Who is afraid of hybridity? Re-visiting Bhaji on the Beach and perspectives on multiculturalism in Britain

ABSTRACT

This article explores the concept of hybridity and its relations with several analytical categories – ‘home’, space (private/public), ‘essences’, and the Bakhtin concept of heteroglossia – as they occur in Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach. Although perceived as a director who idealises hybridity and multiculturalism due to the happy endings of her comedies, the variety of characters and their interactions portrayed in this film requires a close look at the circumstances that bring them together in a multi-layered space. Space, either enclosed or in the open, private or public, is a constant element in the film grammar and contributes to defining hybridity and the British multicultural society of the 1990s. Interconnected with space, cultural essences (British-ness, English-ness, Indian-ness) are also analysed here.

KEYWORDS:

• Hybridity
• multicultural society
• cultural essences
• centripetal and centrifugal forces
• (hybrid) space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Iulia Rășcanu is a Lecturer with the Bucharest University of Economic Studies (BUES), Romania. Her research study is interdisciplinary, combining literary and film studies with social anthropology and feminist discourses. Her academic interests are migration studies, diasporic studies, and feminist studies. She has published several scientific papers in academic journals and volumes. Among her latest published work includes two books: Transnational Networks, Identities and Homes: Diasporic South Asian Women in Fiction and in Film; and ‘Love’ and ‘sisterhood’ in the Identities of Women in Novels by Writers of the South Asian Diaspora.

Notes

1 The two cultural essences, English-ness/English and British-ness/British, are not fully interchangeable (so are not used as such) because ‘British’ is a wider concept that, especially in combinations such as ‘British Asian’, is perceived as less dominant than ‘English’. However, ‘British’ also has imperial connotations that also lead to the idea of dominance. For this reason, we prefer to use both concepts separately.

2 ‘Some’ because not all immigrant/minority cultures have a colonial past.

3 Chadha often accompanies her images with bhangra music, sometimes mixing bhangra and Caribbean rhythms in order to illustrate the interracial relationship between Oliver and Hashida. One of the songs used in the film is Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, in which the lyrics in English have been changed to Punjabi ones, creating a new art piece (also see Hussain 2005, 77).