ABSTRACT
Gurinder Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice (2004) is a Bollywood-influenced Jane Austen adaptation that plays with Orientalist and Occidentalist clichés by simultaneously tapping into two intensely marketable genres. Combining elements of Hindi film and the genre of the literature adaptation, it trades on a current craze for Bollywood elements in the international market and draws on a renewed revival of period drama for the big screen. Its spatial and temporal transposition of Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice into twenty-first-century Amritsar in north-west India at first sight simply appears to ‘update’ a timeless classic. But as close reading shows, the film defamiliarizes present-day concepts of love, marriage and financial exchange across the globe by filtering them through Austen’s satire. Targeted at a global audience, this British-made film employs different layers of irony in an attempt to transcend the confines of old and new forms of stereotyping. While questioning Hollywood’s hegemony from the point-of-view of the British film industry, it capitalizes on the defamiliarizing effects of exotic or foreign genre elements to suggest new ways of translating culture clashes into genre breaks. This twofold market appeal of both Bollywood film and Austen adaptations, however, threatens to upstage the self-reflexive potential of such genre experiments, altogether undermining a sustainable critical thrust. What singles out the film as a particularly intriguing case study is that it
satirizes the marketing of the exotic on which its international success nevertheless largely depends. Stylistic mixing is matched by juxtaposing India, Britain and the US. Fantasies of ‘other’ spaces thereby pinpoint both America’s and India’s exoticization of Old England as much as that of a typified Orient. Yet sheer excess of genre crossings neither automatically ensures a transcendence of cultural baggage (including additional baggage accumulated through appropriation itself), nor creates by default a critical rather than an imitative pastiche. But how can we accurately gauge both the critical potential of such a stylistic amalgamation and the additional stereotyping it might inadvertently reinforce? In order to address the complexities of sustaining both Austen’s irony – notoriously difficult to be captured on screen – while making the most of a partly parodic homage to classic Bollywood despite the
difficulties of dealing with the exotic in contemporary cinema, I situate Bride & Prejudice within critical discourses on the self-or re-Orientalization that threatens to reintroduce elements of exoticization into seemingly selfreflexive reworkings. A close analysis of the slippages that fissure the film’s central ironies reveals both the problems and the opportunities of any transposition of genres, texts, or paradigms. The term ‘transposition’ helps us to understand how the most complex
and experimental reworkings become enabled to transcend the limits of literature adaptation as a specific genre. It is a useful term that moves beyond the idea of a necessary update that is to work ‘as bait to attract more general readers and to help justify including the novels in school lists’ (Macdonald and Macdonald 2003: 1). The thematic structure of Bride & Prejudice overtly – even in a tongue-in-cheek-fashion, as I shall show – hinges on genre crossings between Bollywood film, literature adaptation, postcolonial reworkings and also partly parodic revisionism. The resulting transposition of a ‘classic’ literary text consequently works through a twofold repackaging of iconic traditions famed for their general popularity: Austen and Bollywood. As a result, the film’s deliberate targeting of a specific audience compels close critical attention to the pitfalls of selfexoticization. As part of a renewed craze for transpositions, or updates, of canonical fiction, Austen is once again introduced to new viewers (and ultimately perhaps readers, too), and so is Bollywood. Part and parcel of an increasingly visible marketing of elements borrowed from Hindi cinema, the musical interludes, choreography, as well as multinational and multi-ethnic casting (including the former Miss World and leading Bollywood actress Aishwarya Rai as Lalita Bakshi, Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet) force an intriguing clash of genre paradigms that could perhaps not be any more dissimilar. While it has repeatedly been questioned whether the resulting blockbuster, with its necessarily distorting appropriation of Hindi film and classic British literature, really does more than merely cash in on both, the film is saved from lapsing into a mere rehearsal of clichés by attempting to re-create Austen’s ironies. How this transposition manages to go beyond the mere appropriation of a ‘classic’ text, but then becomes complicated by strong market forces that propel its re-Orientalization, prompts us to reconsider the limits of such experiments. These limits are imposed upon popular film not just by the demands of the market, but ironically also by the theoretical confines of film (and more general cultural) criticism. In the repackaging and exportation of an ‘Orient’ for international con-
sumption, re-Orientalization operates as an internal process that mimics the recently much deplored exoticism in popular culture. This mimicking may at times be inadvertent, yet the self-othering it implies is as often deliberately market-driven. As Lisa Lau and Ana Mendes stress in the introduction to this volume, ‘re-Orientalists … faithfully keep to the tradition of Orientalism’ in rendering up the East ‘as a spectacle for consumption’ with different flavourings. The resulting products join what Graham Huggan has so pointedly
termed the production of a ‘postcolonial exotic’: in a marketing of multiculturalism on a global scale, an alterity industry is built on ‘mechanics of exoticist representation/consumption’ (2001: x). This consumerist exoticization permeated fashionable discourses on diaspora, hybridity and multiculturalism in the West throughout the 1990s. By 1997, Stanley Fish could symptomatically arraign a boutique multiculturalism that invited the production of all too predictable, clichéd exponents of the exotic that were being sold as consumer goods. Although Fish posits a peculiarly vague conceptualization of what he called ‘strong’ or ‘very strong’ multiculturalism as a possible counterpoise, what is most important to note here is that he focused on food, festivals and food festivals as the most easily consumable output of neatly stratified cultural diversity. Toying with the commonly extended metaphor of consumption, Fish specifically targets ‘the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and high profile flirtations with the other’ (1997: 378). The edible is lumped together with the flirtatious in a parody of sexualized food metaphors that are indisputably peppered through cultural fictions of ‘exotic’ or ‘ethnic’ consumption. Over the last decades, such fashionable promotion of alterity has increasingly come under critical investigation. Perhaps most influentially, in expressing her disillusionment with ‘the chorus of celebrating the idea of diaspora’, Ien Ang condemns the fabrication of an at best limited set of identities. They are ‘strait-jackets’ manufactured by the then fashionable rhetoric of identity politics in the 1990s: ‘many people obviously need identity (or think they do), but identity can just as well be a strait-jacket’ (Ang 2001: 12, vii). As a textual analysis of Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice shows, self-irony can
rupture such straitjackets, yet the resultant juggling with re-Orientalist attractions renders the intended escape notably difficult. Re-Orientalization thereby emerges as the internalized version of a new Orientalism – frequently termed ‘neo-Orientalism’ – that has been dangerously distorted as a positive development in often virulently exacted identity politics. Whereas neo-Orientalizing tendencies refer to exoticizations of ‘the Orient’ in contemporary literature and film that often feature it as an ‘other’ space, located elsewhere and hence easily typecast, re-Orientalization happens within seemingly self-reflexive reworkings. On the most literal level, this means works by Asian writers and filmmakers, or produced in Asia. But as the internal strategies of a British-made film by a British Asian director showcase, such re-Orientalization can be both ambiguous and complex. Re-Orientalization, therefore, may overlap or form part of a more general neo-Orientalism in contemporary popular culture, but as it occurs in works that pertain to be a reaction to common forms of exoticization, it is arguably also more invidious. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, both postcolonial and
diasporic productions have repeatedly displayed a tendency to define themselves as self-conscious reworkings or reactions to earlier Orientalism or current neo-Orientalism – in the process curiously endorsing necessarily reductive categories. Playing into a streamlining of what might otherwise have
been experimental redirections, they have ironically been immensely instrumental in constructing some of the most limiting paradigms. Strategies of re-Orientalization consequently rear their hydra-like heads as the outgrowths of both market pressures and audience expectations are engendered in the criticism itself. Over the last decades, discourses on the multicultural and the hybrid have generated a self-perpetuating, largely imitative production of similar works that meet a demand for more narratives featuring the same (or very similar) types of Others. To an extent, in short, re-Orientalized texts spell out what consumers of the new postcolonial or, more loosely defined, multicultural exotic apparently wish to purchase: more cross-cultural affairs, more updated travelogues into far-away places, more juxtapositions of palm trees and skyscrapers, more reviewing of ‘multi-ethnic’ food – the latter in a particularly slippery invitation of a potentially comical literalization of exotic consumption. Occidentalist inversions additionally reinforce prevailing clichés. Just
standing them on their heads only makes them all the more widely recognizable. In this, Occidentalist representation has perpetuated perhaps most insistently the impact of such stereotypes on the popular imagination. Representations of the so-called West as the object of Occidentalist desire in Bride & Prejudice brings out this reinforcement of common clichés through their seeming inversion especially well. The film, in fact, attempts to play with (if not necessarily transcend) precisely such clichés. What has recently shown potential at least to criticize the stereotyping intrinsic to Orientalism and Occidentalism tendencies in popular narratives of otherness indeed is a selfironic engagement with both sets of expectations. Whether sheer parody can instigate a more encompassing redirection in the representation of changing global culture must of course remain doubtful. That targeted consumers tend to misunderstand complex attempts to break through their expectations can be seen from the earliest reviews, such as the Sunday Mirror’s reductive description of Bride & Prejudice as merely an ‘attempt to make the Bollywood experience accessible to Western audiences’ (Adams 2004: 46). As I shall show in more detail, this has resulted in what Ana Mendes has recently already diagnosed, among ‘most responses to the film’, as ‘a puzzling consensus on its “Indianness”’ (2007: 100). Such responses have unhappily obscured that ‘one of [Chadha’s] aims was to probe contemporary cultural stereotypes’ (Wilson 2006: 324). Even if we keep the dangers of falling into the trap of an authorial fallacy in mind, Cheryl Wilson is certainly right when she points out in a recent article that ‘Chadha keeps viewers aware of the form’ as ‘she both adheres to and pokes fun at Bollywood conventions’ (2006: 330). What I seek to address here as a central issue is that Bride & Prejudice also offers an illustrative example of the way misreadings that are based on viewers’ expectations of an ‘exotic’ product short-circuit the endeavour to get away from or parody common clichés. A misreading of the film’s use of irony has ironically reduced it to an exotic
spectacle. But this is not to say that the film itself does not plead guilty of
employing re-Orientalizing strategies. In part this is indisputably the result of its cultural as well as financial investment in the promotion of Bollywood tradition in the international market. Its importation and integration into mainstream cinema necessarily hinges on the most recognizable and hence more superficial elements. The very vagueness of the rehashed paradigms, however, has at times been facilely understood as the realities of contemporary India instead of the distinct paradigms of a subgenre intensely aware of its own play with recurring clichés. A detailed interrogation of the film’s shifting negotiation of the exotic (both Orientalist and Occidentalist) consequently has to answer two related questions: the extent to which postcolonial, or diasporic, exoticization has been projected on to the film in interpretations blinkered by preconceived expectations and, conversely, the extent to which re-Orientalizing strategies form part and parcel – and possibly a necessary evil – of the film’s deliberate crossing between different genre paradigms and film traditions. Above all, a careful critical assessment of its experimental potential needs to be firmly set in the foreground in order that some of the most clichéd interpretations are partly pre-empted, or satirized, even as the film continues to struggle with the temptation just to toy with clichés.
