1961: Arrived with parents in Britain, after birth in Kenya.
1993: Bhaji on the Beach.
2000: What’s Cooking?
2002: Bend It Like Beckham.
2005: Bride and Prejudice.
2006: I Dream of Jeannie. (?)
A British-Indian born in Africa, married to and writing with a Japanese-American, Gurinder Chadha is genially subversive of all orthodoxies, but affirmative of universal hopes and dreams, each culture’s different but similar embrace of family values.
While establishing herself as a documentary filmmaker in the Nineties, Chadha was able to direct her first feature film, the surprising and delightful Bhaji at the Beach, about three generations of Indian women in England, taking a daytrip to Blackpool, the working class resort. What she said about that applies equally to all her films: “You have tradition on one side and modernity on the other, Indianness on one side, Englishness on the other, cultural specificity and universality -- but in fact there is a scale between each of the polarities and the film moves freely between them.”
Food and family take center stage in her second film, set in Los Angeles, as four different ethnic enclaves prepare for the All-American feast of Thanksgiving. What’s Cooking? was her first collaboration with her LA-born husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, and it is steeped in multicultural authenticity, displaying the wit and heart and specificity of all her work. Again, theirs is the best description of their own work: “Norman Rockwell with a fresh color palette -- ‘Our Town’ for the new millennium.”
A natural crowd-pleaser despite her contrarian streak, Chadha achieved her breakout with Bend It Like Beckham, about an Indian girl growing up in Chadha’s own neighborhood of West London, who lives to play soccer despite the traditional conservatism of her family. Gurinder's joyful and affectionate approach to life and film connected with audiences worldwide and Beckham became one of the most successful British films ever, emerging as an anthem of female empowerment.
The pull of ethnicity amidst the universality of family concerns provides the throughline of Chadha’s career, and she continued her global melding with Bride and Prejudice, which married Bollywood and Hollywood, Jane Austen and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, satire and sentiment, English domestic comedy with Indian song and dance. Sheer exuberance and a welcoming spirit invite acceptance across the bounds of place, culture, and gender.
Gurinder Chadha is now in negotiation with Hollywood to direct I Dream of Jeannie, a prequel to the old tv series, but whether she works within the system or continues her independent efforts, she is likely to retain her emphatic embrace of feminine freedom and cross-cultural understanding, in a joyful celebration of difference and sameness. She aims to entertain as well as to inform and provoke, admitting her films are not “all big anti-racist statements, they’re just about humanizing people who are different and showing you people in a different light and showing you people you thought were different to you but actually very similar.”
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