Imperial Vanities: Mira Nair, William Makepeace Thackeray and Diasporic Fidelity to Vanity Fair

Mira Nair has built her career on films that contribute to the Indian identity in diaspora and attest to the prominence of Indian filmmakers in international cinema. For a filmmaker so concerned with the relationships between American and Indian heritage, Nair’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847-1848 novel Vanity Fair (2004) appears as an outlier. However, this chapter argues that Nair’s film maintains overarching fidelity to the source text’s plot as a strategy to imbue the narrative with an Indian perspective. Nair subtly rewrites the text by eliminating the novel’s omniscient narrator and his complicity with the imperial project in favor of her own postcolonial Indian position through her use of cinematic style and the camera’s point-of-view capabilities. In asserting India’s physical presence in her adaptation, Nair also incorporates elements of Bollywood cinema into the production, including an item number dance sequence that brings Hollywood and Bollywood convention in dialogue. As a result, Nair embeds images into the narrative that directly challenge the power of the British Empire and its agents as well as Hollywood’s continuing influence over Indian cinema.

Educational Attainment in the South Asian Diaspora: Representation of Gender Conflicts in Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair’s Films

This article studies the representations that Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha, film directors from the South Asian diaspora, offer to portray and denounce the educational attainment inequality suffered by women from the diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. The paper analyses how Chadha and Nair’s depictions challenge the socioeconomic structures that limit these characters both in their homelands and in the welcoming countries and how they disrupt the limiting structures imposed on them for being women.Key words: Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, diaspora, South Asian Subcontinent. Logros educativos en la diáspora del Subcontinente Surasiático: La representación de los conflictos de género en las películas de Gurinder Chadha y Mira Nair Resumen: Este artículo estudia las representaciones que las directoras de cine de la diáspora del Subcontinente surasiático Gurinder Chadha y Mira Nair realizan para presentar y denunciar la desigualdad que sufren las mujeres de esta diáspora en Reino Unido y Estados Unidos a la hora de acceder y elegir qué estudios realizar. Analizando algunos de sus personajes se demuestra que Chadha y Nair desafían el orden socioeconómico que limita a sus personajes tanto en sus comunidades como en el país que las recibe presentando mujeres transgresoras que rompen con las estructuras limitantes impuestas sobre ellas por el hecho de ser mujer.Palabras clave: Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, diáspora, Subcontinente Surasiático

From Documentary to Fictional Realism: Mira Nair’s Documentary Roots, Fictional Home and Production Politics

This chapter demonstrates how the transnational figure and twenty-seven-year career of Mira Nair is prototypical of female independent practitioners who negotiate diverse issues of identity and politics in their films and working practices. As an Indian filmmaker with a production company based in New York City, Nair makes films that cross multiple borders, whether of nation, race, class, sexuality or genre, to promote social activism. Highlighting her documentary film production, methods and career-long investment in non-profit organisations, Projansky and Ono explore how even her popular fictional features such as Monsoon Wedding (2001) or Vanity Fair (2004) share political and socially confrontational methods with her outreach programs.

Studying Indian Cinema

This book traces the historical evolution of Indian cinema through a number of key decades. The book is made up of 14 chapters with each chapter focusing on one key film, the chosen films are analysed in their wider social, political and historical context whilst a concerted engagement with various ideological strands that underpin each film is also evident. In addition to exploring the films in their wider contexts, the book analyses selected sequences through the conceptual framework common to both film and media studies. This includes a consideration of narrative, genre, representation, audience and mise en scène. The case studies run chronologically from Awaara (The Vagabond, 1951) to The Elements Trilogy: Water (2005) and include films by such key figures as Satyajit Ray (The Lonely Wife), Ritwick Ghatak (Cloud Capped Star), Yash Chopra (The Wall) and Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay!).

Reality of the Dispossessed

This chapter describes how addressing the issue of poverty has been a continuous feature of Indian cinema. Mira Nair's award-winning directorial debut Salaam Bombay! (1988), depicting the lives of Bombay's impoverished street children, is one of the most moving Indian films of the 1980s. It was also one of the few Indian films to find an international, largely arthouse, audience while launching the career of diaspora film-maker Mira Nair, who resides in America. The chapter deals with Indian diaspora cinema and Mira Nair as a female director. It also examines the production history of the shoot; the iconography of the urban slum in Indian cinema; representations of family, poverty, and power in the city of Bombay; and the film's criticisms of the state.