IndiaStar--A Literary-Art Magazine

Bhaji on the Beach

A film by Gurinder Chadha, 1994, 100 minutes

Bhaji on the Beach is an energetic, race-and-sex-relations comedy that is a must see for anyone who thinks that putting these issues-of-the-epoch in the mass media is a nice way to deal with the traumas plaguing South Asian women.

Community-orientated films are a superb way to dramatize, confront, and to come to terms with interracial sex and pregnancies, and other configurationsthat are a source of endless trouble for South Asian parents who just can't forget India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda etc.

Bhaji follows hot on the heels of but does not go beyond other "Black," (in the UK, South Asians are classified as"Black") British masterpieces such as Hanif Kureshi's My Beautiful Laundrette, and The Buddha of Suburbia; and Isaac Julien's gay landmark, Young Soul Rebels.(an independent film, made in London, circa 1991) Bhaji's plot does not strain the imagination. Here's a part of it: a South Asian community leader/political activist takes an all-ages-all-classes group of South Asian women to Blackpool. In the old days, before we all got to England and improved the English diet it was a
white holidaying spot. But UK immigration changed all that.

The insertion of these splendiferously dressed women on the beach include a battered wife who during the trip makes up her mind to leave her husband forever; a teenage couple who, one gets the impression, are sexually involved; a shilvar kamees clad granny who is mechanical scripted in to
contrast old-world values with "English" ones. Chastity, obedience to Gods, and a reverent respect for the family bread-winner are up for gentle feminist review. The granny stereotype has to act shocked most of the time. Boring. The biggest shock for her is the pregnancy of one of the young Asian
women by her African boyfriend. This dilemma is elegantly solved, as the rest of the group drive
back to town, with a tender lingering kiss during a interracial sunset. Thank god this scene will bother some Asians.

At Blackpool, sexually explorative members of the outing meet English cowboys who work at a hot-dog stand. One of the women gets into a bit of interracial necking, but before anything exciting happens her protective about-to-de-cloak lesbian friend pulls her back into the virginal harem of the Asian community.

The acting is earnest cardboard stereotyping au maximum. No one evolves, everyone stays in the same charactival rut, and the story is as tense as watching Rajiv Gandhi have tea and biscuits at a press conference on the Tibet question.

However, it is stereotyping with a huge difference: it is brown stereotyping.

Bhaji is more than mundane; check this for excellence: "I just needed you to be there" says the pregnant woman. And there are hundreds of lines like this. But even at that, Bhaji is saved by being more or less a first of its kind, and it does not grind on inexorably. It is ultra light race-sensitive entertainment, for the lily-livered.

Notwithstanding the simplistic editing -- there is not one unpredictable cut-- this film is brilliant even if the South Asian in-jokes will pass over the heads of both white Canadian tribes. British audiences, however, are hip to all this post-colonial modernity, so they will get most of the culturally anchored funnies.

Bhaji is better than most films made in Canada in the last five years. Quebec films don't even come close, and of course, Quebec lives in mortal fear of black actors, artists, intellectuals and directors and therefore
does not encourage them. Director Gurinder Chadha is lucky to have generous film funders who take her so very seriously.

Imagine the National Film Board or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation putting bucks into such a film without getting utterly terrorized by the racegender questions. Forget it. Canada will not catch-up, not even by thetime Hong Kong slips into Beijing control.

A warning: there are hectares of songs and dances:
You can take the Asian out of Asia but you can't take the Bollywood out of the Asian.