Snap Movie Apostrophes: Bride and Prejudice

In George W. Bush’s America, we’re no longer in a post-colonial world. We’re back in a colonial world, and don’t you forget it. What was once an empire run out of the British Isles is now an empire coming out of America. And where the British traded in, I don’t know, spices or something, the US is trading in culture, late capitalism, and promiscuity, and you, you were there to put everything together with a cute little bow.

You present, as a sort of unifying theme, that women are the commodity to be exported from India these days. The metropole of consumerist, promiscuous, Amrikanised women needs a steady supply of “rooted” and “traditional” wives from abroad to keep it in check. We see this most markedly with Kholi, who prefers hip-hop and wears the star-spangled banner on his crotch—it is not, then, just capital that he seeks, but cultural capital (not for nothing that all the US scenes in the movie occur in Los Angeles!). His consumerism is meshed with adoption of American society, and he feels something has been left behind in the meshing. On the other hand, Lakhi shows us the connection between consumerism and promiscuity. From the movie’s start, she’s the flashiest daughter and the one most interested in boys. Fitting, then, when she goes off to meet Wickham for a tryst, she tells her parents she’s off shopping.

So it is against these three forces threatening the stability of India—American society, consumerism, and promiscuity—that Lalita rebels. For this reason, her match with Darcy makes perfect sense; he’s never as flashy as Kholi and seems to inhabit a sort of neutral zone culturally. But they share another thing—their visions of the role of India in the twenty first century.

This seems to be one of your primary operating motifs: presenting the tension between India as a decolonised backwater and as an alternative potential superpower. Balraj calls it “hickville,” and his sister cannot contain her UKified contempt for everything Indian. To them it is backward, a site of regression, a location of roots, not leaves. Similarly, when Wickham tells Lalita that he likes India because you can have fun for cheap, he is not, as Lalita hopes, arguing for India as an alternative, he is, instead, pointing out how, in its backwardness, it can be exploited.

Darcy and Lalita, however, see it as different (how tenable separate but equal can be is another issue). This is why Darcy does not buy the hotel in Goa. Let India be India and not be converted into DesiAmerica or whatever. When Mrs. Darcy suggests that one would not go to India now that one can get “spices” in the US, she shows that in her mind, the world is all the same, America with different currency.

Yet there are two points of attack on this idea of India as different but not backward.
First, if India’s not backward, why is this, now, the second movie I’ve seen that’s a reworking of a Jane Austen novel into India? Is it, to paraphrase Nandy on cricket, that it’s only a historical accident that Austen was English and not Indian? What does it say that the 1795 English mores blend so comfortably with 2005 Indian mores? These are slightly rhetorical questions, since I’ve figured this one out. Pride and Prejudice is seen as a universal/timeless study of character, not a historically situated political work (well, we all know that’s untenable, but not everyone’s up to snuff on their Jameson—including me). That’s why it’s also ok for the BBC (or whoever) to make P&P remakes every ten years. Furthermore, it’s a jab at the US audience—the only way they’ll sit through a “Bollywood” movie is if it either stars white people (Moulin Rouge) or is based on a very familiar, English plot (you).

But the second concern remains unanswered. At one point, Lalita asks why she should ever want to go to America. Why would Aishwarya Rai want to make a movie in Hollywood? This movie was pitched as an opportunity to see Rai in action in the US. What, no one knows about Netflix? Dvddhamaka.com? Are you supposed to be a reverse colonising move? Chickens coming home to roost?