Bollywood Influences apparent in Chadha’s EuroCinema

Bollywood. Hollywood. Eurowood? Gurinder Chadha acclaimed director found a way to insert herself into all three major industries. While understated, it is evident that in every project she does, her Indian roots are visible.
Even though she was born in Nairobi, Kenya, her family emigrated to Southall, England when she was two years old. Southhall, primarily a South Asian residential district, and is colloquially known as "Little India.” By growing up in Little India, where the population is over 60% Indian or Pakistani, and home to over 10 Gurduwaras, Sikh places of worship, it is truly the cross-cultural home of Indian and European relations.
Chadha has had several forays into the European cinema and Hollywood, yet she always picks British cinema over American when she has the choice.
With the newest fusion of Hollywood, EuroCinema and Bollywood, this trend will continue until it will difficult to tell which production continent a film came from.
Derek Bose, author of Brand Bollywood: A new global entertainment order, “Giant Hollywood production houses and studios like Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Fox and Universal Pictures are setting up shop in Mumbai. Already, India has become an international hub for animation and special effects. Much as the Gurinder Chadha’s (Bride and Prejudice) and the Deepa Mehta’s (Water) make films ‘with an Indian soul in a foreign body,’ the anxiety to reach out to a global audience at all levels cannot be overlooked. “
An Indian soul in a foreign body is the best way to describe the work that Chadha does. Her tribute to Bollywood in the short Quais de Seine in Paris Je T’aime, is wonderfully done yet before we can discuss her tribute, I have to outline a few of the genre conventions of Bollywood.
Bollywood films are mostly musicals, and are expected to contain catchy music in the form of song-and-dance numbers woven into the script. A film's success often depends on the quality of such musical numbers.
Indian audiences expect full value for their money, with a good entertainer generally referred to as paisa vasool, (literally, "money's worth"). Songs and dances, love triangles, comedy and dare-devil thrills are all mixed up in a three-hour-long extravaganza with an intermission.
Bollywood plots tend to be melodramatic. They frequently employ formulaic ingredients such as star-crossed lovers and angry parents, love triangles, family ties, sacrifice, corrupt politicians, kidnappers, conniving villains, courtesans with hearts of gold, long-lost relatives and siblings separated by fate, dramatic reversals of fortune, and convenient coincidences.
Several of these conventions can be seen in Quais de Seine. The scene starts out with what appears to be a gang of hooligans hitting on women. They are immediately denoted the “bad boys.” True to Indian cinema, one of them turns out to be good, and was just hanging out with the wrong crowd. We then see a young Muslim girl, quietly laughing at the boys.
When she falls, the wind is blowing, which is huge in Bollywood cinema. Whenever wind blows, it is an indication of love or the heart changing on a major topic. In Mohobbatein, the 2001 film, directed by powerhouse director, Aditya Chopra, wind is used as a symbol for romance. Whenever any character is falling in love, there is a huge gust of wind.
After she falls, the young Frenchman is helping her out, and asks her why she wears a hijab, the traditional hairpiece for Muslim women, she responds by saying, “When I wear the hijab, I feel like I have a faith, an identity. “
This quest for identity, is something that Chadha explores in all her movies. Bend it like Beckham has a traditional Punjabi family living in London, always trying to find their identity. It is similar to Salut Cousin! When Alilo visits Mok’s family. They have a vision of an idealized version of Algeria.
This is what Jigna Desai, author of Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, calls “Homesickness and Motion Sickness: Embodied Migratory Subjectivities. ’
She notes that Chadha has taken several cues from Bollywood in all of her movies. One of the most popular films of the nineties Bollywood cinema was the 1995 film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, also directed by Aditya Chopra. In this movie, a first generation Indian moves to London to seek a better life for his family, but he always envisions India, specifically his home state of Punjab to be something incredible, something better.
Desai writes, “Although nostalgia is pondered as a universal experience, that is, a structured feeling that is naturalized so that any subject’s experience of displacement from a past time and place is categorized as the condition of nostalgia, we may seek to differentiate between different productions of nostalgia, such as the patriarchal deterritorialized nation nostalgia of DDLJ.”
The young woman does that in Quais de Seine, she is seeking her identity in a foreign land.
After she gets up and walks away, all he has left is a picture of her, so he goes on a quest looking for her. This journey of a boy looking for a girl that he knows very little about is typical bollywood. While in Bollywood it is overstated and turned into a large musical production, the concept is still the same. This can be seen in Aziz Mirza’s 2003 film, Chalte Chalte. In this movie, the protagonist, Raj spots Priya and they have a brief meeting, from then on he is smitten and must find her immediately.
Finally, he goes to the mosque and waits for her there. In Bollywood, many romances have their turning point at places of worship. In the 2008 blockbuster, Rab ne Bana di Jodi, directed by Aditya Chopra as well, the main character realizes that she is in love while she is at the Gurudwara, a sikh place of worship.
The whole scene is very Bollywood until the very end when the grandfather invites Francois to walk with him and Zarka. In traditional Bollywood cinema, Francois would get harsh looks and cold stares for even touching Zarka but Chadha focuses on the humanity, which is a nice departure from traditionalism.
Overall, Chadha uses all sorts of elements from Bollywood, but they are simply muted and subtle. Through this connection between EuroCinema and Bollywood she is able to make a product that really does feature the best qualities from both worlds.