We’ve never been short of Jane Austen film adaptations. In fact, it seems a new one arrives every decade – two were announced recently, including Netflix’s spin on Pride & Prejudice. Yet, one adaptation has been shamefully overlooked: Gurinder Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice.
A cross-cultural, British-and-Bollywood-meets-Hollywood take on Austen’s most famous novel, the film is pure joy – a riot of original musical numbers, colourful costumes, chaos, culture clashes and, of course, romance.
You may think it wouldn’t work, but it does. Released after the huge success of Bend It Like Beckham, Chadha spent two years filming Bride & Prejudice across three continents. It’s a homage to the Bollywood films she grew up watching with a modern, western twist – a cinematic expression of her hybrid identity.
The comfort lies in the beloved storyline, effortlessly familiar. Themes of class, social expectations and (yes) prejudices are refracted through Bollywood tropes and melodrama. We leap from Amritsar to Goa, then LA and London. More than that, Austen’s world fits surprisingly well into contemporary India, where arranged marriages equal security and status. These parallels make the novel an ideal fit for a 21st-century Indian retelling.
The Bennets become the Bakshis – a middle-class family from Amritsar with four daughters to marry off. Our heroine is Lalita, played by the former Miss World and Bollywood movie icon Aishwarya Rai. Like Elizabeth Bennet, she is clever, full of gumption and occasionally arrogant. Reviews were mixed, but unanimous about Rai’s beauty. Branded as a “stately beauty” (the Guardian) and reduced to a “world-class hottie” (Rolling Stone), she proved to be both dazzling on screen and deft enough to bridge Bollywood spectacle and British sensibility.
At a wedding party, we meet our Mr Darcy – reimagined as Will Darcy (Martin Henderson), an American real-estate tycoon. He arrives with best friend Balraj (Naveen Andrews) and Balraj’s sister Kiran (Indira Varma). So begins the east-meets-west culture clash. “Watch out, Darcy, he’s about to turn into the Indian MC Hammer,” quips Kiran, as the film’s best dance number kicks off. During this exuberant sequence, Lalita shines and Darcy falls for her but his comments at their initial meeting reek of western superiority, and Lalita, quick to judge, writes him off.
Balraj invites Lalita and her older sister, Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar) to Goa, where Darcy is viewing a potential hotel purchase. Lalita’s impassioned rebuttal of his motives: “You think this is India? Five-star comfort with a bit of culture thrown in? Well, I don’t want you to turn India into a theme park” – feels just as relevant today.
Chadha adds intersectionality to Austen’s tale. Class here is inseparable from culture and colonialism. India’s recent independence looms in the background and western misreading of Indian identity and values are woven into the story.
In Goa, we encounter George Wickham (Daniel Gillies), shirtless and smouldering, intriguing Lalita while undermining Darcy’s reputation. Fun fact: it’s common to include an “item number” in Bollywood films, where a glamorous performer takes centre stage for a showpiece song that rarely aids the storyline. Keeping this tradition, American singer Ashanti delivers a sultry Bollywood-R&B fusion performance.
From here, the plot broadly follows Austen’s. Along the way, we meet Mr Kohli (Nitin Ganatra) AKA Mr Collins, or as Mrs Bakshi states, “your father’s sister’s husband’s sister’s son”. He’s an exaggerated portrait of a first-generation Indian-American, enamoured with the west yet fixated on marriage. Lalita inevitably sees Darcy’s better qualities. Their romance is told through a Bollywood-inspired montage – in a full-throttle song that transcends into gospel, ending with a choir singing on Venice Beach.
Being faithful to the novel’s idiosyncrasies is beside the point in this adaptation – don’t watch if you’re a stickler for accuracy, or if you don’t like characters seamlessly breaking into song. The film may lack nuanced depths, but it brims with joy. Austen’s novels are often restrained on the surface but bubbling with emotion underneath. In Bride & Prejudice, those emotions burst forth in larger-than-life numbers by Bollywood royalty Anu Malik.
Primarily funded by the UK Film Council, this was a truly cross-cultural production – shot across LA, London and India with the three countries’ cast and crew creating something new together. Could a film like this be made today? I’m not so sure.
What I am sure of is Bride & Prejudice honours Bollywood. The people are beautiful, the energy is infectious and any film that brings a cultural shake-up to a classic, predominantly white narrative should be welcomed. Maybe that’s the biggest message of all: finding commonality despite culture differences is infinitely more interesting. If that’s not feelgood, I don’t know what is.
Bride and Prejudice is available to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia
