The Ethics of Geography: Women as Readers and Dancers in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004)

Abstract

The tones, plots and concerns of Jane Austen’s novels suggest that the varying ways in which adaptations of her work negotiate the lines between devotion and correction, faith and critique would have amused the author herself.¹ Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004) worries these lines in particular and intriguing ways. While Chadha uses the phrases ‘Indianise’ and ‘ British-Indian-kind-of-combining-culturally-kind-of-weird-combo’ to describe her Bollywood musical adaptation of Austen’s novel, it is not quite or only an Indian or British Indian version of Pride and Prejudice (1813).² It more fully brings the action and motivations of the original into a contemporary milieu of global mobility. While the emotional and strategic premises and pressures of the film follow Austen’s novel, the geographies into which the characters are born and which they traverse stretch beyond both Britain and India. The first part of this essay considers the film’s geographies via the debate prompted by Edward Said’s influential reading of the geographies of Austen’s work. This approach suggests that while the film may have a certain postcolonial potency, it also reads more precisely as a less-than-maverick response to Austen. However, the second part of this essay begins by acknowledging the ineluctability of apprehending Bride and Prejudice through Said and his critical wake. By reading the text alongside Rajiv Menon’s film Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000) and Azar Nafisi’s book Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), this essay discerns a looser ethic moving — bodily — through and beyond Chadha’s film.