Humbert Humbert Eat Your Heart Out

A Review of the film "Bride and Prejudice" (3/2004).

Winter is finally loosening its mean grip on Wisconsin -- meaning your face no longer freezes if you venture out minus your terrorist-chic balaclava. So last night my husband David and I had an attack of cabin fever and went to see "Bride and Prejudice" produced by Gurinder Chadha once of Amritsar, lately of London.

In "Bride and Prejudice," Lalitha's problem is that she's not a real "Amritsar di kudi" -- a (traditional) girl from Amritsar. If she was, she'd jump at her mother's plans for her to marry a rich goof ball who lives in LA and will rescue her from her mansion in India. Lalitha meets Darcy, a visiting American hotelier, at that must-see event for all tourists -- an Indian wedding. He is scornful of the custom of arranged marriages and Lalitha defends the practice, even as she tries to find her own solution. Later they travel to Goa with only Lalitha's unmarried elder sister as chaperon. There Lalitha does a little more verbal sparring with Darcy and has a gotcha moment when she finds out Darcy's mother in New York is arranging his marriage too. CBC panned /Bride and Prejudice/, citing its post-colonial rhetoric, but without the East-West conflict to be overcome by love, the conflict would have been parental opposition, not personal and a lot less interesting.

Kudos to Chadha for risking the sound track, pairing English words with Punjabi folk music. Fusion music has rarely ventured into that combination, preferring western music paired with songs in Indian languages. David says he now has empirical evidence that a few notes of /Heer /have the same effect on a second-generation diasporic Indian as /Danny Boy/ on a fifth generation Irish-American.

Other symbols and images were more subtle: Lalitha lives on Udham Singh Rd. (named for the martyr who shot the British governor responsible for the 1919 massacre of Indian civilians at Jallianwala Bagh). She's also shown playing the guitar and cricket -- so she's very much a part of India's mixed up chutney culture. And Lalitha kept correcting people - "Lalitha, not Lolita." Lalitha, played by former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, is shown reading a book -- very non-Bollywood of Gurinder Chadha to show a beautiful woman can be a reader.

Darcy was quite devoid of passion or expression. And Austen gets mauled along the way, but it makes us review the Cliff Notes on "/Pride and Prejudice/." Lalitha lives in a mansion but thinks of herself as a poor Indian in contrast to the inheritor of a hotel chain - maybe it's all relative. Suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this satire of the Bollywood film.

"Bride and Prejudice" pokes fun at Indian fears of repeating history and losing our selves again in these times of neo-colonialism. That fear that sits like a squat blinking toad at the beginning of every East/West personal relationship within India and in the diaspora. Chadha laughs at that toad with us, never at us.

Diasporic artists from the subcontinent are re-presenting/re-writing the classics of the English canon - Thackeray's "Vanity Fair," Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" have been reinterpreted in film. And we're telling our version of history -- from "Midnight's children" to my own "What the Body Remembers," and Shree Ghatge's "Brahma's Dream" there are now some counter-histories to the Mountbatten-inspired "Freedom at Midnight" version of the Indian independence narrative. Like Canadians and Australians before us, we've begun imploding official US-UK-centric histories of WWII -- Michael Ondaatje's "English Patient" showed Indians participated in WWII; my novel "The Tiger Claw", challenges the heroic view of Churchill and compares the German Occupation of France in WWII with the British Occupation of India; and Vikram Seth’s memoir of his uncle and aunt who met in wartime Germany is coming in 2005. What's next in line for reverse colonization?

Shauna Singh Baldwin