Spin It Like Charles

With her new film on partition, director Gurinder Chadha steps away from light-hearted cinema

- Priyanka Bhadani

When Gurinder Chadha decided to work as a journalist with BBC Radio in the 80s, people close to her tried to dis-courage her. As an Asian who grew up in Southall in London, Chadha was expected to take up some secretarial job, like most other Indian girls there. But she stuck to her decision, as she wanted to break the mould. Having watched a variety of blackand-white British films and many Hindi films in her formative years, Chadha was fascinated by the grammar and shorthand of filmmaking.

One of the films that blew her mind as a child was the patriotic Purab Aur Paschim (1970). “I also vividly remember watching Haathi Mere Saathi and crying when the elephant cried,” said Chadha, who was in India recently to promote her new film, Viceroy’s House. The film is releasing in India on August 18, under a different title, Partition:1947.

Her parents had migrated from Nairobi, Kenya. “My father loved Baiju Bawra (1952) and Mother India (1957),” she said. In fact, Baiju Bawra was the first film she showed Paul Mayeda Berges, her husband, who is her long-time collaborator on screenplays. “He watched it and said, ‘They die at the end? Why do they die at the end?’ And I was like, that is Bollywood,” said Chadha, who became famous with her 2002 film, Bend It Like Beckham, on a football-crazy Asian girl in London. Bride & Prejudice won her more acclaim two years later. In 2005, Chadha made Who Do You Think You Are (a BBC series where celebrities trace their ancestry). It took her to her ancestral home in Pakistan from where her family had fled during partition of India and taken shelter in Kenya for a couple of years before settling down in the UK when she was two years old.