When Darcy and Lalita get laid…

All bluddy fookkin’ nonsense. ‘Bride and Prejudice’ is the sort of film that must be taken to the laundry – it is so full of artificial colour, dirt and sweat. I am not surprised that director Gurinder Chadha has stated, “The idea of adapting the story came to me while I was doing the washing-up”.

It may sound terribly cheesy to tell the BBC, “Jane Austen must have been a Punjabi girl in a previous life”, but who cares? No one in their right mind would be looking for an authentic ‘Pride and Prejudice’ adaptation; we were indeed looking for a film and not this excuse of swirling bodies to drum-beats. You want to make kitsch, go ahead, and be our guest. But don’t give us these crappy lines about paying homage to our film-makers. We are not going to the movies to see which waterfall or white saree is reminiscent of which film.

You can go and shove it all down the Grand Canyon. This reminds me. Chadha’s real motives are not to be cheeky (oh, how hard she tries to get that tag for herself), but to tell us poor Indians back home, “Look, this is Beverly Hills, this is Buckingham Palace, these are the London streets and the LA streets and this is the Golden temple and this is Goa, and here are the eunuchs, the halwaais, the elephants, the bullock carts (a solitary one in which Lalita wearing jeans takes a ride home through the fields!)…and I know it better than you do because I got the bucks, I have a hold on all these territories…”

So while the Indian package tourist who insists on having a pure veg Indian chef may be seen as a bit of an oddity, Madame Chadha, in the intellectually libertine tradition of a Madame Bovary, can claim rebelliousness as her birthright and proceed to indulge in absurdities. Her packaged steel tiffin box is full of these very varied things. But since she has not dared to open it until she has been sanctified by the West, it has turned rancid.

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She was certainly comfortable doing the Indian diaspora scene in her earlier films like ‘Bhaji on the Beach’ and ‘Bend It Like Beckham’, but it is obvious she knows very little of the real India. Since when has Amritsar become “rural”? Fine, we do have overpowering mothers like Mrs. Bakshi who want their daughters married off to wealthy men, preferably NRIs. They can be loud and crass. But an Indian mother, whatever be her hardsell, would not send her daughters to Goa with men they have just met, she would not say that the coveted eligible bachelor “will get a chance to see Jaya in her swimsuit”, she would not talk about how her prospective son-in-law would have no problems with her beti on the wedding night.

Is Chadha portraying a mother or a madam of a brothel?

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For a feminist, Chadha’s sympathies lie with the men. The father is supportive of his daughters, embarrassed by his wife’s antics, contradicts her and permits a stranger, a backpacker, to stay with them. Message conveyed: men are understanding and non-interfering.

William Darcy, the wealthy American hotelier, is arrogant, but a victim of a screwed-up childhood. He gives up his first-class seat in the aircraft to Mrs. Bakshi and sits in the economy section. He apologises for the errors of others and warns the independent Lalita against another man. Message: Men are chivalrous, misunderstood and protective.

Balraj, the London-based barrister, is not concerned about class barriers when he falls in love with Jaya and when doubts assail him he goes to New York to nurse a breaking heart. Message: men are sensitive and above petty money-mindedness.

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Contrast this with the women. Besides the over-the-top Mrs. Bakshi, the daughters are treated with utmost frivolity. Lalita is supposed to be ‘feisty’. What that amounts to in the film is that she spars with Darcy over his belief that the US has everything and yet gives him flirtatious sidelong glances with her empty swimming pool eyes.

The silliest bit is when she thinks she is falling for the Brit John Wickham, Darcy’s childhood rival, and her logic is that there is nothing wrong in being poor. Wickham, even in his poverty, is earning in pounds and his backpacking is more adventure, less pecuniary considerations. Besides, would she have the same noble sentiments towards a truck driver or dhabawalla?

Jaya, after Balraj has left and not been in touch, shows ‘poise’ by hiding behind a book. She has let herself be swept off her feet by a man she barely knows, romps in the sea with him, gets quite cozy and then despite all this forwardness does not have the courage to try to trace him and confront him. In middle-class India a girl who has gone even this far would feel used and abused and if she is as intelligent as we are made to believe (the evidence in this film is that the girls read and know how to use the computer and wear see-through pyjama-suits at night) she would make her displeasure and annoyance clear.

Lakhi, the third daughter, is a total fruitcake. The minute she spots a gora, Wickham, she clings to him. This, in ‘rural’ Amritsar. If this is the rebellious face that Chadha wants to portray of women in India, she had better rethink.

Maya is the one with musical and dancing talent of sorts which she likes to show off. This tradition of performing before guests is common, but is done when the children are young, not when they have large tits and wear cleavage-revealing cholis to do a ‘cobra dance’ before male guests (temptation anyone?) when their father is present in the room.

These are girls who have been brought up with a sturdy family background that stands for certain traditional values. I am sure there are several ways to portray spunk, intelligence, rebellion and mediocre talent rather than the subversive manner chosen by Chadha to make the curry crowd go ‘balle-stic’. There is a song that goes, “She’s going to be wed/ It doesn’t mean she’s dead.” Huh?

To give a flipside to the picture we do have Kiran, Balraj’s sister, who supposedly has a stiff upper lip. Alas, if she is to the manner born and has anything close to the pedigree of an English poodle, she would not have her tongue hanging out all that much. When the Bakshis visit their mansion, she draws attention to the Indian ayah in the house. This is precious, for most Indian households, even middle-class ones (including the Bakshis) have at least one servant.

And no person with class would flaunt the fact that you could see The Palace from one’s window or that her mother got art from Barcelona, which makes Mrs. Bakshi say, ‘Ah, Italy!” Just as on seeing one of those tepid ye olde English oils on the wall, she asks, “Is that Andy Warhol?” Now, a Mrs. Bakshi from Amritsar may die to get her 15 minutes of fame, but she would not know who the becks is Andy Warhol. Ms. Chadha, just don’t push it.

And what was the point anyway? To tell us that the poor sods from India’s hinterland do not know Warhol? Pooh, it only portrays her smart-ass attempts at wit. If she is trying to wriggle out of this by saying she is paying a tribute to Warhol, then she can’t get out of this with a kitschy orgy of a movie.

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And take a look at her prejudices. She brings in a bumbling NRI who wants to get married because, “What’s life without wife?” Firstly, she should learn to spell Indian names; it is Kohli, not Kholi, which she parodies in the sequence of ‘Kholiwood’. When she shows him eating rather indelicately with his fingers, what was going on in her mind? He has gone to America on his own steam, made some money and is showing off because that is his USP. Does it mean that he is so deranged that he will stuff food in his mouth as though he has been starving for months? Are we being told that this is the way Indians connect with their roots? Strange that the people of the soil, the Bakshis, use cutlery. Come back Peter Sellers, all is forgiven.

Chadha has a neat hierarchy of her own. The Indians living in India are good if they retain the customs, add colour to the proceedings and, despite being gauche in most matters, know their table manners. The NRIs who are nouveau riche deserve contempt and they are villagers at heart and have no right to be villagers at heart because they must adopt and adapt to their new country. The NRIs who are born rich are good because they are assimilated and know all about thin cucumber sandwiches. The Westerner is good because although he worries about Delhi belly, he has a large heart to accept the belle.

If Gurinder Chadha wants to make a Bollywood film, then she should know that packaged masalas aren’t enough; you have to grind the darned condiments and know the mix. And if you want to make a cross-over film (ho-hum), then stick to those elements that add a whiff. The top-angle shots of the crowds in yellow, orange, green, pink with jiggling bellies and oxen bottoms clearly reveal that the film is lusty Kumbh Mela mating with coitus interrupted Kama Sutra – neither reaches its ordained climax.

And guess who is having the last laugh? The behenji from Amritsar when she saw the so-called global Bollywood star, Aishwariya Rai, attend the London premiere wearing an Armani gown (in Indian national bird, peacock, colours!) with a fur stole and a black bag with white pom-poms. Blimey, this is how Indian children dress up for school fancy-dress functions. Or the young woman from the chawl who sneaks out to participate in the Miss Jhumri Talaiya contest. Wonder if this too was a wink-nudge metaphor of some kind? With international directors one never knows!

If this is the trend the director wishes to follow, then one can only hope that next time she gets a camel to kiss an elephant’s ass and be done with it. The best tribute she could pay to Bollywood is to lay her hands off it.