INDIA: The latest cinematic version of Jane Austen's classic love story hits the screens this week. Rahul Bedi, in New Delhi, reports on what Bollywood has done to Pride and Prejudice.
Bride and Prejudice, the Indianised film version of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which opens in Ireland and the UK next week, is not merely a glib renaming of the classic English novel of Regency snobbery and love, set in a robust Punjabi milieu featuring mostly Bollywood stars.
It is a quick-witted, amusing and clever cross-cultural story that unfolds mostly in the holy Sikh city of Amritsar in northern India, London and the US, successfully capturing the essence of Austen's intertwined tale of class, social equality and romance.
Kenya-born director of Indian origin Gurinder Chadha, herself a Sikh, deftly shows that Austen's axiom that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife remains valid even today even in conservative societies.
She also manages to depict the silent, unstated sexuality of the book, through an unusual synthesis of East and West that will come as a welcome surprise to overseas viewers.
Austen's delicate, very English ambience is delightfully transported to Amritsar's Golden Temple of the Sikhs and the city's exotic sights, smells, sounds and lusty humour.
Long English cocktail dresses, stilettos and hats mingle with Punjabi salwar-kameezes or loose baggy trousers and knee-length shirts, elaborately embroidered shoes, casual sarongs and rainbow-coloured glass bangles.
"I don't think mine is a cross-over film. It is a British-Asian film, as I am a British director. I think mine is a mainstream film and I have not just made it for the Indian audience," said Chadha, whose last venture, Bend it like Beckham, is running in over 1,200 theatres in the US and has grossed over $32 million.
In Bride and Prejudice, Chadha, who began her career with BBC radio, transforms Austen's Hertfordshire Bennets into the genteel but poor Bakshi family of Amritsar, who, like their English counterparts, are anxiously seeking wealthy husbands for their four pretty daughters.
Shabby gentility, however, renders Mr Bakshi incapable of paying any dowry for his daughter, weaving a serious Indian social problem into the narrative.
The glamorous Aishwayra Rai, the 1994 Miss World and successful Bollywood heroine from the film city of Bombay, is Lalita, one of the four feisty daughters awaiting a suitable match.
It is Rai's first English movie, but she claims she will not use it as a stepping stone to Hollywood. "I am not a bird. I will not migrate or move. We actors are gypsies and nomads and we go where the movie takes us," she said.
But she is set to star in Chaos opposite Meryl Streep for French director Coline Serreau, Roland Joffe's Singularity and Barton Randall's I Know a Place. She will end the year with Mistress of Spices, once again with Gurinder Chadha.
Chadha said she wanted to shoot a film in Amritsar after visiting it two decades ago with her uncle, whose four daughters reminded her of the Bennett sisters.
During subsequent visits to the holy city she came to know more about Punjabi girls, especially their forthrightness and candour.
In Austen's highly ironic tale of snobbery, the class conscious Mrs Bennet is anxious to get her five daughters married.
Bingley, a prospective match, arrives in their bucolic neighbourhood as a suitable match for the older daughter Jane, but his rich and proud friend Darcy talks him out of it because he finds the Bennets low country folk.
Darcy, however, likes Jane's younger sister Elizabeth but she dislikes his snobbish and uppity ways.
Wickham, meanwhile, an unprepossessing character, elopes with the younger Bennet sister, Lydia, giving Darcy's noble side the opportunity to emerge when he prevails on him to marry her.
Eventually, Darcy realises the follies of his pride and Elizabeth her prejudices and they end up getting married. Bingley, in turn, weds Jane.
In Chadha's hands Balraj (Bingley), an eligible British Asian from London, played by Naveen Andrews, the Indian-born actor who acted as the peripatetic but swashbuckling Sikh sapper in The English Patient, arrives in Amritsar and takes up residence near the Bakshis.
Soon after, his close fried Darcy - who retains his original name but is transformed into a crass, somewhat insufferable American hotel owner from Los Angeles - portrayed by Mike Henderson who featured earlier in The Ring, arrives to stay with him.
The presence of these two eligible men in the neighbourhood sparks off a flutter of activity in the Bakshi household that comprises their oldest daughter, Jaya and siblings Lalita, Maya and Lucky.
Soon after, at one of the many social engagements - in which the grand balls of Hertfordshire are transformed into Amritsar's vigorous dance parties - Lalita meets Darcy, who is instantly attracted by her exquisite beauty and quiet fieriness.
But it's not love at first sight for headstrong Lalita.
She is determined to marry for love, without the interference of her mother, a boldness few Indian women exhibit today.
Chadha also localises the snobbery with sardonic humour.
Darcy, for instance, wants to know if it's safe to eat pakoras, vegetables deep fried in a semolina paste that are considered a delicacy by most Punjabis, because he does not want "Delhi" or runny belly on his first day in India.
He also says rude things about arranged marriages.
Lalita stoutly defends the institution, still responsible for the majority of Indian marriages, as a global dating service and no different from Western ways.
Darcy also brags that his hotel charges $500 a day for a single room. That's more than what a lot of Indians earn in a year, Lalita responds in lively repartee.
And while in the novel the conflict between Darcy and Elizabeth revolves around their social status, in the Bollywood version, cross-cultures act as negative barriers between Darcy and Lalita.
What happens thereafter is broadly similar to what unfolds in Pride and Prejudice.
Balraj and Darcy return to Los Angeles and it is only after the Bakshi sisters visit London and LA on the invitation of Kohli (Mr Collins) that some sort of crisis develops by way of a punch-up between Darcy and Wickham - who also retains his name and evil ways - in a cinema hall over the latter's caddish behaviour.
And while the film changes class divisions in Jane's Austen's late-18th century England to the "prejudice" an American Darcy may have towards an Indian bride, the movie is in essence a love story.
"The kind of drama, emotions and twists and tuns in the plot are perfect fodder for films," Chadha said.