Looking at how the ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ director has scripted a children’s fable, on the art of giving, with her holiday release that opens in theatres, December 12
A still from the British musical comedy Christmas Karma
I’ve figured a polite way to work around a rather rude question, as I first did with late Kundan Shah, about Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983).
Which is to recall that Joseph Heller was once asked why he could never write another book as great as Catch-22. Heller had said then, “Nobody else could, either!”
Likewise, for director Gurinder Chadha and her classic, Bend It Like Beckham (2002), isn’t it —that her company is named after, and that follows her still, with its ever-growing fans, no matter where she is, including onstage, with me, at the India Film Project fan-fest in Mumbai.
Chadha says, “[Bend It Like Beckham just] hit at the right time. It came out six months after 9/11, when something had shifted in the world.
“Of course, I struggled to make that film for three-four years. Everybody laughed at the [idea of] girls playing football; never mind an Indian girl. But I pushed and pushed; Beckham supported us.”
To emphasise on reach, Chadha says Bend It Like Beckham “remains the only film in the history of cinema to have been distributed in every country of the world, including North Korea!”
That’s crazy! She agrees.
The first time I saw a film directed by Chadha, Bhaji On The Beach, was as a kid, at the British Council in New Delhi — totally struck by the joyous style of storytelling, while films about Indian Diaspora were usually such insulated clichés on the migrant experience.
Ever since, Chadha, 65, has directed nine features.
Screenwriter and filmmaker Gurinder Chadha. Pic/Getty Images
Christmas Karma, that opens in Indian theatres, December 12, is her latest release — a proper, peppy musical, based on Charles Dickens’s novella, A Christmas Carol, starring a multi-culti cast, headlined by the Delhi-bred Kunal Nayyar (as in Raj from Big Bang Theory).
The film ends with Priyanka Chopra singing a Hindi version of Wham’s Last Christmas in the closing credits!
Nayyar plays the grumpy Scrooge, named Mr Sood, whose life’s centred on money, while he perceives Christmas as an event alien to his own culture.
This hardnosed gent, Chadha tells me, is based on a young man of Indian-origin she knew in London, who had moved from Uganda, once dictator Idi Amin had expelled Asians in 90 days flat.
The OG Scrooge suffered from a childhood trauma. So does Sood. Only, no two traumas are ever the same. And that’s the uniquely felt perspective only the Kenyan-born, Punjabi, British-Asian, Chadha, can bring to the mainstream.
There’s a fine episode in a documentary series, Who Do You Think You Are (on YouTube), where Chadha traces her family roots down to pre-partition Pakistan, that offers you a fair sense of the history of her family, that eventually moved to Southall, London.
There was a point in the early 2000s, when three Indian-origin filmmakers, all women — Deepa Mehta (Canada), Mira Nair (US), Chadha (England) — had dominated the Diaspora scene, to a point that an ignoramus could confuse one for the other. Chadha makes it known that she belongs to a starkly different stock. In the sense that, she says, “Mira gets more identified as Indian, because she grew up in Delhi. As did Deepa. The influences of Mira’s son, Zohran Mamdani (New York City’s mayor-elect, of Ugandan-Indian origin), is more like mine.”
At perhaps the only time the three women veteran-directors have publicly chatted together (for NYC’s Asia Society), I remember Chadha suggesting that whatever her movie’s genre/milieu, it’ll always address racism.
Which is obviously an important theme, especially for the West, presently, witnessing an upsurge in anti-immigration as a collective political sentiment.
Chadha says, “The BBC’s economic correspondent told me, recently, he’d done a report on Silicon Valley, and met all the Indian CEOs. None of them wanted to talk about the situation. While so powerful, they felt vulnerable in the current climate.”
Perhaps normalising multi-cultural characters, especially leads, in purely popular entertainment is the subtle answer.
Very fable-like, Christmas Karma is decidedly a children’s film. And that’s the only way to see it — more like a Bollywood musical, since the songs needn’t always take the story forward. The music and dance can exist for its own sake.
Chadha tells me she did make the film for her children, revealing an incident her eight-year-old went through once, in school: “A white English boy told my son that his colour is the same as poop.
“I asked my son, did he feel bad? He said, yes. Then, it’s racism! What’s also true is that all other white kids in the school made an intervention, when that incident happened [telling that boy to take his words back].”
Soon after Bend It Like Beckham had released, with nobody having any idea about how big it would become, an early viewer of the film in Oldham, Manchester, had come up to Chadha to tell her the film was far from a comedy.
That it had deeply spoken to her town, where a racial riot had taken place recently.
Chadha remembers, “I’ll never forget what she told me — that it’s a story about how, at the end of the day, everybody wants the best for their kids! Isn’t that an amazing leveler for society, regardless of colour,
caste, religion….”
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets@mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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