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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.

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.

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.

This chapter discusses the emergence of Asian American literature and film about the South as they disrupt multiple narratives about race relations and racial subjectivity. It particularly studies Susan Choi's novel The Foreign Student (1998), Mira Nair's feature-length film Mississippi Masala (1992), and Paisley Rekdal's creative nonfiction collection of autobiographical essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000). Asian American stories set in the South erupt the myth of imaginary lines between the past and present, arguing that the inclusion of Asian American voices signals not simply a pluralistic affirmation of racial harmony but the complications of understanding race beyond a black–white paradigm. Indeed, a true understanding of southern race relations crosses the geographic borders of the American South into not only Europe and Africa but the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia as well, because the South is a space that is implicated in larger transnational and global flows.

This chapter is divided into two parts. It revisits the social conditions that affected the lives and shaped the public sphere of many black Mississippians. It cites the works of Mira Nair, such as her film, Mississippi Masala (1992). It also looks at the imaginative work by Mississippi writers Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Sterling Plumpp, and Etheridge Knight, among others. Their work highlighted the personal, subjective space vis a vis the official constructs that blacks found themselves in.