Blackpool illumination: Gurinder Chadha on Bhaji on the Beach

About a third of the way through Bhaji on the Beach, one of the film’s most day-glo characters, the Bombay-based, Chanel-clad Rekha, clambers down from the coach, totters around the corner on her pink high heels and is confronted with her first, unforgettable glimpse of Blackpool. The sight is so gloriously gaudy, and above all familiar, that her awe-filled response is almost involuntary: “It’s Bombay!” she exclaims.

It is a moment that Bhaji’s director, Gurinder Chadha, feels sums up the film. “I do think that Blackpool, when the Illuminations are on, is where England meets India. I bet that if the film goes out in India there will be directors who will want to come and film here.”

Sometimes home is not as far away as it seems. And it is these issues of home, hybridity, identity and belonging that preoccupy Chadha in Bhaji, the first feature film to be directed by an Asian woman in Britain. “What I’ve tried to do with all my work is to open up all that stuff – what it is to be British. What I’m doing is making a claim, as well as documenting a history of British Asian people.” In his collection of essays Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie makes it clear that “laying claim” is not a pursuit without pitfalls. How do you preserve cultural values without falling into a ghetto mentality? How do you discuss the need for change without playing into the hands of the enemy? It is a question that transcends politics, nationality, even race. “It is a question”, he remarks, “of how to be in the world.”

“I hate to say this – people always raise their eyebrows when I do – but I was quite lucky,” Chadha says as we discuss her rise in the film business in her north London living room. Her career started when her first short film, I’m British But…, was accepted for the pilot intake of the BFI’s New Directors scheme. The shot of a saried Chadha clutching a British bulldog summed up what the television executives were looking for. “It was the first offering by a second-generation Asian, and Channel 4 was interested to explore this new sense of British and Asian identity.”

On the strength of I’m British But… Chadha submitted the treatment for Bhaji, but Channel 4 and her producer Nadine Marsh-Edwards persuaded her to develop her skills with an 11-minute film for the Short and Curlies season: A Nice Arrangement. They were happy with the result, and Bhaji got the green light. The process of making the film was gruelling, Chadha recalls, with endless meetings, rewrites and rethinking. “I reckon I learned three years of film school in the time of Bhaji’s development,” she laughs.

Bhaji was inspired by an idea brought to her by actress/writer Meera Syal about a group of Asian women who go to the seaside for the day. But Chadha was insistent that she didn’t want the film to be “just a comedy. So I picked the two most taboo subjects within the Asian community – mixed relationships and separation and divorce – and threw them in as well.”

The day trip is organised by Simi, who works for the Saheli Asian Women’s Centre. She is a feminist, socialist activist who nonetheless has to negotiate a careful path between the traditional views of the “aunties” and the younger women like Madhu and Ladhu who just want to chase boys. The other women on the outing are as much at odds: Ginder, who wants time to think through her broken marriage; Asha and Pushpa, who want to get out from behind their husbands’ shop counters; and Hashida, who is involved in a clandestine affair with a young West Indian. Like so many journeys, the trip becomes a turning point, a moment of choice, from which they will not return unchanged.

With its picaresque coach journey, stops at motorway cafes and Punjabi version of ‘We’re All Going on a Summer Holiday’, Bhaji on the Beach presents a world in which Carry On up the Khyber meets Cliff Richard. When I ask whether the film was a deliberate attempt to invade white-only spaces, Chadha bristles. “I don’t like the word invade. It implies a traditionally European view of history: them and us, they are taking our land, that sort of thing. What I am saying is that there is no such thing as ours and theirs. There is no part of Britain or England that I can’t lay claim to.” Born and bred in Britain, Chadha points out that she has been very much influenced by “the look of England, as I’ve experienced it in things like A Taste of Honey, Up the Junction and the Carry On films, which have a very constructed sense of Englishness.” She continues: “I think of Bhaji as a very English film.”

“The premise of the film is based on all our lives, all our experiences – writer, director, producer, actors, everyone.” What has pleased her about the performances of her large-ensemble cast, despite a too short rehearsal time, is that “they brought a real complexity to the characters, to the sort of cross-referenced identities we all share.” Yet Bhaji is not as seamless a product as the statement implies. From its very inception the film was part of two very different traditions. On the one hand there is Syal, a veteran television writer with credits that include Black Silk and Tandoori Nights. And on the other is Chadha, whose politics have emerged out of the polemical tradition of black British art cinema exemplified by Sankofa, where producer Marsh-Edwards established herself.

Chadha, who has a degree in politics and economics and a work background dominated by television journalism, says of herself: “I came to this work as someone who was very conscious of how the media constructs images of black people. What I’m interested in doing is counteracting those images of how I – as a black woman – should be, rather than looking at the multiplicity and complexity of what I actually am.” The uneasy creative coupling accounts for both the film’s strengths and its weakness. Veering between high drama and slapstick comedy, Bhaji’s rollercoaster tonal shifts can make the viewer queasy, while at moments it has a formulaic Film on Four feel, lacking the grit that has been Chadha’s strong point. Yet it is the slick one-liners that salvage a rather ‘issuey’ film: without them, its protagonists – the battered wife, teen pregnancy and inter-racial couple – could have become mere mouthpieces, burdened as much by their politics as by their picnic hampers.

Humour has always been Chadha’s secret weapon. “Whenever anyone describes one of my plots as ‘A group of Asian women…’ they think they have my number. So all my films have comedy in them to wrong foot people, to disrupt their expectations and to make them think about things in a different way.” Being black, after all, is supposed to be a serious business, and in Britain it is only the gleeful sit-com paradise ruled by Lenny Henry, Desmonds and re-runs of the awful Mind Your Language that provide any respite.

Chadha is loath, however, to claim television as an influence. (For British film directors, already nervous of being subsumed by a media so much more powerful than their own, this would always be a difficult admission.) Perhaps, though, she is wrong to be so dismissive: it has been television that has provided us with a comedic sense of the black community, and it is television comedy, with its tradition of combining politics and gags, that Bhaji resembles.

If she is hesitant about television, Chadha is more than willing to pay her debt to the Indian cinema around which much of her social life as a teenager in Southall was organised. Her characters often make trenchant asides in Punjabi.

“It gives it a certain authenticity,” she argues, “a certain tension. It allows me to claim back some of myself from the mainstream media.” Bhaji’s aesthetic quality is certainly borrowed from Bombay: with its vivid colours and cartoon-like set-ups, it has that overblown but energetic crudity that could only have come from the Indian film industry or American super-hero comics.

Chadha singles out two films as particular influences: Baju Bawara (her father’s favourite) and Purab aur Patcham (East or West), a hilarious critique of the west’s supposedly corrupting effect on Asian youth. “When I was growing up this is what everyone thought those of us brought up here were like. So when I wanted a shorthand for England’s ruinous effect on ‘good’ Asian girls, I just took an image of a blonde-wigged, red mini-skirted, cigarette-puffing character.” ‘Back home’ and its mores shadow the women in Bhaji like clouds obscuring the sun. But even India, as Rekha points out, isn’t the same any more: it too has been transformed, susceptible like everywhere else to the relentless dynamics of change.

Whatever Bhaji’s limitations on its home turf, one can’t help but feel that its definite ‘Made in Britain’ stamp will mean that like Monty Python and Colman’s mustard, it will do well abroad. (What is Englishness these days but the country’s most – some would say only – exportable industry?) The film received a standing ovation at the Locarno Film Festival and an enthusiastic review in American Elle, which put it somewhere between two of 1993’s “best of British”: The Snapper and Naked.

Comparisons with at least two other films – My Beautiful Laundrette and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala – are, Chadha admits, inevitable. “As far as My Beautiful Laundrette goes, I think the most interesting thing is that the film was made ten years ago and this is the first thing that has happened since. Laundrette was irreverent and depicted our community in a very different way, but I think it came from the heart of Hanif Kureishi, who is biracial, and of Stephen Frears, who is English, unlike someone like myself who is Punjabi.” The comparisons with Mississippi Masala are harder to dismiss. Both films share an inter-racial theme, a large-ensemble cast and a belief in the importance of hybridity. Chadha plays down the similarities, but admits: “I have a lot to thank Mira for. After all, she opened up America for me. There people are describing Bhaji as a British Mississippi Masala, so even though I don’t have Denzel” – she laughs – “I still have some appeal.”

Curiously enough, it is to another of Kureishi’s works that she is happiest to compare Bhaji. “I loved The Buddha of Suburbia. In the half-English, half-Indian character of Kremmie (Karim) he manages to capture a sense of Englishness and Indianness in one person. There’s no identity crisis, he isn’t torn between two cultures none of those cliches. He has a wholeness, a sense of belonging in both worlds rather than being comfortable in neither.” It is this dual sensibility which Chadha hopes underlies Bhaji: “In the characters, how it is shot to be very English and Asian at the same time, very traditional and yet very modern.” Even the score, which is on a sliding scale from classical Indian music to a complete fusion in a ragga style, is used “to signpost the characters’ place on the tradition trail.”

Cultural tensions. Duality. These were keynotes in a recent Channel 4 news item on Asian women film-makers in which Chadha was prominently featured. But to some extent she believes that their collective media pull is based on an amazement that Asian women are filmmakers at all. “The idea of the delicate beauty with doe eyes and a long sari, lovingly cooking curries for her husband, is an image everyone loves on a mail-order basis. They can’t get over the fact that we have left the kitchen.”

She is loath to generalise about the reasons for the current prominence of Asian women film-makers, but when pressed guardedly suggests: “Because of struggles with our parents and community, perhaps we have had to fight for our independence and establish a more honest way of looking at ourselves. Perhaps Asian men have had to question themselves less. It’s something I would have liked to have concentrated on more. Our men, being mother’s sons, are encouraged to see themselves as better than women, which is especially problematic now, when our women are bright and articulate and aren’t willing to put up with the same shit as their mothers did.”

Chadha is right to be wary of what she says about her film. Accusations that Bhaji is “cliched”, “stereotypical”, “disloyal to the community” are already brewing. It is possible that like the first black feature made in this country, Isaac Julien’s much maligned Young Soul Rebels, Bhaji will be crushed by the weight of all those who feel themselves misrepresented, misunderstood or simply ignored.

Which would be a shame. Good or bad, full of positive representations or not, films like these matter too much. No film-maker can hope to represent everyone the way they want to be represented, and no film-maker should have to try. At best, a director like Chadha can point out openings, options: “What I’m trying to say is that Britain isn’t one thing or another. It isn’t just Howards End or My Beautiful Laundrette. There are endless possibilities about what it can be – and is already.”