Gurinder Chadha and the price of turning British Asian life into a crowd-pleaser

Gurinder Chadha

Photo: U.S. Embassy London / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 10, 1960 Nairobi, Kenya
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	Bend It Like Beckham, Paris Je T'aime, Blinded by the Light
Awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire · Evening Standard British Film · London Film Critics' Circle

Near the end of Christmas Karma, a London businessman who has spent the whole film sneering at refugees is made to remember that he arrived in Britain as one, a boy thrown out of Uganda with a father who would not survive the move. Gurinder Chadha had told MPs exactly who that man was long before the cameras rolled: “My Scrooge is an Indian Tory who hates refugees.” GB News dismissed the project as a woke rewrite before anyone had seen a frame, and The Daily Telegraph answered the finished film with zero stars. For a director whose method has always been to fold a migrant story inside a crowd-pleaser, the verdict stung twice: the crowd stayed home, and the critics went well past dislike.

That method has a precise origin. Chadha was born in Nairobi, then a British colony, into a Punjabi Sikh family of the East African Indian diaspora, and was two when the family followed her father to Southall, in west London. He had been a clerk at Barclays in Kenya; in Britain, with his turban and beard, the bank would not give him the same job, so the family opened a shop instead. At home she refused the part laid out for her, would not cook while the men ate, and sat at the table arguing with them. Her teachers suggested a secretarial course. She went to the University of East Anglia, studied politics and development, and then trained in radio journalism at the London College of Printing.

Reporting came first, on BBC radio and then BBC television news. In 1989 she made I’m British But…, a documentary for the British Film Institute and Channel 4 about young British Asians that used bhangra as its argument: music that was Punjabi and British at the same time, without apology. She insisted on premiering it at the Southall community centre. A year later she set up her own company, Umbi Films, and her eleven-minute short A Nice Arrangement, about a British Asian wedding, was picked for the Critics’ Week at Cannes.

Bhaji on the Beach followed in 1993, the first full-length feature directed by a British Asian woman: a minibus of Birmingham women from three generations on a day trip to Blackpool, carrying domestic violence, an unplanned pregnancy and the judgement of their own community along with the picnic. It won the Evening Standard award for best newcomer to British cinema and was nominated for the BAFTA for best British film. What’s Cooking?, set across four Los Angeles households on a single Thanksgiving, opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2000.

Then came the film that changed the scale of everything. Bend It Like Beckham, in 2002, sent Parminder Nagra’s Jess Bhamra out of a Hounslow kitchen and onto a women’s football pitch beside Keira Knightley, and it became the highest-grossing British-financed, British-distributed film at the UK box office until Slumdog Millionaire. It was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, and prompted a letter from Tony Blair that ended on “this is my Britain.” Bride and Prejudice moved Jane Austen to Amritsar with Aishwarya Rai and became the first film to open at number one in Britain and India on the same day. An OBE for services to the British film industry followed in 2006, the year she shot a segment of Paris, je t’aime, and in 2015 she took Jess to the West End as a musical.

The stretch in between was quieter and more commercial: Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, a Paramount teen comedy, and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, which premiered at Sundance. Blinded by the Light, in 2019, found the old charge again. Adapted from Sarfraz Manzoor’s memoir, it follows a Pakistani teenager in 1980s Luton who gets through racist abuse and his father’s expectations on the strength of Bruce Springsteen, who let her use the songs after reading the script. New Line paid around $15 million for it at Sundance.

The clearest fight of her career came with Viceroy’s House, her account of the last months of British India, with Hugh Bonneville as Lord Mountbatten and Gillian Anderson as his wife. It was her most personal film. On the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? she had learned that her grandmother had been driven out of a home in what became Pakistan and that a small aunt she never met died of starvation on the road; the film is dedicated to that girl. Fatima Bhutto, writing in The Guardian, argued that it cast the British as benefactors and Muslims as the only people who wanted a divided India. Chadha replied that the film had been “misinterpreted by some” and pointed to the diplomat Narendra Singh Sarila’s history of Partition as her source. The dispute exposed the limit of her approach. The warmth that lets a Hounslow family’s quarrels play on the other side of the world can sand down a history whose violence has no comic resolution, and the instinct for uplift that made Jess a national heroine reads, set against the killings of 1947, as a choice about who gets the gentle light.

Television brought its own reversals. Beecham House, the drama she created for ITV about a former East India Company soldier in 1790s Delhi, ran for six episodes in 2019 and was not renewed. Netflix’s animated Pashmina, which she had been set to direct, was cancelled in 2022. Christmas Karma, which she wrote, directed and produced, reached British cinemas in November 2025 with Kunal Nayyar as Mr Sood and Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George as his ghosts. Robbie Collin called it “the worst film since Cats.” Even Empire’s kinder two-star review faulted the songs. It took about $1.4 million.

She is married to Paul Mayeda Berges, the American screenwriter who is her regular co-writer, and they have twins born in 2007. In 2017 she handed her working archive, thirty-seven boxes of scripts, budgets, notes and set photographs, to the BFI National Archive. In January 2026 BFI Southbank built part of a season on women filmmakers’ archives around it, with an artist’s installation and an onstage conversation with her.

Her next move goes back to the film that brought her the big audience. Chadha told the BBC in July 2025 that she is developing a sequel to Bend It Like Beckham with Berges, taking advice from Emma Hayes, the head coach of the United States women’s national team, and that it may end up as a series rather than a film. The target is 2027, the original’s 25th anniversary and the year of the Women’s World Cup in Brazil. Nagra and Knightley have been told about it; neither has signed. Whether Jess gets a second match, Chadha has said, depends on the script.

Featured Films

Viceroy's House (2017) — Blinded by the Light (2019)

Tags: British cinema, Keira Knightley, Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice, Christmas Karma

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