Like her Australian contemporary Campion, Mira Nair occupies a dual space in film culture, fully integrating herself within the Hollywood film community while making films in and about her native country. Nair has built her career on films that contribute to the Indian identity in diaspora while attesting to the prominence of Indian filmmakers in international cinema. For a filmmaker so concerned with the contemporary Indian experience, Nair's adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–8 novel Vanity Fair (2004) appears to be a departure. Its seeming outlier status may explain why, of all the films under discussion in this project, it is the only one to have amassed consistent critical notice as a postcolonial adaptation of Victorian literature, although primarily through anecdotes in Hutcheon's A Theory of Adaptation and Leitch's Adaptation and Its Discontents. Critics such as Helen Machalias have deftly analysed the contrapuntal strategy Nair uses in the adaptation, which ultimately led to controversies over the film's fidelity: ‘While Nair asserts that she is faithful to the novel, she overturns the nostalgic visualization of the English past that is customary for costume dramas, and includes voices that were marginalised in Thackeray's panoramic view of Regency England.’ For Machalias, Nair's fidelity to the novel belongs in italics, a ‘professed reverence’ contradicted by the film's focus on Indian servants and the revisionary politics it applies to characters of colour such as the Caribbean Jew Rhoda Swartz. Yet, Nair had a personal connection to the novel after first encountering it when she was sixteen at an Irish-Catholic school in Simla, going so far as calling its heroine, Becky Sharp, the greatest female character in literature and the adaptation a dream project, sentiments that call into question assertions of her hypercritical approach to the source material.

Given Nair's affection for the novel, her adaptive strategy goes beyond merely refashioning it for the postcolonial era or flagrantly criticising the text for its colonial discourse.