Note from the Editor

The year-round production of LFQ means that we are in a near-constant state of production. That said, once-in-a-while we take a moment to look back at some of the articles that reverberate across the journal’s 50+ year history. This article by Cheryl A. Wilson was published in 2006 but it has stayed with me as an enduring example of cross-cultural significance. Back when we first published the work, I summarized it as follows in my editorial:

Cheryl A. Wilson explores how the 2004 Bride and Prejudice, directed by Gurinder Chadha, a “self-identified Punjabi born in Kenya,” blends Hollywood and Bollywood cinema. The Indian film, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is the site of contact between disparate cultures, histories, and film industries which it ironically connects, positioning the spectator in a way that demands enjoyment of and engagement with its self-consciously complex form.

I stand by this summary, but I recognize now that it doesn’t do justice to the energy, originality, and hopefulness of Wilson’s work. While Chadha’s film inevitably belongs to its own time (consider the excited references to email and conference calls as relatively new technology, or the heavy-handed references to globalization as a growing but resistible threat), her ironic combination of Bollywood style and Austenian narrative still feels like a revelation. Here is a film that takes unpredictable, playful, but pointed risks, as Wilson shows. Perhaps the most gorgeous surprise comes with her analysis of the cross-dressing men (hijras) who show up during a musical number titled “A Marriage Has Come to Town,” the joyous lead-up to the first (heterosexual) wedding of Chadha’s film. Wilson connects their comedic presence with a surprising story within Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in which Lydia and Kitty dress up a male friend in women’s clothes so they have enough male/female-presenting couples for a dance. Both film and novel thus offset the “normalcy” of heteronormativity in ways that are not only surprising but somehow even more exciting today, reminding me that progressive change might feel all-too-slow but still has deep roots across time and diverse artforms.

Rereading Wilson’s work, I celebrate the optimism she finds within Chadha’s spectacular, loud, and vivid film that exuberantly honors the work Austen did most privately, quietly, and anonymously. I thank Wilson for inspiring me to teach some of my most inspiring classes in adaptation studies (comparing Chadha’s film with Joe Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), as well as Austen’s text), and for reminding me that our archives are rich in discoveries worth re-finding. 

~Elsie Walker

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” (Austen, Pride 3). The celebrated first line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice sets up the courtship narrative and class issues that permeate the novel and also provides an example of the “epigrammatism” that the author acknowledges as one of her text’s distinguishing – and indeed, most endearing – features (Jane Austen’s Letters 203). “Bollywood meets Hollywood [...] and it’s a perfect match” (Bride). The tagline for Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 film Bride and Prejudice sets up a love story and foreshadows the cultural conflict that will ensue. Both lines aptly characterize their respective texts, yet they are also curiously self-referential. Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged” questions the blurring of true and false/reality and fiction in the novel itself and the genre in general. The “Bollywood meets Hollywood” tagline establishes Bride and Prejudice as the site of contact between two conflicting cultures as well as two disparate film industries and conceptions of media. Thus, within the context of Austen studies and Bollywood film history, Bride and Prejudice can be viewed as a film that integrates two well-suited partners – the Bollywood form and Austen’s comedy of manners – to both preserve and update the cultural critique of the original.

One of the still-unresolved issues in the emerging field of adaptation studies, argues Tom Leitch in “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” concerns how to address the multiple acts of adaptation that take place within any particular work. Leitch writes:

Because films depend on screenplays which in turn often depend on literary source material, in fact, they are doubly performative. Actors and actresses are translating into performance a written script which is itself an adaptation of a prior literary source, with the important difference that the script is a performance text – a text that requires interpretation first by its performers and then by its audience for completion – whereas a literary text requires only interpretation by its readers. (150)  

As Leitch points out, direct communication from writer to reader – a given in most studies of literary reception – is complicated by the mediation first by a screenplay and then by the actors’ performance of that screenplay, thereby imposing two layers of adaptation between the audience and the original source. This is certainly the case with Bride and Prejudice – the screenplay by Chadha and Paul Mayeda Berges renders Austen’s “light and bright and sparkling” novel through the lens of Bombay Cinema, combining two well-defined forms in “a perfect match” (Jane Austen’s Letters 203). In addition, the different (and sometimes conflicting) acting styles of British, American, and Indian performers, according to Chadha’s film commentary, give an energetic and emotional charge to the film. Nonetheless, Chadha preserves the comedic nature of Austen’s source material, which allows the film to undercut certain conventions of the Bollywood form, while using that very form to convey the novel’s commentary on class, culture, and gender to a contemporary audience.

Any film entering the heavily populated field of Austen adaptations is confronted with the task of re-presenting an early-nineteenth-century text to a contemporary audience; and crossing continents, as Chadha does in Bride and Prejudice, further complicates this act of re-presentation. Unlike Rajiv Menon’s 2000 film I Have Found It, which maps Austen’s Sense and Sensibility directly onto the South Indian landscape with minimal appearance of Western characters and maximum appearance of rain-drenched lovers, Chadha’s film is a hybrid, exacerbating the problems of adapting a novel by blending Hollywood and Bollywood cinema in so doing. The film’s hybridity encourages audiences, both Western and non-Western (for which slightly different versions were released), to question their expectations for films and for adaptations. That is, because Bride and Prejudice is and is not Jane Austen, is and is not Bollywood, and is and is not Hollywood, it can reach the “multi-national” audience Chadha identifies as her target by providing each viewer with something that is familiar and something that is not. The film employs these tensions between the familiar and the unfamiliar to prompt reflection on the nature of such cultural blendings (film/novel, Hollywood/Bollywood, English/American/Indian) within the contemporary global marketplace.

A “self-identified Punjabi born in Kenya” who “migrated to England at an early age and settled in Southall in the sixties,” Gurinder Chadha “emerges out of a historical moment in the eighties British (post)multicultural scene in which artists, intellectuals, and activists challenged conceptions of British/English identity around issues of race, class, and gender” (Desai 137-38). Perhaps best known for her 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach and 2002 film Bend It Like Beckham, Chadha uses her work to question assumptions about race and gender from both inside and outside a patriarchal Western perspective. Pride and Prejudice, itself an interrogation of the social forces that shape individual and cultural identities, seems a natural choice for Chadha’s contemporary ethos. Indeed, as Austen film critic Laura Carroll points out, postmodern versions of Austen’s texts can be quite effective in capturing the spirit of the novels:

Austen’s works were not period pieces when she wrote and published them. From here, it is just a small conceptual step to importing elements of the novels into contemporary spaces, and to reconceiving traditional grist to the costume drama mill as material that works beautifully inside modern, popular genres and conventions. (169)

In an October 2004 interview for the British film magazine Sight and Sound, Chadha confirms that one of her aims was to probe contemporary cultural stereotypes: “Bride & Prejudice is a multi-national, 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” (37). Thus, taking a cue from the filmmaker herself, this essay focuses on the ways in which Chadha renders Austen’s novel, particularly its comic treatment of socially constructed ideals of class and gender, by employing certain conventions of Bollywood film – itself a medium for articulating a cultural identity – to achieve a contemporary social critique which, incidentally, is not terribly different from Austen’s own. Both the film and the novel question women’s positions within the family and society as well as deconstruct the performance of femininity required to achieve and maintain that position. Moreover, the race- and class-based conflicts in the film complicate the subtle, albeit well-entrenched, class distinctions that are so central to Pride and Prejudice, and such complication prompts a reflexive re-reading of the novel’s conclusion.

During a campus showing of Bride and Prejudice,the line that received one of the biggest laughs from the audience was, not surprisingly, one of Austen’s own. Overbearing, matchmaker Mrs. Bakshi tries to convince her daughter Lalita to marry Mr. Kohli who has come from America in search of a “traditional” Indian bride. As the lyrics to the song “No Life Without Wife” explain, “Lonely Mr. Kohli from Los Angeles, came to Punjab on one bent knee, he had a green card, new house, big cash.” Mrs. Bakshi appeals to her husband, claiming that she will never speak to her daughter again if Lalita refuses Mr. Kohli, to which Mr. Bakshi replies “and I will never speak to you again if you do.” This, of course, is a slight paraphrase of Mr. Bennet’s famous proclamation in Austen’s original: “An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents – Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do” (Austen, Pride 76). The film’s ability to poke fun at the stereotypical wife-hunting Mr. Kohli and matchmaking Mrs. Bakshi while remaining aware of the serious implications that bad marriages pose to the Bakshi sisters, reveals Chadha’s engagement with what Margaret Stetz terms “the historically problematic issue of women’s laughter” (118). In discussing the work of “Bombay-born expatriate writer,” Suniti Namjoshi, Stetz explains that one of the functions of women’s comedy is to assert “a particular sort of identity and the right of that identity to exist and flourish” (118). Indeed, the film’s comedic song, “No Life Without Wife,” performed by the Bakshi sisters in response to Mr. Kohli’s proposal, sends up life as an imported bride in America: the lyrics include,  “you make Aloo Gobi, he makes the money,” but also assert a young woman’s right to choose a man who suits her. Lalita sings, “I don’t want a man who’s crude and loud, wants a pretty wife to make him proud” (see Figures 1 and 2) and later “I just want a man with real soul who wants equality and not control.” The challenge to traditional gender roles and the transformation of the bumbling country parson Mr. Collins into the Americanized emigrant Mr. Kohli, reveals how the film interrogates Indian identity within middle-class life in India as well as within the context of Western imperialism. This scene’s focus on the importance of marriage to the individual, family, and nation, also reveals how the conventions of Bollywood cinema suggest an affinity between this form and British culture as represented in early-nineteenth-century novels of manners. For example, in her discussion of the gender politics of Bombay Cinema, Vijay Mishra points out that most films present “woman as the focal point of social cohesion and genealogical purity” (66). Similarly, in early-nineteenth-century England, facing the threat of Napoleon (a current most strongly felt in Austen’s novel Persuasion) and the increasing influence of continental culture on English identity, women came to be viewed as the protectors of English heritage and culture.

However, as Stetz points out in discussing Chadha’s 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach, comedy can be “fleeting and always threatening to dissolve into its antithesis” (xiv). Such is certainly the case with this musical number, which transitions into Lalita’s fantasy of an English countryside wedding but substitutes Will Darcy at the altar instead of the expected groom Johnny Wickham. The exaggerated drama of this encounter – Lalita screams and runs out into the rain while the song, transformed into an ominous chant “no life without wife,” drums in the background – reminds viewers that it is just a nightmare. We know Darcy to be rude but not menacing. However, this dream sequence also darkly foreshadows the danger of entering into a liaison with Wickham, who, like the nightmare wedding, is not what he seems. It is later revealed that Wickham impregnated Darcy’s sister Georgie, and Darcy thwarts him before he can do the same to Lakhi, the youngest of the Bakshi sisters. The latter sections of the film hover on the border between comedy and tragedy, but comedic order is restored, and the nightmare is reversed as Darcy rescues Lakhi, and indeed the entire family, from Wickham.

More prevalent and provocative than the direct incorporation of Austen’s comedy, however, are the instances in which the film blends that comedy with song and dance – elements of the Bollywoodformthat are particularly recognizable to Western audiences. In Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (2002), Vijay Mishra discusses the different types of song and dance that characterize Bollywood films – the wedding song, Bollywood Cabaret, and Mujra, all of which appear in Bride and Prejudice and mark distinct connections to Austen’s novel, which itself is heavily invested in music and dance. Such feminine accomplishments come under close scrutiny in Pride and Prejudice.

For example, Austen’s narrator tacitly approves Elizabeth Bennet’s humility concerning her musical skills: when pressed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh, “Do you play and sing, Miss Bennet?” Elizabeth famously replies, “A little,” although she possesses considerable skill (109). In contrast, Mary Bennet, who is technically more accomplished, is criticized for her self-aggrandizing performances: “Mary had neither genius nor taste; and although vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner. [...] Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure” (17). In the film, as in the novel, Maya/Mary is characterized by her accomplishments, which illustrate technical prowess, rather than artistic talent. In addition to her music (we see her playing sitar to accompany Mr. Kohli’s power-walking workout) Maya Bakshi also dances. The mujra, a sensual performance by a single female dancer, interrupting the narrative flow, is a Bollywood staple and a cinematic adaptation of traditional performances by court dancers, temple dancers, and courtesans. Maya Bakshi’s cobra dance (one of the most humorous moments in the film) shows Chadha incorporating Austen’s comedy into the Bollywood form, adapting the traditional mujra to convey the satirical perspective on accomplishments offered by Austen’s narrator. Both Mary’s piano playing and Maya’s dancing humorously illustrate the conflict between technical proficiency and artistic ability, yet they also comment on the ways in which feminine identity for young women in both of these cultures is expected to be packaged and performed in ways that are both unpleasant and unnatural.

The wedding with which the film opens also provides opportunities for song and dance, allowing Chadha to incorporate further elements of the Bollywood form: “the wedding song is more likely to be a diegetic necessity in Bombay Cinema than any other song/dance sequence” (Mishra 263). In Bollywood film, social dance encounters stand in for the more overt expressions of sexuality that are prohibited by the industry. In Bride and Prejudice, three dance scenes, all of which are associated with the wedding, convey the sexual tensions between the characters and within the community. The first is a call and response ritual performed during a prewedding celebration – an “Indian version of American Idol” in which “the girls tease the boys and the boys tease the girls.” Lalita and Will Darcy are thrown together in this dance rite, which, like the dances of the nineteenth-century ballroom, emphasizes the ritualistic nature of courtship. The back-and-forth dialogue of the song, too, echoes the back-and-forth dialogue of Elizabeth and Darcy in Austen’s novel as they move through a country dance. In a country dance a series of figures brings the participants physically together and then separates them, thereby structuring the dialogue as a series of short exchanges. During the ball, Mr. Darcy is not aware of his responsibility to alternate polite commentary with Elizabeth, and she chastises him: “It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples” (62). Darcy then asks, “Do you talk by rule then, while you are dancing?” (62). Elizabeth’s response, “Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know” (62), suggests that the “rule” is a social prescription, yet it is also a physical measure – dancers in a country dance must “talk by rule” because the dialogue is dictated by the codified steps of the dance. For example, in The Royal Ball-Room Guide, Rudolph Radestock describes the “Galopade Country Dance”: “All form two lines, each gentleman having his partner at his side. All advance, retire, advance and change partners; advance, retire, and regain partners; all stand still, except the two top couples; ladies’ chain, and galop down the centre” (85). Advancing, retiring, and changing partners impose structure upon the dialogue, forcing dancers to adapt their conversation to the movements of their bodies.

Bride and Prejudice also achieves cultural commentary through dance in two scenes that illustrate Chadha’s attention to the subtle ways in which Austen’s text invites destabilized readings of race and gender. The first occurs when Chadha adapts a key line from the novel. Just before he rejects Elizabeth as a dance partner, Mr. Darcy is talking with Sir William Lucas, who remarks, “There is nothing like dancing after all. – I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished societies,” to which Darcy replies, “Certainly, Sir; – and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world. – Every savage can dance” (18). Darcy’s comment, fueled by his “indignation at such a mode of passing the evening,” is intended to insult Sir William and illustrate his disdain for this particular social ritual (18). However, his actions retract his words as, having tempered his pride and prejudice, Darcy later pursues Elizabeth on the dance floor. Nonetheless, as Austen’s readers would have understood, Darcy’s comment reflects more general nineteenth-century perceptions of non-Western dance as the subject of curiosity and sensation. In her comprehensive history Dancing (1895), Lily Grove devotes an entire chapter to “The Dances of Savages,” detailing different customs and illustrating how the prevalence of dancing among “savages” reveals their primitive civilization: “The dance among savages may be considered a just indication of their character. [. . .] the dance of the savage has great significance as an indication of his primitive religion” (65-66). Seen as distinct from the “savages,” the Indian dancer also captured the interests of the British, and fiction and poetry celebrating the “nautch girl” or “bayadere” abounded. For example, poetess Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.), romanticizes this figure in “The Bayadere: An Indian Tale” (1831), in which a distraught bayadere, a figure of “wild grace” who possesses “A beauty shining through the whole, / Something which spoke of heart and soul,” commits suicide to remain with her lover (141, 143-44). And, Lily Grove writes in wonder, “the nautchees have the right to go where they choose, and they are even allowed to enter the palaces of the princes, to sit down in their presence, and to talk to them freely” (347).

During the traditional Indian wedding that occurs near the beginning of Bride and Prejudice, Darcy asks Lalita to dance, claiming that it looks easy: “this looks like you just screw in a light bulb with one hand, you pet the dog with the other,” but she is outraged, “I think you should find someone simple and traditional to teach you to dance like the natives” (see Figures 3 and 4).  In the novel, Darcy’s comparison to “savages” is intended to deflate Sir William’s pretensions about society and entertainments, yet it also reveals Darcy’s unwillingness, or perhaps inability, to perform in “civilized” social situations – something that he learns over the course of the novel. In the film, Darcy’s comment about the style of dance suggests a similar lack of knowledge about social rituals. Although his insult, couched in his attempt to flirt with Lalita, seems born more of nervousness and ignorance than malice, what it reveals about Darcy’s character is the same. In this scene, Chadha speaks directly to Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy by illustrating how the dances of non-Western cultures (both in the nineteenth century and today) are as complex and embedded in social rituals as the country dances found in the English ballroom.

Jane Austen acknowledges the potential of dance to destabilize gender relationships as well in what appears to be the only scene of cross-dressing in her novels, recounted by Lydia as she tells her sisters of her exploits at Colonel Forster’s:

Kitty and me were to spend the day there, and Mrs. Forster promised to have a little dance in the evening; (by the bye, Mrs. Forster and me are such friends!) and so she asked the two Harringtons to come, but Harriet was ill, and so Pen was forced to come by herself; and then, what do you think we did? We dressed up Chamberlayne in woman’s clothes, on purpose to pass for a lady, – only think what fun! (145)

The women’s laughter betrays their trick to the gentlemen who “soon found out what was the matter” (145). The cross-dressing must be discovered before the promised entertainment, the dance, can occur. This scene reinforces how social dance stands as a model of heterosexual partnership; after all, country dance is “an emblem of marriage,” proclaims Henry Tilney in Austen’s Northanger Abbey (56). Yet the scene also offers a tantalizing “what if?” It is the women’s laughter, not the appearance of Chamberlayne in drag that piques the men’s suspicions, so Austen suggests that the jest could have been carried onto the dance floor where Wickham or one of the other soldiers would have stood up with another man. By refusing to let the jest go that far, Austen reinforces the power of dance in determining heterosexual courtship. Dance occupies its traditional role throughout the novel, playing an important role in the courtship of Jane and Bingley and Elizabeth and Darcy; however, the image of the cross-dressed dancing body also provides an undercurrent that speaks to the power of dance to destabilize traditional gender relationships.

The cross-dressed dancing body also appears in the film. During the song and dance number “A Marriage Has Come to Town,” a group of hijras – “South Asia’s ancient and secretive community of transsexuals, hermaphrodites and eunuchs” – join in the singing and dancing, celebrating the boost to the local economy and morale provided by a large traditional wedding (Walsh) (see Figure 5). Like Austen, Chadha depicts a celebration of heterosexual union and cultural tradition, while simultaneously destabilizing the institution through the presence of the hijras, who are a common feature at South Asian weddings. The hijras in Chadha’s film exhibit exaggerated gender characteristics, such as a pronounced swaying walk and dramatic effeminate gestures, and their song suggests a male/female union that offers an alternative to heterosexual marriage – the existence of both sexes in one body. They sing, “Who can tell you more about yin and yang? Sharing one spirit between woman and man.” Again, the comedic, along with song and dance, achieves broader social commentary by using a traditional site of courtship to undercut the heterosexual union.

In her discussion of Bombay Cinema, Mishra also notes, “songs are significant emotional correlatives, they extend dialogue or filmic image” and can even replace dialogue in some cases (148). Some of Darcy and Elizabeth’s trademark banter is translated into Bride and Prejudice, yet Chadha also uses song – specifically the reprise of “Take Me to Love,” played during a montage of scenes depicting Darcy and Lalita’s courtship – to further remind viewers that the romance of both the novel and the film is inextricable from the comedy. Initially the song is wistful and serious sung by Lalita as she waits for word from Wickham after he has left Amritsar: “This place called love, is it for real, or is it just a dream?” In its second incarnation, the song begins seriously but rapidly becomes comic. As Darcy and Lalita enjoy a romantic walk along the beach, the vocal duet is supplemented with a gospel choir, and the choir appears on the beach, complete with gowns and risers, singing and swaying as the couple walks by. Soon surfers and lifeguards join in this overchoreographed and hyperstylized version of the Bollywood musical number, which Chadha identifies as the epitome of the “Bollywoodizing” of LA that occurs throughout the film’s American scenes (Chadha and Burges).

Whereas Austen’s novel is largely concerned with Elizabeth’s ability to negotiate the class differences that separate her from Darcy, Bride and Prejudice employs cultural differences as the foremost source of social tension in Lalita and Darcy’s relationship. Of course, class differences are a factor, and a clear distinction exists between the Darcys and the Bakshis, but the emphasis, from the opening scene of Darcy’s introduction to the streets of Amritsar – “Jesus, Balraj! Where the hell have you brought me?” – remains on the cultural differences. As writer Paul Mayeda Burges, punning on the original title of Austen’s novel, explains, “Whereas the novel is all about class distinctions, this [casting Darcy and Elizabeth as American and Indian] would enable us to really look at America and India and the kind of first impressions we make of each other culturally” (Chadha and Burges). In “Austen, Class, and the American Market,” written in response to the Austen film boom of the late twentieth century, Carol M. Dole notes, “one of Jane Austen’s chief fascinations for American audiences in the 1990s is her keen analysis of the vicissitudes of class, a topic which American films in particular have resisted confronting openly” (58). This lack of attention to class, Dole argues, is partially an acknowledgement of American audiences’ inability to relate to the treatment of class in the novels. Yet, such attention to class is inherent to the world Austen depicts: “class difference was of course a fact of life for Austen, and an acute observation of the fine distinctions between one social level and another was a necessary pan of her business as a writer of realistic fiction” (McMaster 115). Bride and Prejudice captures the novel’s attention to the subtleties of class by combining it with culture, ultimately conveying, particularly to contemporary American audiences, the significant implications of a match between individuals from two different worlds.

This transformation of Elizabeth and Darcy’s nineteenth-century courtship into a contemporary cross-cultural relationship also alters the power dynamics of the match. Elizabeth Bennet fulfills her own desires and the romantic longings of Austen’s readers in marrying Darcy, but she also ensures the financial security of her family. The entailment of the estate poses a real economic threat to the Bennet women, yet as another example of the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy maintained in the novel and replicated in the film, the situation is easily subsumed by the antics of Mr. Collins and other, more compelling, plot issues. Indeed, Austen leaves the matter largely unarticulated. The initial mention of the entailment, “Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his,” leads not to an explanation of the financial straits the Bennet sisters may realistically anticipate but instead to a discussion of Mrs. Bennet’s Meryton relatives and their attraction for Lydia and Kitty (19). Likewise, Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Collins is depicted primarily in the context of his personal shortcomings and her declarations of independence. Not until after the situation has been resolved by Mr. Collins transferring his affections to Charlotte Lucas does the issue of the entailment arise again: Mrs. Bennet exclaims, “it is very hard to think that Charlotte Lucas should ever be mistress of this house, that I should be forced to make way for her, and live to see her take my place in it!” (89).

In contrast, Lalita’s marriage to Darcy is not weighted with the same set of economic concerns. Mrs. Bakshi grumbles about their living conditions and the impracticality of having four unmarried daughters, but the future does not hold the same threat of poverty and displacement. Instead, Lalita, shown helping to manage the farm and the accounts, is set up as the successor to her father. Thus, her marriage is presented as a personal triumph rather than as the family’s economic salvation because Lalita refuses to adhere to the model in which a successful Indian man returns from abroad (America or England) to find a “traditional” bride – a model that appears twice: in the opening wedding with which the film begins and in Mr. Kohli’s wife-hunting exploits. Without the framework of the entailment and with the clear articulation of Lalita’s ability to take care of herself (and, potentially, to take care of the whole family), the economic stakes are lower in the Bride and Prejudice marriage. Because he is outside the context of nineteenth-century restrictions on women’s personal and economic independence, Chadha’s Darcy is not in a powerful position from which he can “rescue” Lalita, and she does not need to be rescued anyway (they even undertake the search for the wayward Lakhi together). The updated setting levels the power structure within the relationship, but it is Darcy himself who rejects the imperialist power that is within his reach. Darcy convinces his mother not to extend the family empire by building a luxury hotel in India once he realizes the cultural implications of so doing. As one of the actions that prompts Lalita’s reconsideration of Darcy’s character, the rejection of imperialist power can be seen as the broader marriage of cultures that is personalized in Darcy and Lalita’s union. However, the balance is short- lived. The change in power dynamics from novel to film additionally complicates the issues of difference (class and culture) in the central romantic relationship, ultimately tempering the celebratory ending of the film.

The confrontation between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet, in which the class differences come to the surface of the text, occurs late in Pride and Prejudice after Austen has already led her reader to become invested in and to support the match. Elizabeth responds to Lady Catherine’s comment “you would not wish to quit the sphere, in which you have been brought up” with “In marrying your nephew; I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal” (232). Elizabeth’s logic is sound, and Austen has schooled her reader to accept Elizabeth’s perspective – this is not Emma Woodhouse making the completely unfounded claim that Harriet Smith is a gentleman’s daughter merely so she can justify their friendship: “There can scarcely be a doubt that her father is a gentleman – a gentleman of fortune” (Austen, Emma 39). As Edward Ahearn points out, “Her [Lady Catherine’s] assumption that the assertion of noble prerogatives will win the argument is countered by Elizabeth’s self-assurance in being “a gentleman’s daughter,” which provides a readerly satisfaction based in class identity and antagonism” (400). This “readerly satisfaction” at Elizabeth’s besting of Lady Catherine effectively erases the class differences, despite the ways in which Lady Catherine proceeds to attack Elizabeth’s mother, aunts, and other “connections” as unworthy of a liaison with the Darcy family.

In Bride and Prejudice the Darcy/Lalita romance is equally appealing, yet the signifiers of cultural difference remain before the viewer as a constant reminder of the cultural weight of this union. This situation is further compounded by the machinations of both mothers – throughout the film Mrs. Bakshi visits websites, including IndianMatchmaker.com, to find suitable Indian husbands for her daughters. Similarly, Mrs. Darcy attempts to arrange her son’s marriage and dangles suitable women before Darcy in Lalita’s presence. These cultural differences leave the film much more open ended than the novel. The end of Pride and Prejudice sees Elizabeth installed at Pemberley, filling the household with her charm and good sense. Once Elizabeth and Darcy have triumphed over Lady Catherine’s objections, the class differences fade from the text. However, as Lalita and Darcy ride off into the sunset on the back of an elephant after their traditional Indian wedding (see Figure 6), questions about the union remain – where will they live? How will they blend cultural values in raising children? What kind of interaction will their families have? (Darcy’s family is noticeably absent from the wedding). The affinity shared by Darcy and Lalita as individuals, of course, suggests nothing but a happy marriage, but the practical aspects remain troubling; this Elizabeth cannot be welcomed to Pemberley – which in the film is an upscale Los Angeles hotel owned by Darcy’s mother – nor does she particularly want to be. The reunion image of Darcy playing an Indian drum offers one solution to this problematic ending. This moment is both a Bollywood convention, the “melodramatic recognition scene – often presented as a tableau – is based on the recognition (and legitimation) of the correct signs against those evil signs to be excluded from the moral universe of the film,” and a sign of cultural blending (Mishra 38). As Nandi Bhatia remarks in her discussion of Chadha’s 1993 film Bhaji on the Beach, for contemporary artists like Chadha “the identification with cultural symbols is one that, instead of signaling an unconditional return, engenders the possibility of exploring new strategies and alliances that refuse an exclusionist identification with the native homeland” (519-20). So, the film ends by incorporating symbols that suggest a blending of culture more complicated than the overcoming of class boundaries that facilitates Elizabeth’s removal to Pemberley. Indeed, this creation of a cross-cultural Elizabeth/ Darcy union is self-reflexive for contemporary readers of Pride and Prejudice by emphasizing the significance of the union and the social forces that Elizabeth and Darcy must overcome.

The blending of film and novel is further facilitated by the self-consciousness of form that both media betray. The novel form, as critics from Virginia Woolf to Nancy Armstrong have pointed out, was particularly suited to the needs of nineteenth-century women writers. In discussing the history of women’s writing, Woolf explains, “The novel alone was young enough to be soft in her hands – another reason, perhaps, why she wrote novels,” and Armstrong argues that gender, class, and genre are interdependent: “one cannot distinguish the production of the new female ideal either from the rise of the novel or from the rise of the new middle classes in England” (77, 78). Writing while the genre was still nascent, Austen vociferously defends the novel form. The most pronounced example of this occurs in Northanger Abbey where Austen’s narrator criticizes the tendency of young women to disparage their own reading habits. The question “And what are you reading, Miss – ?” is answered with “Oh! it is only a novel [...] It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda” (Austen, Northanger 22). Austen’s narrator praises these works, “in short, only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language” (22). Thus, Mr. Collins’s refusal to read fiction – “Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it, (for everything announced it to be from a circulating library,) he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels,” – reveals to Austen’s characters and readers that he lacks taste and intellect (47). Jane Austen, Claudia Johnson states, was fully aware of the potential and problems of her chosen medium: “to write novels of social criticism, authors had to develop strategies of subversion and indirection which would enable them to use the polemical tradition without being used completely by it” (19). Bollywood film fulfills a cultural agenda similar to that of the nineteenth-century novel: “Film is the most popular and significant cultural form and commodity in the transnational South Asian cultural and political economy. More important, South Asian diasporic identificatory processes are centrally configured and contested through the cinematic apparatus” (Desai 35). As she both adheres to and pokes fun at Bollywood conventions, Chadha keeps viewers aware of the form. Setting the American sections of the film in Hollywood (or Kohliwood as it appears when Lalita imagines life as Kohli’s wife), reminds viewers that the film both is and is not Hollywood. Similarly, Bollywood also becomes a “setting”; the fight between Darcy and Wickham takes place in a theatre during a Bollywood film festival and mirrors the fight onscreen. The film in the background, Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Pachim (1970), which translates as “East and West,” was consciously chosen, Chadha explains, as one of the first Bollywood movies to depict Indians in Britain (Chadha and Burges). These moments, along with the Bollywood meets Hollywood tagline, reveal that the film is a self-conscious production exploring the interplay between the forms of Bollywood and Hollywood and novel and film.

Chadha explains that one of her aims in making Bride and Prejudice was to make “a Bollywood-style Hindi movie that somehow interacted wholeheartedly with another cultural tradition,” in this case the “English literary tradition” (Chadha and Burges). The successful integration of these traditions is due, in part, to Chadha’s attention to Austen’s comedy and the suitability of the song-and-dance elements of the Bollywood form to capture the spirit of a novel also heavily invested in music and dance, effectively closing the gap “from Amritsar to UK.”