Bride & Prejudice and the (Post-)national Cinema Debate

The primary location of Gurinder Chadha’s film Bride & Prejudice (2004), a Bollywood-influenced adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is 21st-century rural Amritsar in north-western India. In this reworking of Jane Austen’s text, the Bennet family members become the Bakshis, the main cast members are Indian, the action moves between India, London, and Los Angeles, and the characters discuss post-imperialism and globalisation. In the filmmaker’s words, despite these updates, Pride and Prejudice’s “themes have all been brought out, but with an Indian twist” (Chadha in Gritten 2004). In this Bollywoodised Austen, the Bakshis reside in a large country house beyond their means and the mother believes that the only road to financial survival is to scan the internet for suitable husbands for her four unmarried daughters. The character of Elizabeth Bennet becomes the headstrong Lalita Bakshi, while Darcy is an Oxford-educated wealthy heir to an American hotel chain, and the two meet while he is visiting India for a friend’s wedding. At first, Lalita is appalled by his arrogant and condescending attitude toward India, which he finds plain and provincial, and the Indians, who he deems responsible for holding India back. The arranged marriage system that she regards as a “global dating service” he sees as “backward”, and Punjabi dance styles are characterised by him as “screwing a light bulb with one hand, and patting a dog with the other” (Sandhu, 2004:24). Lalita is annoyed that snobs such as Darcy assault her country in what she considers to be a new imperialism. Indeed, she believes him to be a throwback to British colonialism since he is considering buying a beach resort in Goa. “I don't want you turning India into a theme park,” she tells him, “I thought we’d got rid of people like you”. The two are set on a path for love, and spend the rest of the film revising their opinions of each other. From the outset, the film’s edge lies in its inclusion of Indian culture into a British canonical text, not only in the Bollywood-styled musical interludes but also in raising issues such as the economics of 21st-century cultural tourism resulting in the tourist-driven “India without all the Indians”, in Lalita’s words. Nonetheless, in the context of this essay, I intend to consider not Bride & Prejudice thematically – and, in this respect, issues of mobility and location generally associated with diasporic filmmaking are peripheral to my investigation –, but rather the debate around the film to focus on the ways in which critical discourses intersect to classify it as a national and/or diasporic cultural product.