ABSTRACT
According to Chadha she uses the camera to educate her audience, ‘I wanted to use the camera which is so powerful to change the way that people are portrayed’ (Chadha quoted in Fuchs, 2004). She has made a conscious decision to operate in the mainstream thus presenting images that are normally invisible in mainstream. What she does succeed in doing is showing the characters in her film not as isolated individuals, but as socially located within the wider family and community framework. Consequently, the characters are more rounded, the viewer is able to have some sense of their personality, and their background together with their family and community. It is argued here that these films involve the ‘desification’ of British cinema. ‘Desi’ means authentically South Asian, but it also entails a deeper meaning of being rooted in the South Asian community carrying with it connotations of pride and self-worth. For example, when Gurinder Chadha’s films ‘desify’ British cinema, the themes, music and language of British film is transformed through the introduction of South Asian elements, so that the result is a specifically British South Asian form of cultural hybridisation. Chadha’s feature films thus have a distinctive mise-en-scene characterised by their expression of cultural hybridity.
