The diaspora auteurs: Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha
While Bollywood made the diaspora its muse, three Punjabi women — Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha — made it their subject, turning the immigrant's double vision into world cinema.
While Bollywood was busy making the diaspora its muse — filming NRIs in Swiss chalets and London mansions from a studio in Mumbai — three women who were of the diaspora were doing something harder. Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadha did not flatter the immigrant. They examined him, and her, from the inside, with the double vision that only someone raised between two countries has — and they turned that gaze into world cinema, collecting a Caméra d'Or, a Golden Lion, an Oscar nomination and a global box-office hit along the way.
They are sometimes called, half-affectionately, the "Bhenji Brigade" — three daughters of the Punjabi diaspora, one in the United States, one in Canada, one in Britain, who between them wrote the overseas Indian onto both the art-house and the multiplex screen.
Mira Nair: the outsider's India, the immigrant's America
Mira Nair, born in India in 1957 and educated at Delhi University and Harvard, announced herself with her first feature. Salaam Bombay! (1988), shot with real street children, won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — a debut that put an Indian woman director on the world map overnight.
But it was her American films that made her the diaspora's chronicler. Mississippi Masala (1991) followed an Indian family expelled from Idi Amin's Uganda and resettled in the American South, and the love affair between its daughter and a Black American played by Denzel Washington — a story about two diasporas, African and Indian, meeting in a country that had made a place for neither. The Namesake (2006), adapted from Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, remains one of the truest films made about the second generation: the Bengali boy in New York who cannot forgive his parents for his name, until he can. Her Monsoon Wedding (2001) won the Golden Lion at Venice. Across her career she has taken two prizes at Cannes and four at Venice.
Deepa Mehta: the films India tried to stop
Deepa Mehta, born in Amritsar in 1950 and long resident in Canada, made the diaspora's most controversial cinema — not about the West, but about India itself, seen with a returnee's unflinching eye. Her Elements Trilogy — Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and Water (2005) — took on subjects mainstream Indian cinema avoided: same-sex desire, Partition, and the abandoned widows of Varanasi.
The reaction proved her point. Fire drew mobs that attacked cinemas. When Mehta began filming Water in the holy city of Varanasi in 2000, protesters destroyed the sets and forced the production to shut down; she completed the film five years later, in Sri Lanka, under a false working title. Water was nonetheless nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film — submitted not by India but by Canada, the country that had given its director a home. It was a telling detail: the diaspora film-maker could say what a resident one could not, and had a second nation willing to claim her when the first would not.
Gurinder Chadha: the girl who played football in Hounslow
Gurinder Chadha, born in Nairobi in 1960 to a Kenyan-Asian Sikh family and raised in Southall, west London, made the most joyful and the most commercially successful diaspora films of the three. Her debut, Bhaji on the Beach (1993), followed a group of British Asian women on a day trip to Blackpool and earned a BAFTA nomination.
Then came Bend It Like Beckham (2002). The story of Jess, a Sikh teenager in Hounslow who wants to play football against her traditional parents' wishes, became a global phenomenon — a Golden Globe–nominated hit that grossed many times its budget and, for a generation of second-generation kids from London to Los Angeles, was simply the first time they had seen themselves on a cinema screen and laughed. Chadha followed it with Bride and Prejudice (2004), Viceroy's House (2017) and Blinded by the Light (2019), and was made an OBE in 2006. Where Bollywood's NRI films were about longing for India, Chadha's were about belonging in Britain — a crucial difference for children who had never known anywhere else.
They were not the first
The three did not appear from nowhere. The diaspora's first great figure in Western cinema was a producer, not a director: Ismail Merchant, born in Bombay in 1936, who with the director James Ivory built Merchant Ivory Productions into one of the most respected names in English-language film — A Room with a View, Howards End, The Remains of the Day — over a partnership that lasted more than four decades. Merchant proved, long before Bend It Like Beckham, that an Indian could not only work in Western cinema but shape its most prestigious end. Nair, Mehta and Chadha inherited that possibility and pointed it, for the first time, squarely at the diaspora's own story.
What they share, and what they changed
The three have obvious things in common: all women, all of Punjabi heritage, all working outside India, all drawn again and again to the collision of cultures. But the deeper thing they share is a gaze. The Bollywood NRI film looked at the diaspora from the motherland and asked whether it had stayed Indian enough. These three looked from the inside and asked harder questions — about race, gender, caste, sexuality, and the particular loneliness of belonging to two places and fully to neither.
And they did it for the world, not only for the diaspora. Salaam Bombay! and Water and Bend It Like Beckham reached audiences who had never seen a Hindi film and never would; they made the Indian immigrant's experience a subject for global cinema on its own terms. In doing so they built the runway for everyone who followed — the Dev Patels and Riz Ahmeds and Mindy Kalings, the whole generation of diaspora talent now working in the Western mainstream.
Bollywood taught the diaspora to feel nostalgic. These three taught the world to take the diaspora seriously. It is the more lasting achievement.
This is Part 2 of The Diaspora Screen*. Part 1: how DDLJ made the diaspora Bollywood's muse. On another diaspora art form that conquered the world's stages, read our piece on Indian-origin singers.*
Continue the series · The Diaspora Screen
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