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 2 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. 3 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.