Gurinder Chadha could well be an example of a British-Asian woman who has bent rules to achieve her own success. Her family came to settle in Britain from East Africa in the seventies. Daughter of a small-time Indian grocery shop-keeper, she experienced, at first hand, the trauma and humiliation which Asians go through in Britain, when they don’t have money or status. During her growing years, Chadha also observed the inhumanly trivial lives which women of the Punjabi community settled in Britain — especially in cities like Leicester where one-third of the population is Asian. Through the older generation — like Gurinder Chadha’s father — which opened grocery shops or stationery corners and joined the huge lower middle class of the British population, she noticed how the racist Whites treated them. "My father was made to wait for hours for service in a bank because his depositing capacity was small. The early Asian settlers in Britain, like my parents, had little education and a huge complex about living in an alien society. The Punjabis especially stood together in their isolation and developed their own lifestyle of bhangra and family gatherings over tea and bhajias. They joined their compatriots in Southall for nostalgia meals or shopping and still felt lost between their Indo-African heritage and the strident call of the vibrant British culture they came to experience. I felt a part of this confusion; yet my generation thought differently and we were rebellious and unwilling to accept our second class status."

Gurinder is a second generation Asian — a woman who knows no other country as her home other than Britain. She is now married to Paul Mayeda Berges, a Japanese American. Yet, like other women of her generation, she too suffered the confusions and lack of identity, which surround the lives of Asian British women. "We are taught Asian values but are expected to make good in European society," she says, "This dichotomy of life troubled me greatly and found expression in my work as a media person and journalist."

Chadha made several documentary films but really hit the headlines when she made Bhaji On The Beach for the BBC in the early nineties. The film was shown widely in Britain and in the US to audiences who identified with Asian problems and empathised with them. "I presented these problems through the characters of several Asian women of different ages, who make bhajias (a typical Indian snack) and go for a picnic on a beach," she recalls, "During their day-long conversations and the events which affect them, their problems were discussed and graphically put before the viewers of the film. I remember that when the film was commissioned, I got a million pounds sterling. Itook it to the bank — the same bank where my father waited hours. The service was instant, though we were still Asians and poor!"

Bhaji On The Beach created a minor stir in Britain in the mid-nineties. It did not reach the shores of India at all. The film’s theme and treatment were so alien to Indians that it could not make a deep impact on those few Indians who saw it in Britain. Besides, women’s problems, viewers felt, are the same the world over, with only different manifestations. Chadha did not make any major films after Bhaji though that film earned her a minor celebrity status.

Then, media reports in 1997 said that Sunny Deol, himself a Punjabi with a wife living in Britain, met Chadha in the UK, after seeing Bhaji on the video. He approached her to make a totally commercial Hindi masala film in London starring the Deol brothers — Sunny and Bobby with Karisma Kapoor. "It did not work out," says Gurinder, "But I will soon make a film Bollywood style. I want to project my vision of cinema through a film which have actors from India, America and Britain!"