study guide

BRITFILMS british schools film festival

Bride and Prejudice USA / UK, 2004

Director: Gurinder Chadha Screenplay: Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayda Berges Camera: Santosh Sivan Music: Ann Malik Producer: Gurinder Chadha Starring: Aishwayna Rai (Lalita Bakshi), Martin Henderson (William Darcy), Naveen Andrews (Mr. Balraj), Nam- rata Shirodkar (Jaya Bakshi), Daniel Gillies (Johnny Wickham), Alexis Bledel (Giorgina Darcy), Anupam Kher (Mr. Bakshi), Nadira Babbar (Mrs. Bakshi), Indira Varma (Kiran Balraj), Nitin Ganatra (Mr. Kholi), Meghna Kothari (Maya Bakshi), Peeya Rai Chowdhary (Lacki Bakshi) Running Time: 107 mins Language: English, OV

Recommended Age Group: 12 + Topics: Bollywood, British colonies, literary adaptations: Pride and Prejudice, culture clash, traditions, love, family, arranged marriage vs romantical marriage School Subjects: History, English, Social Sciences, Literature, Film

„All mothers think that any single guy with big bucks must be shopping for a wife.“ Bride and Prejudice

Bride and Prejudice is Gurinder Chadha‘s loose adaptation of Jane Austen‘s classic Pride and Prejudice. The film is set in present-day India in the provincial town of Amritsar. While there have been key changes to location and several names, the main protagonists are easily recognisable as the original book characters. The Bennet family has become the Bakshi family, an Indian middle-class family struggling with the limited income their family estate brings in and four lively daughters. Elizabeth Bennet is now Lalita Bakshi, her older sister Jaya instead of Jane, Lydia has become Lacki and Mary is Maya. The book’s middle daughter Kitty has been quietly dropped from this adaptation and has no equivalent. Mrs. Bakshi‘s main goal in life is to have her four daughters married off, preferably rich. She faces two problems: First, her stubborn daughters, and second, the lack of a decent dowry for them. She sees the chance of a lifetime when two very eligible bachelors turn up in their small town. Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy has been turned into William Darcy, a rich American businessman. His best friend, the Anglo-Indian Balraj Bingley whom he met while studying at Oxford, has dragged him against his will to Amritsar for a friend‘s lavish wedding. While Bingley falls easily for the eldest daughter Jaya Bakshi, the meeting between Lalita and Darcy is fraught with complications. Lalita is enraged by his snobbish attitude towards her country and hometown, which he calls „Hicksville India“. For her, he represents the worst of western arrogance. Darcy, on the other hand, is impressed by her beauty and temperament, but much less by her socially awkward family and what he perceives as a cultural gap. And when a certain Johnny Wickham turns up the misunderstandings really begin…

The story unfolds very similar to the Austen novel, but Bollywood elements, Hollywood style and Gurinder Chadha‘s very own brand of feel-good, yet gently subversive humour add a fresh twist.

Bollywood

Bollywood combines the names of Bombay - now Mumbai - and Hollywood, thus indicating the large Indian film industry. While the phenomenon of Bollywood has only during the last decade gained visibility in the West, the Indian film industry has a long tradition and a huge output of films, which puts even Hollywood to shame. Bollywood movies are self-contained worlds with their multiple song and dance routines, intense melodrama and plots that contain everything from farce to tragedy. Well-loved staples are star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties and sacrifice. Western audiences usually get caught up in the glitzy costumes, the exotic dances  and the over-the-top emotions, but Gurinder Chadha wants to prove that there is more to those films than their kitsch value: „The majority of them are crap. But out of every 100, five are really good. And that‘s the same for Hollywood“ (Chadha, Gurinder. 2004. ”Laughing all the way to the box office. Guardian.” July 19.). Underneath the spectacle lie classic cultural traditions dressed up for a modern medium. The development of the Indian film industry was pretty much on par with Europe and the USA. The brothers Lumiere themselves brought their invention to India in 1898, and soon afterwards the first silent movies were not only shown, but also locally produced. The filmmakers turned to their own mythic traditions as subject matters. These stories were well known by their audi- ences and could be easily understood without words. In 1913 Govind Phalke started filming parts of the great Indian epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This epic narrative tradition can be seen as one source of today‘s movies. Another part of the heritage is Sanskrit theatre, and in its tradition a Bollywood film should reflect the nine rasas, the essential emotions or tastes of live: love, anger, laughter, disgust, heroism, pathos, fear, wonder and peaceful contemplation. These ingredients are expressed in the songs. This explains why the emotional content of Bollywood songs often is not in tune with the story itself, which is in contrast with the western musical tradition where a musical number in a film usually reflects the current action. Despite relying heavily on their time-tested formulas, the Bollywood films are not static and their changing styles also reflect the changes within Indian society. From 1920 onward, India developed a real film industry that gained importance throughout the 30s when the first “Talkies“ were introduced. The fact that films were produced in the In- dian national languages was important for the development of a national identity and the struggle for independence. The British colonial authorities soon started to censor any overtly political films. Mythical and historical subject matters were rediscovered and criticism was hidden within allegorical legends. While the 60s are still seen as the classic era of Bollywood, the 70s saw the decline of the industry and mainly the production of run-of-the-mill action films. That changed during the 80s, when, through the availability of videos and later DVDs, the marketing towards the Indian diaspora became more significant. Since the 90s there has also been a shift in subject matters, slowly changing the settings to an idealised world often featuring upper-class global citizens, who are educated in Britain or the US and travel the world and live a new ”Indian dream”. Film kisses are no longer banned and plots now tend to feature westernised urbanites dating and dancing in discos rather than arranged marriages. It can be argued that this reflects India‘s rise as an economic power, the closer interaction with the west (not only through personal experience, but through the media as well) and the importance of the new Indian middle class. The fact that Bollywood films will now often switch their action between India, Europe and the US also reflects the experiences of the Indian diaspora, who have to bridge the continental divide in their own life.

The British filmmaker Gurinder Chadha, who wrote and directed Bride and Prejudice, is part of this diaspora. She was born in Kenya to Indian parents, who themselves were third-generation immigrants from the Indian province Punjab and who still identified strongly with their heritage. Her parents moved to England in 1961 when Gurinder was two years old. They settled in Southall, West London, close to Heathrow airport. She later set her break-through movie ”Bend It Like Beckham” in exactly that neighbourhood. Just as in that film, she also comes from a Sikh family, which led to the family‘s first experiences with racism as her father was refused several jobs for wearing a turban as a religious symbol. In interviews Chadha often refers to the fact that as a young girl she initially tried her best to fit in and refused to be the ”nice Indian girl”. At that time she did not watch Bollywood films or was in any way consciously interested in Indian culture. Despite this initial refusal, she later developed a strong identity through merging both cultures. In her films, she often draws on perceived conflicts between both cultures, resolving them by letting reasonable people find reasonable solutions, smartly navigating the intricacies of both British and Indian cultures. She often refers to her own ”Britishness”, but gives herself the freedom to define this term. Hence her absence of hesitation in accepting the OBE (Order of the British Empire): ”I think my ancestors would have been thoroughly pleased. One reason I got it, I think, is that I show contemporary Britain to the outside world. I‘m only able to do that - my Britain is only like it is - because of the history of the last 500 years” (Chadha, Gurinder. 2006. ”Larger than life.” The Observer, July 16).

Literary adaptation:

Entertainment Weekly calls Jane Austen ”the hardest-working dead authoress in Hollywood” (Schwarzbaum, Lisa. 2005. ”Bride and Prejudice.” Entertainment Weekly, February 09.) which is certainly true. Not only have there been no less than nine adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, but Gurinder Chadha is not the first to mix Austen and Bolly- wood. There is a 2000 version of Sense and Sensibility called Kandukondain Kandukondain, which is set in the south of India and features Aishwarja Ray (Brides and Prejudice’s Lalita) in the Marianne Dashwood role. 

Similar to Shakespeare in that respect, Austen‘s material is robust enough to be transferred to the most unlikely set- tings and still work. However, it is at its most effective when the transfer is to a hierarchical society with strict rules of conduct, whether that may be the cut-throat world of a Beverly Hills high school as in Clueless or to a more or less traditional Indian family as in this case. The ironic distance with which Austen dissects the customs of her times and the pompousness of her contemporaries is still just as amusing and cutting in our days. One of the reasons why her attacks on snobbery and false nobility are timeless is her keen grasp of subtle social distinctions. Carol M. Dole argues in her article Austen, Class, and the American Market that the reason why the classic Austen adaptations have been doing so well since the 90s is that underneath the romance they deal with a subject that is not often brought up in entertainment: class. Austen‘s attraction lies in ”her keen analysis of the vicissitudes‘ of class, a topic which American films in particular have resisted confronting openly“ (Dole, Carol M. „Austen, Class, and the American Market.“ Jane Austen in Hollywood. Ed. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1998. 58).

While, at first glance, Gurinder Chadha‘s change of setting from the peaceful English countryside to the Indian provincial town Amritsar seems drastic, she actually stays quite close to the spirit of Austen‘s novel. She follows the original storyline and manages to adapt the ironic dialogue, if in a slightly less subtle way. The most important change is that she purposefully shifts the focus from social stratification to a conflict of culture. Where prejudices of class and birth lie at the heart of Pride and Prejudice, Chadha puts preconceived notions about culture and the socio-economic differences between first-world and developing countries at the centre of her film. She herself sums it up best: „Bride & Prejudice is a multinational, multi-cultural crowd-pleaser that touches on American imperialism, the way the west looks at India and what people regard as backward or progressive. In a populist, entertaining movie, the drama is questioning the audience‘s Eurocentric attitude“ (Chadha, Gurinder. 2004. „Austen Power.“ Sight and Sound, October 2: 36).

This quote is interesting as it shows the fresh approach that Chadha takes. The words multi-cultural crowd-pleaser and American imperialism are usually not placed in one sentence, or even more importantly, let near a Hollywood comedy. It is less surprising when one knows that Gurinder Chadha spent a year in Amritsar for her degree in deve- lopmental studies, before she realised her frank demeanour and sense of humour were a better fit for the media. Her unique combination of a political approach and broad humour form the basis for Bride and Prejudice.

Chadha adapts the witty banter for her purpose and updates it with political jibes. In Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy remarks snidely that every savage can dance. In the context of P&P, the insult only serves to show Mr. Darcy‘s low opinion of the society he is thrown into and the ”savage” part is just part of the colonial mindset and nothing to be thought about further. By changing the context of the remark and incorporating it into one of the first major argu- ments of Lalita and Darcy in Bride and Prejudice, Chadha uses it to build her theme of western ignorance and the critique of the „Eurocentric“ world-view. The quote is transferred into the end of a scene that begins with Lalita chiding Darcy for being condescending to- wards India, after he comments that his hotel is not up to his standards with its crashing computer system and fluc- tuating electricity supply. She reminds him that he is not paying the five hundred dollars a night that he charges his own hotel guests, that this would be more than the yearly income of an Indian peasant anyway, and that he should not impose his standards on others. The scene sets up the dynamic between the protagonists, which is very similar to the book: they have one big confrontation, which forms their impression of each other. While the confrontation sparks his interest, it firmly settles Lalita‘s opinion of him as a western know-it-all. She is not shy about letting him know that: „Americans think they‘ve got the answers for everything, including marriage. Pretty arrogant, considering they‘ve got the highest divorce rate in the world.“ This exchange leads to the use of the mentioned quote, referring back to Austen‘s unconscious use of the term sa- vages. Only now it is Lalita, who imperial Britain would have seen as a „savage“, throwing this expression back at Darcy: Darcy: „Listen, er... I‘m a hopeless dancer, but... well, this looks like you just screw in a light bulb with one hand, you pet the dog with the other. Will you teach me?“ Lalita: „You know what? I think you should find someone simple and traditional to teach you to dance like the na- tives.“

This scene effectively sets up the antagonism between Lalita and Darcy. The argument is taken up again in the beach scene that adapts the famous drawing room scene where Lizzie mocks Mr. Darcy‘s idea of the ideal women. In the film the scene is placed in the popular tourist destination of Goa, and Chadha again keeps the dynamic close to the novel, but adds explicit political content. She refers to India‘s colonial past and again brings up the USA‘s current status as a political and economic superpower. When Darcy announces that he plans to build a hotel in Goa the following dialogue ensues: 

Darcy: „Well, don‘t you wanna see more investment, more jobs?“

Lalita: „Yes, but who does it really benefit? You want people to come to India without having to deal with Indians.“

Darcy: „That‘s good. Remind me to add that to the tourism brochure.“

Lalita: „Isn‘t that what all tourists want here? 5-star comfort with a bit of culture thrown in? I don‘t want you turning India into a theme park. I thought we got rid of imperialists like you.“

Darcy: „I‘m not British. I‘m American.“

Lalita: „Exactly.“

Those examples show how Gurinder Chadha uses the structure and spirit of Pride and Prejudice, but freely adapts them for her own purpose. The subtleties of the novel are lost in the process, but she brings a new energy to the material that serves her “multi-cultural crowd pleaser” well.

Rational Romantics - Concepts of Love and Marriage in P&P and B&P:

As mentioned before, it is important that Austen‘s world works within certain social codes. Her happy endings are always couples that manage to adapt social conventions for their needs, but never entirely defy them. While in the novel Darcy struggles with the feeling that Lizzie is socially inferior to him and yet proposes, the real moment of connection is when he meets her together with her aunt and uncle. There he discovers that she has family that, while not of noble birth, is of gentlemanly behaviour. They meet in a civic spirit. Similarly, in Gurinder Chadha‘s universe the heroines always manage to reconcile the demands that family places upon them with their own needs. In that sense both Gurinder Chadha and Jane Austen’s characters can be described as rational romantics or romantic rationalists. This is probably a deeper connection than any superficial similari- ties.

There are several models of marriage presented both in P&P, and consequently, in B&P. Of course the subject of arranged marriages turns up in several ways. In B&P, the whole story starts with a wedding which was arranged by the parents, a custom Will Darcy does not approve of:

Darcy: „No, no, I am. I just find the whole arranged marriage thing a little strange. I don‘t know how two people can get married that don‘t know each other. I mean, it‘s a little backward, don‘t you think?

Lalita: „That‘s such a cliché. It‘s different now. It‘s more like a global dating service.“

Darcy: „The groom looks pretty happy. Did his parents force him into it?“

Lalita: „No, he asked his parents to find him a bride, actually. He was busy running his company. - He just wanted it to be simple.“

Darcy: „ I see, and so he came here.“

While it is expected to come up as an Indian custom, it is also suggested that Darcy is not free from parental pressure when it comes to choosing a wife. While Lalita defends arranged marriages as a „global dating service“, Darcy does not quite believe her and remains wary of the concept. Ironically, he seems to be more in danger of having a marri- age arranged for him than the independent Lalita. His mother has certain expectations for a suitable mate for him:

Darcy: „She‘s beautiful, yeah, but...“

Bingley: „But not your mum‘s idea of the mother of her heirs, right?“

Darcy: „Not exactly, no.“

While the romance,of course, wins out for the heroines of book and film, the minor characters have to content them- selves with lesser version of the ideal. 

In P&P, Elizabeth is shocked when her friend Charlotte announces that she will marry the pompous cleric Mr. Col- lins, as she could never see herself in a union with this kind of silly man. Charlotte answers her: “I am not romantic, you know; I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering Mr. Collins’s character, connection and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering marriage.“

This conversation in slightly changed wording happens also in B&P between Lalita and her best friend Chandra: „I know what you‘re thinking. But he‘s a good man. I‘m not romantic like you, Lalita. I didn‘t want to take the chance in case my prince never came. I know he‘s not for you, but... but he‘s kind and... and adores me. And I love it here.“

In contrast to these more practical notions, Lalita presents a romantic ideal only very slightly tampered by reality in her answer song to Mr. Kholji‘s No Life Without Wife (incidentally a saying of Gurinder Chadha‘s late father, which she put in as an homage to him):

No life Without wife Oh, yeah-yeah yeah yeah yeah

I don‘t want a man who‘ll grab the best seat Can‘t close his mouth when he starts to eat I don‘t want a man who likes to drink Or leaves his dirty dishes in the sink I don‘t want a man who wants his mummy A balding pest with too much tummy I don‘t want a man who‘s dead in the head

(...) I just want a man with real soul Who wants equality and not control I just want a man good and smart A really sharp mind and a very big heart I just want a man not scared to weep To hold me close when we‘re asleep (...) I just want a man whose spirit is free Will hold my hand, walk the world with me

This song combines the very romantic idea of a „soulmate“ with some very modern attitudes about marriage. While Lalita dreams of the free spirited ideal, her mother extravagantly mourns the lost opportunities and fears the conse- quences, echoing Chandra’s fear of waiting for a prince that never arrives. Mrs Bakshl: „It‘s so tragic. Not a single proposal. So sad. My fate is to live in that rotten house full of spinsters and no grandchildren.“

Both film and book go back and forth between the description of a romantic ideal and the warning that this ideal is just that - an idea and one that is always in danger of being unfullfilled. In the end, romance of course triumphs for the main couples, even more so in the film than in the book. Austen may ultimately be the more pessimistic of the two and therefore deserves the last word:

„Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.“ 

Useful Links:

Bollywood http://www.bollywhat.com/ : Amusing Guide to Bollywood http://www.jump-cut.de/bollywood101.html: : Theoretical Essays

Indian History Sourcebook http://www.kamat.com/kalranga/timeline/timeline.htm : Historical Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ India : Historical Overview http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/india/indiasbook.html : Resources on Indian History

Arranged Marriages http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Arr.html : Overview of Indian marriage customs http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Marriage_knots_Live-in_or_give_in/articleshow/msid-867417,curpg-1.cms : Modern views http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A32226- 2003Feb19¬Found=true Experiences of young American-Indians www.pemberley.com : The go-to-place for all things Austen www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/pptopic2.html#protofem3: Marriage in Regency times

Arbeitsgemeinschaft Kino - Gilde dt. Filmkunsttheater e.V. | Rosenthaler Str. 34/35 | 10178 Berlin Booklet by Hendrike Bake, Diana Kapke, Britta C. Wilmsmeier, October 2007 worksheet

Bride and Prejudice

Before you view the film:

Have a closer look at the title. What do you associate with the title? Have you seen a Bollywood film yet? What do you expect this film to be like?

Review

Bollywood meets Hollywood… Is it a perfect match?

Opinions about this movie vary from very positive to harsh criticism, as you can see in the following excerpts: A complex adult novel has been used as the pretext for a low-octane and glassy-eyed Bollywood romp, at a shorter length than usual and without balancing the romcom jollity with any of the genre‘s usual heartfelt and ingenuous moments of seriousness. It‘s apparently based on the single insight that arranged marriages are very much the order of the day for young people in south Asia and emigrant communities in America and the UK - which is sort of like Jane Austen, right? (Bradshaw, Peter. 2004. ”Bride and Prejudice.” The Guardian, October 8.) At under two hours, the movie is easily less than half the length of a true Bollywood production. The acting is broad, the dance numbers are hybridized, and the musical numbers are tricked out with such disposable lyrics as ‚‘I just wanna man who gives some back/Who talks to me and not my rack.‘‘ Yet rather than detracting, the phosphorescent artificial fibers of the material shape up into their own optimistic whole cloth. Before her hit Beckham (where she overshot her multiculti goal with all that heavy-footed girls-and-sports politicking), Chadha tried but couldn‘t quite shape her passion for ethnic mélange into a satisfying experience in the unwieldy 2000 comedy What‘s Cooking? With the Bollywood language of Bride & Prejudice, the filmmaker has devised a delightful interpretation of Austen‘s wise observation: ‚‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?‘‘ (Schwarzbaum, Lisa. 2005. ”Bride and Prejudice.” Entertainment Weekly, Feburary 09.)

• Compare both reviews. • Which one do you like better? What does a good film review need? • Make a list of things that you like and dislike about the movie. Write your own film review.

Adaptation

• In Germany, the title of the film became Liebe lieber Indisch. Why do you think they didn’t choose a title similar to the German book title of Pride and Prejudice: Stolz und Vorurteil? • If you think of a film adaptation you know, e.g. Harry Potter, do you expect an exact “translation” of the literary script into film? • Film is said to have its own language. What do you think is meant by this? How are literary devices translated into film? Can you think of any examples? • Choose one of the books you have read in class and think about a film adaptation. How would you realise this film? Make a list of important aspects such as time, location, and genre. Write a one-page draft of your film idea.

Topics

• List the different couples in the film. What do they expect from their relationships? Why? • There are several examples of very romantic ideas vs. a more practical approach to love and/or marriage. Which idea do you agree with? Are you a romantic or a realist? • Take a look at the most popular Indian dating website www.shaadi.com, part of what Lalita calls the international global dating service. Look at some examples of personal adds. What are women and what are men looking for? Compare this with your own expectations for a relationship or marriage. What are the differences? Write your own personal add, describing who you are and who you are looking for.

• At the beginning of the film William Darcy is very sceptical about a cross-cultural relationship: „Listen, Balraj, if you really wanna get married, hook up with an Indian girl from England, or even America. You‘d have something in common.“ Do you agree with him? List the reasons why you agree or disagree with him.

• Who do you think has the better arguments in the discussion between Lalita and Darcy about India vs. the West? For example, would Darcy building the hotel really turn the area into a ”theme-park India”? And would it matter if it created jobs?