Bride and Prejudice and diasporic cinema

Indian films are being watched more and more by international audiences ever since the global markets opened up in the 1990s. This because of the transformations that occurred in the communication and media sector as a result of new information and communication technologies.[1] The new global broadcasting environment and the availability of online delivery systems and digital television made it possible to get Bollywood cinema (Hindi language film industry, based in Mumbai, India) to international audiences.[2] In addition, blended forms with both Hollywood and Bollywood style elements arose. This blog post will discuss the example Bride and Prejudice. Besides the fact that the movie is aesthetically hybrid, something else is happening in the scope of (trans)national identity.

The British Indian director Gurinder Chadha produced the movie Bride and Prejudice in 2004. This movie, based on Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice (1813), bridges the gap between Western and Indian popular cinema.[3] The two genres that can be recognized are the Western film musical and Indian Bollywood cinema but it also presents  issues about limitations that native Indians have in the eyes of others.[4] This last part fits in the concept of diaspora (which will be defined in the next paragraphs). This blog post will explain  what makes Bride and Prejudice an excellent example of diasporic cinema. The outline will be as follows: first we will elucidate the plot of Bride and Prejudice as adapted from Pride and Prejudice, then the position of Gurinder Chadha as an Indian British filmmaker will be defined whereupon the movie aspects of Bride and Prejudice will be placed on the spectrum of diasporic cinema and finally, we will draw a conclusion.

In this paragraph some more information about the plot will be given. As mentioned in the paragraph above, the plot of Bride and Prejudice is taken from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a British comedy of manners. The novel is adapted into a love story between an Indian woman and a contemporary American businessman who represents the original character Darcy. In this adapted plot Darcy comes to India to look for investments but unexpectedly meets the woman Lalita (originally called Elizabeth). The class conflict that keeps Darcy and Elizabeth from getting together in the original novel has been transformed into an intercultural conflict. The social positions dilemma has been replaced by the main characters’ prejudices about the other’s culture and as a result,intercultural relations become the main theme.[5] Thus, not only the conventions of both Hollywood’s musicals and Bollywood’s cinema are mixed, the plot is a combination of the Western and the Eastern culture  as well. In fact, the movie was filmed in India, as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States.[6] In the end Darcy overcomes his prejudices and accepts Lalita’s different cultural background.

It is no coincidence that director Gurinder Chadha mixes East and West as she is from Punjab, a region that encompasses the north of India and the east of Pakistan, but grew up in London. This makes her a ‘diasporic filmmaker’ as she only has very remote experience of migration.[7] According to Hamid Naficy’s study An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001) diasporic cinema is dominated by its relationship to the homeland and by the lateral relationship to the experiences and communities of the diaspora.[8] However, as stated by Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg in their article Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe (2010), it is not necessarily the film-maker’s nationality or ethnicity that determines the classification of a production as diasporic. They consider diasporic cinema as being demarcated by subject matter. The diaspora space (this space includes next to migrated people and their descendants also natives) can problematize the subject position of the “native” as well as the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, of otherness and belonging and of “us” and “them”.[9]

The South Asian diasporic cinema in particular tries to challenge the limitations that native Asians have in the eyes of others.[10] This is what Chadha does in Bride and Prejudice, as she explains in an interview for the British film magazine Sight and Sound (October 2004):  “Bride and 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.”.[11] In other words, Chadha foregrounds issues of diversity. An example where the characters discuss this diversity can be watched here.

As mentioned earlier, Bride and Prejudice can be considered a part of aesthetically hybrid cinema because it uses elements of both Western film musical and Indian Bollywood cinema. The aesthetically hybrid cinema juxtaposes and fuses stylistic templates, generic conventions, narrative and musical traditions, languages and performance styles from more than one (film) culture.[12] Chadha shows us the differences and blendings of Hollywood and Bollywood (even in her cast).

So Gurinder Chadha is a diasporic filmmaker but what really makes Bride and Prejudice a diasporic cinema movie is the fact that she points out the otherness of the so called “us” and “them” wherein “us” can be seen as the western world with their Eurocentric attitude and “them” being the Indian population. This is supported by the use of aesthetically hybrid cinema in form of the fusion of Hollywood and Bollywood cinema elements. This all makes the movie an excellent example of diasporic cinema.

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The fusion between both Hollywood and Bollywood cinema elements show that reflexivity is a key component of diasporic cinema.


E.H., N.S., L.D., K.H., D.L.


[1] Daya K. Thussu, ‘Cultural Practices and Media Production: The Case of Bollywood’,in Mediation Cultural Diversity in a Globalised Public Space, 2012, p. 119.
[2] Thussu, p. 124.

[3] Thussu, p. 124.
[4] Elena O. Aldea, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice: A Transnational Journey Through Time and Space, 2011, p. 170.
[5] Sandra Heinen, Gurinder Chadha’s ‘Commodified Hybrid Utopia’: The Programmatic Transculturalism and Culture-Specific Audience of Bride and Prejudice, 2009, p. 61.
[6] Aldea, p. 168.
[7] Daniela Berghahn and Claudia Sternberg, Locating Migrant and Diasporic Cinema in Contemporary Europe, 2010, p. 16.
[8] Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, 2001, p. 15.
[9] Berghahn, p. 17.
[10] Aldea, p. 170.
[11] Cheryl A. Wilson, Bride and Prejudice: A Bollywood Comedy of Manners, 2006, p. 324.
[12] Berghahn, p. 41.