GURINDER CHADHA

An Indian lineage, a Kenyan birth and a London upbringing leading up to marriage with a Japanese-American must need stir up an identity bristling with ethnic fecundity. Which is why when Gurinder Chadha makes a film, the cross-cultural strain wafts up with a decisive tang. Take Bend it like Beckham.

A savvy clubbing of the English obsession with football and the Indian obsession with marriage, Bend it like Beckham has wiggled comfortably into the No. 1 slot in Britain, riding the country's flavour of the season-multiracialism. So even though English soccer superstar David Beckham is out of action with a broken ankle, it hasn't stopped the film from scoring at the UK box office, raking in $1.8 million (Rs 8.75 crore) in the first two days of its release last week. In doing so it also added to the buzz it has generated as a shoo-in for the Cannes Film Festival which is set to begin on May 15.

EYE ON THE GOAL: Nagra (top) with Knightley in Bend it like Beckham

For the 30-something Chadha, success is especially sweet. When her father came to England as a qualified bank manager in the 1960s, he didn't get a job at Barclays because he wore a turban. Certain pubs in Southall even denied him a drink. But the integrated Britain Chadha lives in today is very different. It's this change in a multiracial society that Chadha has recorded through her feature films. It's this change which saw her film premiering at London's Leicester Square and getting a 450-print theatrical release, 445 more than her first feature, Bhaji on the Beach, in 1993. It's this change again which saw the film's posters on the back of buses plying on Oxford Street. "Could this have happened in 1993?" she asks.

Bend it like Beckham, to open in India in June, is Chadha's third milestone after the much-acclaimed Bhaji on the Beach and the more recent polycultural montage What's Cooking? (2000). In her latest film, Chadha pits convention against schism when Jess (debutante Parminder Nagra) prefers playing football with her teammate Jules (Kaira Knightley) to making chapatis that her mother insists she learn as part of some obligatory premarital training. The theme-of two 18-year-olds, an Indian and English girl, who want to play football for England like their idol Beckham-is cross-cultural. So is hypocrisy. So while the Indians are shown cancelling a wedding because the younger sister is found kissing a gora (white man) at a bus stand, the English are shown as disapproving of a girl with biceps bigger than her boyfriends'.

Cinema

AN INDIAN SUMMER Hudson in Four Feathers: (below) Khan in The Warrior If Bollywood is striking it big in England, the British Indians and India-influenced English filmmakers are not far behind. Metin Huseyin's film Anita & Me, based on comedy star Meera Syal's first novel, is set to be released in July. Produced by BBC Films, the film star Lynnn Redgrave and Kathy Burke. Asif Kapadia's Hindi epic The Warrior, starring theatre actor Irfan Khan, is being released in May. It won the London Film Festival's Sutherland trophy for the most imaginative first feature last year. Shekhar Kapur returns the theatres in September after a four-year ago post-Elizabeth. Four Feathers will be released by Paramount and stars Heath Ledger, Wes Bentley and Kate Hudson.

As Jules' mother, the marvellous Juliet Stevenson, says darkly, "Remember, Sporty Spice is the only one without a fella.'' It echoes the objection of Jess' parents: "Which family will want a daughter-in-law who can kick a football but can't make round chapatis?''

Anupam Kher makes his British film debut as Jess' father, pop star Shaznay Lewis plays the football team captain, and Beckham's wife Victoria Spice is in the all-star musical line-up that includes All Saints, Blondie, Bally Sagoo, Malkit Singh and Hans Raj Hans. "But what made me truly happy is that it has been accepted as a completely British movie," says Chadha, "and in the way we've managed to change the definition of what being 'British' means.''

Which is why Chadha never wanted Bend it like Beckham to be a ghetto film. Her model was Damien O'Donnell's 2000 crowd-pleaser East is East, which told the story of Pakistanis in Salford but spoke to people across cultures. Unlike East is East, however, which had Om Puri spewing expletives, Chadha has made a feelgood film for the family.

For Chadha, her multicultural identity has never been a "confrontation". "I prefer to call it a dance, a new manoeuvre. It creates a symbiosis, a new culture that's neither British nor English, but has a bit of both,'' she says.

She talks about flourishing marriages of melody such as bhangra acid and bhangra house. "Sometimes this stuff gets exported to India and everyone there thinks it's homespun. It's not. Remember, A.R. Rahman came much after the work of Bally Sagoo," she says.

Unfortunately, Chadha believes Bollywood filmmakers haven't quite understood the fusion and is amused at the "grotesque" attempts at portraying expatriate life, quite the trend in Mumbai. "I don't know of any Indian girl who gets up in the morning to do paath (prayer) like in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge,'' she laughs. "Or like Amrish Puri lounge around the house in a kurta-pyjama. And remember Saira Bano (Chadha is in splits now) in her big brown wig in Purab Aur Pashchim?''

This difference in perception is why Chadha's project with Sunny Deol in 1997 called London, co-written by her husband Paul Mayeda Berges, fizzled out. She realised how different their paradigms were. "Sunny is a nice guy but we saw things differently,'' she says. Chadha is now negotiating a more cautious entry into Indian films. For a future project-her lips are sealed-she has entered into a tripartite alliance with Hollywood, British cinema and, of course, Bollywood.

True to form, she's all set to create a "new culture''. Which, she hopes, will see more Britons responding to typical Indianisms like, "Why did the gori call our Jess lesbian? Is she not Piscean?''