engleski

Pitfalls of the Exotic: Problems With Foregrounding India in Mira Nair's Vanity Fair (2003)

The paper investigates Mira Nair’ s adaptation of William Thackeray’ s Vanity Fair with focus on the role of India in the film using postcolonial theory and criticism as theoretical background. The adaptation is analyzed as a contemporary reading of Thackeray’ s novel which in an attempt to reaffirm the role of India in 19th century Britain ends up reiterating narrative uses of the colonies in the Victorian mainstream novel paradoxically not even present in Thackeray’ s Vanity Fair. The Victorian narrative uses of colonies in question are the use of colony as a space for new beginnings (especially for disgraced men and fallen women, e.g. in Dickens or Eliot) by presenting a new ending greatly departing from the novel with Rebecca Sharp riding “ into the Indian sunset” on an elephant with Joss by her side, and as a place of retreat from the restrictions of the “ civilized” society and mores of the imperial metropolis (major Dobbin’ s “ going native” in India which bears no resemblance to the description of his military service in the very British surroundings of his army barracks overseas as described by Thackeray). In addition, the foregrounding of India in the film through visual emphasis on the presence of Indians and things Indian in early 19th century Britain departing from the original text (Joss’ s personal servant, an Indian-themed garden party, a Bollywood-style dance scene, and an image of an idealised Indian nuclear family inserted in the scene of Dobbin’ s letter-writing to Amelia) is analyzed as a strategy that again paradoxically further exoticizes the presence of India and Indianness. The foregrounding is analyzed as counterproductive because it relies on the already established (visual, cultural) orientalist representational stereotypes of the exotic, thus failing in its attempt to reaffirm and stress the ordinariness of Indian presence in everyday life of 19th century Britain.

exotic; postcolonial; adaptation; orientalism

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