Brown girls span the twain by Randeep Wadehra

Three brown girls have managed to straddle the cultural twain: Amritsar born Deepa Mehta, Bhubaneshwar born Mira Nair and Nairobi born Gurinder Chadha are highly talented film directors, producers, writers and actors. What sets these three apart from their peers is the fact that they are Punjabi women who have successfully spanned the East-West civilizational fault – as far as cinematic sensibility and creativity are concerned. Their works are watched, understood and critically acclaimed as much in India as in the West.

One can have some idea of their caliber if one takes a look at the awards they have won. Mira Nair’s works, apart from nominations to BAFTA and Oscars, have won Golden Camera (1998), Silver Ribbon (1992), New Generation and Lilian Gish Awards (1998), as well as Golden Lion (2001) etc. Deepa Mehta bagged the 2006 Genie Award for outstanding achievement in cinematography, Golden Kinnaree Award at Bangkok International Film Festival (2006), The Silver Mirror (2006) etc, along with the recent nomination to the Academy Awards for Water. In addition to being nominated for Writers Guild of America’s best original screenplay award in 2003 (Bend it like Beckham) Gurinder Chadha’s contribution to cinema was recognized with the OBE decoration by the British government in June 2006.

The trio is equally comfortable while making movies, tele-films and documentaries for Indian as well as western audiences. Nair has made flicks like Salaam Bombay, Mississippi Masala, The Perez Family, My Own Country, Hysterical Blindness, Kama Sutra, Monsoon Wedding, Vanity Fair and The Namesake to name a few. Mehta’s better known movies include At 99: A Portrait of Louise Tandy Murch, Sam & Me, Camilla, The Republic of Love, Bollywood Hollywood, Earth, Fire and Water. Some of the better known productions from Gurinder Chadha’s oeuvre comprise The Mistress of Spices, Bride and Prejudice, Bend it like Beckham, What’s Cooking?, A Nice Arrangement, What Do You Call An Indian Woman Who's Funny?, Bhaji on the Beach, Acting Our Age etc.

The three film makers have explored human mindscapes and relationships in a variety of socio-cultural environments, which are generally alien or oppressive or both. You get a rather detailed look into the world of the marginalised or the outsider in movies like Salaam Bombay (street children), Earth (Lenny, the Parsi girl) and Water (the exploited widows). You get a glimpse of inter-racial relationships in movies like The Mistress of Spices, The Namesake and Mississippi Masala. Quite a few of the movies are about adaptation and adjustent to alien cultures or individuals from different backgrounds.

In Bend it like Beckham Jasminder Bhamra feels more British than Indian and wants to play football like her peers such as Juliette. But her mother forbits her. In the ensuing struggle between the subcontinental orthodox mindset and western liberal values, the latter win as her parents give in to her wishes. Simiarly, in The Namesake you find Ashok and Ashima – married according to Hindu Bengali traditions – trying to adjust to their children’s especially son Gogol’s American way of living. In turn Gogol too has to come to terms with the relative frailty of love-relationships in the western milieu – be it his affair with the American Maxine or marriage with the Indian Moushumi. But, the movies are not just about families caught in the vortex of cultural differences. There are individuals outside families too who adapt to ‘the other’ in order to minimise the effect of cultural clash. For example Sam & Me focuses on the equation between a Muslim boy and an elderly Jew living in Canada.