked-choice system, they urged their supporters to vote for the other as the second pick.
The world was stunned when Cuomo conceded. That a democratic socialist will likely be mayor of the Democrat-majority city next January has big portents—and headaches—in a two-party system where both sides build big tents of disparate voices. The higher up ‘the swamp’ you float, the more centrist you are expected to be.
MAGA motormouth Steve Bannon has declared his verdict, “The traditional Democratic party is dead. Mamdani blew it up.” Even if not so dire, it does pose existential questions for a party that lost the top offices of power in 2024. Like the decision of 31-year-old Zarah Sultana across the Atlantic to leave Labour and float a new party, Zohran’s ascendancy is bound to set off tremors far from the epicentre.
As for Zohran, he is in a honeymoon phase. Not just generally with New Yorkers, but specifically with his wife Rama Duwaji, a visual artist of Syrian origin he married earlier this year. Among all the firsts he is notching up, Zohran could also end up being the first big-city mayor to have met his wife on Hinge.
