Gurinder Chadha's film Bride and Prejudice is an Indian remake of film versions of Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice. While many of the plot details are similar in both stories, Bride and Prejudice is distinctly concerned with the intersection of Indian and non-Indian cultures, especially with respect to marriage. The anthropological themes of South Asia, including the shift from colonialism to cosmopolitanism, the Indian diaspora, familial belonging, and marriage are evident throughout the film and set up a sharp contrast between the Indian family of marriageable daughters and the Indian and non-Indian Americans that have come to visit. Many of the emphases in the two cultures are polar opposites, but at the end of the film, East and West are joined in a rapprochement marked by two Indian-American marriages.
India's history as a colonial nation and America's image as a cosmopolitan one provide a clash of stereotypical images in the film, as the Indians become a bit more cosmopolitan and some of the non-Indians are a bit more colonial. Although they observe many of their cultural traditions, the Indian family also has a computer, and the daughters send e-mails, while Wickham exploits the Indian daughters, and Darcy at first blush evinces a certain superiority over the Indians. The normally home-bound Indians hop a jet to California, showing themselves just as cosmopolitan in some ways as the Americans. This cosmopolitanism is an accurate portrayal of the new Indian, one who has adopted many of the technologies of America, as well as-in many cases-working in India for an American company. Rajan and Sharma (116) point out that "cinema functions to produce and articulate transnational cosmopolitan subjects," and they argue that the South Asian and the American cosmopolitanism produces a complex situation in which views about capital and racial formations are divers
...