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Article Excerpt
The film Bhaji on the Beach, written by Meera Syal and directed by Gurinder Chadha, critiques the contemporary persistence of the bhadramahila or "respectable woman" construct that took root in nineteenth-century pre-independence, colonial Bengal. During that time, an emerging desire for a distinctly modern Indian consciousness set forth gender paradigms for women that would allow them to demonstrate their commitment to a growing nationalist ideology in pre-nationalist times. Summarized briefly, the film, set in late-twentieth-century Midlands, England, in an area heavily populated by Indian immigrants, chronicles the lives of eight South Asian women, ranging in age from sixteen to seventy, who take a day trip to the beach at Blackpool. Organized by the Saheli Women's Center in Birmingham, the trip enables women to temporarily escape the grind of daily life. Prior to the outing, several characters experience personal challenges that confound conventional ideas of what it means to be an Indian female living in the diaspora. For instance, Asha, a middle-aged housewife who helps run the family business, suffers from repeated tension headaches brought on from keeping domestic order, and repressing her desires to do something more with her college education. Another character, Ginder, and her young son seek refuge from an abusive husband at a local women's shelter. And Hashida, whose family plans for her to become a doctor, discovers she is pregnant by her black boyfriend, a certain taboo in the Indian community. These situational crises find a stage for expression during (he Saheli trip. Appropriately named the "Illuminations Outing," the day-long excursion calls attention to the ephiphanistic and adaptive moments that the several women will experience by the film's end.
Secondary criticism on Syal's and Chadha's important film is yet almost nonexistent. Reviews hold sway and only fleetingly mention the film's interrogation of gender, race, and immigration. Even then, reviews like those written by James Berardinelli suggest that the film does not seriously interrogate such topics, doing so in only a "ponderous fashion." Reasons for missing sustained critical attention may possibly be because Syal is most known for authoring, producing, and acting in several popular sitcoms for British television. Her sketch comedies The Kumars at No. 42 (2001-2006) and Goodness Gracious Me (1996-1998) link her directly with a sort of popular sub-genre, covering over her important screen contributions. Bhaji on the Beach, too, has many light-hearted, even comedic, moments, and this may be reason for those wishing to engage in serious criticism to abandon it. Bhaji, however, is worthy of critical exploration. It says much about living in the liminal spaces of diaspora. Its humour and seriousness exposes external and internal perceptions of "Indianess," specifically "female Indianess." But what makes it particularly provocative is its effort to capture character adaptation in process. Bhaji is worthy of serious investigation.
As mentioned at the outset of this essay, Bhaji returns to and borrows from a past complex system of ideas, or cultural stories, developed out of a newly forming Indian nationalism that demanded particular behaviour from women as its support. The essay examines Syal's and Chadha's direct assault upon, and adaptation of, a century-old idea (which originated in the state of Bengal and which was popularized by pre-nationalist, nineteenth-century Bengali writers), the bhadramahila or "respectable woman." The bhadramahila has not adapted easily with temporal and spatial shifts, and still impacts the lives of many Indian females living abroad. Syal and Chadha expose the difficulties contemporary women face when expected to enact traditional roles. The essay focuses on how Bhaji highlights the disconnect that late-twentieth-century Indian females living outside India experience with nineteenth-century codes of conduct, even as they are expected to continue in that tradition.
An intertextual reading of bhadramahila discourse in Bhaji on the Beach is supported by concepts derived particularly from postcolonial theory. For this reason, the essay first briefly canvasses theoretical ideas and defines concepts important to this type of analysis. Next, the essay provides a historical overview of the development of the bhadramahila and establishes its ties to pre-nationalist politics in India. Finally, the essay demonstrates how Syal's and Chadha's film highlights several moments of in-process adaptation for Indian immigrant women living outside India and still reckoning with the respectable woman paradigm.
Graham Allen identifies Julia Kristeva as most associated with foundational work in intertextual studies. Looking to articulate a hybrid theory of language and literature by accommodating ideas from Saussure and Bakhtin, Kristeva--Allen posits--theorizes at a transitional moment in literary and cultural history characterized as a time where critics sought to "disrupt notions of stable meaning and objective interpretation" (3). Julie Sanders explains how disruptive tendencies in literary and filmic work, for instance, have been generically identified as intertextuality where "texts invoke and rework other texts in a rich and ever-evolving cultural mosaic." Sanders usefully connects "the intertextual impulse" to the postcolonial definition of "hybridity" formulated by Homi Bhabha. According to Sanders, Bhabha's "account of hybridity suggests how things and ideas are 'repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition,' but also how this process of relocation can stimulate new utterances and creativity" (17). Bhabha's argument refutes "science-led notions of hybridization" like those forwarded by Gregor Mendel in his studies on heredity and that perceive "cultural artifacts as irrevocably changed by the process of interaction" (17-18). Comparing cultures with either recessive or dominant genes is "problematic" in postcolonial societies since the imperial is positioned to always dominate over the indigenous, even in hybrid forms (18).
Monica Fludernik explains further how Bhabha interprets host countries as antagonistic to expatriate communities. Victims of a racism incurred through science-based arguments, those living in the diaspora are alienated from being symbolic successors of the former colonial power. Reconceiving hybridity through what Fludernik calls the "Bhabhian paradigm" allows immigrants in diasporic locations to reappropriate and "significantly influence" western structures "for their own private interests" (287). Sangeeta Ray marks the power of Bhabha's argument about the migrant's performative abilities that repeat but do not completely replicate hegemonic national narratives. This performance is an articulation of the constricted nature of such a narrative (222).
Diasporic locations (like Birmingham as the setting in Bhaji, for example) serve as the physical landscapes where performances, like those described above by Ray, are enacted. Marakand Paranjape notes that, following the end of the imperial period, numerous people from colonized nations "occupied their former masters' countries, thus creating a new kind of diaspora" (199) and a new type of performance. Paranjape understands these new communities in terms of Bhabha's "interstitial spaces." In such spaces "counter-narratives continually evoke and erase the totalizing boundaries of the modern nation state." In these new and liminal spaces there is room "for the articulation of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative, ideological or dialectical" (Bhabha, qtd. in Paranjape 203).
Linda Hutcheon, like Bhabha, sees liberatory possibilities in hybridity. She, however, theorizes about such potential in terms of adaptation. Like Edward Said, who evaluates the transgeographic and transtemporal nature of ideas, Hutcheon posits that stories, too, migrate. Said speaks about narrative resistance in decolonized authors'...
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