Gurinder Chadha (1993)
A day trip to the seaside for a group of British Asian women, who all live in Birmingham but represent several generations, various social circumstances, sharply differing outlooks. Gurinder Chadha’s first feature, written by Meera Syal, delivers a consistently witty and captivating portrait of contemporary Blackpool. The playing out of cultural controversies that fuel the serious drama in Bhaji on the Beach is hard work, though.
The women travel in a small bus, driven by thirtysomething Simi (Shaheen Khan), who works at the Saheli Asian Women’s Centre, which has organised the outing. En route, the chatter, laughter and good-natured disputes on board the bus are accompanied on the soundtrack by a version of Cliff Richard’s ‘Summer Holiday’, sung by female voices, with Punjabi lyrics (written by Gurinder Chadha). On arrival at their destination, fortyish Rekha (Souad Faress), the group’s most glamorous and colourfully-dressed member, alights from the bus, surveys the gaudy vista before her, and exclaims, ‘It’s Bombay!’ That remark gives a flavour of the postcard of Blackpool to come. A paradigm of seaside culture, the place is both an alien environment and something of a home from home to these visitors; and although it’s seen through Asian eyes, Blackpool’s mix of indigenous and would-be exotic might be confounding to anyone passing through. In an amusement arcade, the games include betting on a mechanised Arab horse race; the burnous-clad race commentator is a young white man with a local accent. Out on the promenade, you can get your photo taken by an Indian snake charmer. That is, he wears traditional Indian costume; ethnically, he looks and sounds like the man calling the horses. Ginder (Kim Vithana), though reluctant, is persuaded to pose with the snake. This coiffed young Asian woman, laughing but scared as the huge snake is wrapped round her neck, is juxtaposed with the white Lancastrian in his turban and eye make-up. Gurinder Chadha brings off the bizarre culture-clash joke with a nice light touch.
Moments later, Ginder is more seriously scared, and the snake-charmer sequence becomes part of a larger juxtaposition, revealing the fault line in Bhaji on the Beach. While posing with the snake, Ginder took her eye off her five-year-old son, Amrik (Amer Chadha-Patel). The only child on the day trip, he wanders off onto a deserted part of the beach, where he’s approached by his father, Ginder’s estranged husband, Ranjit (Jimmi Harkishin). Ginder left Ranjit because of domestic abuse (and has just filed for divorce). With his brothers, Balbir (Tanveer Ghani) and Manjit (Akbar Kurtha), Ranjit, who’s also some kind of professional criminal, has come to Blackpool intending to reclaim his wife and son and take them back where they belong – in his house. Nothing much happens at this stage – Ranjit retreats and Ginder is soon reunited with Amrik – but the episode anticipates a bigger light-to-dark movement at the film’s climax. Most of the women go to a nightclub, where three male strippers provide the entertainment. Their act involves audience participation: it’s quite funny when the trio gets elderly Pushpa (Zohra Sehgal) to join them on the dance floor; the mood starts to change when Ginder is once more forced against her will into something-for-a-laugh. As he dances with her, one of the strippers (Jonathan Cohen) playfully tries to pull off Ginder’s jacket, revealing a line of bruises on her arm. She runs out of the club, straight into a violent confrontation with Ranjit, who assaults Ginder and tries to abduct Amrik there and then.
Gurinder Chadha thus works into her engaging, perceptive seaside patchwork one of the big issues within British South Asian communities – around the primacy of family, the stigma of separation and divorce, the resulting threat to women’s independence and safety. In fact, she tries to work in two – or more – of the big issues. The day trippers also include Hashida (Sarita Khajuria), due soon to go to medical school but who’d rather go to art school and is carrying the child of her Afro-Caribbean boyfriend, Oliver (Mo Sesay): Hashida’s family doesn’t know about her boyfriend’s ethnicity, let alone the pregnancy. On the advice of his right-minded father (Rudolph Walker), who thinks his son should stand by Hashida, Oliver also follows the bus party to Blackpool, on his motorcycle. Chadha aims for maximum tragicomic impact through those quick switches from snake-charmer and strippers to lost-child and battered-wife trauma, but their proximity in the narrative is jarring. More largely, the film’s dramatic parts wanted better writing and acting to be effective.
Few of the cast were familiar screen faces at the time Bhaji on the Beach was made. (Exceptions included Zohra Sehgal, still memorable as Lili Chatterjee in the TV adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown (1984), and Rudolph Walker, who’d broken through in the early 1970s in the notorious sitcom Love Thy Neighbour.) You can see in many cases how the newer actors got their role in the film – they have a distinctive look or an edge to them – but a performance needs more than that to develop through a feature-length comedy-drama. It would be easy enough to disparage some of the situations in Meera Syal’s script as ‘soap’ melodrama, though that would also be unfair to the quality of EastEnders and, especially, Coronation Street back in the 1990s – and to some of the plotlines that both TV series were attempting at the time.
The Hashida-Oliver strand of Bhaji on the Beach works better than the Ginder-Ranjit strand, where the most arresting performer is little Amer Chadha-Patel, in his virtually silent role as the increasingly frightened, bewildered Amrik. Kim Vithana is rather limited, given the size of her part, while Jimmi Harkishin is a grandstanding performer. You start to sympathise with the actors in their one-note (until the violent climax) roles as Ranjit’s brothers: Tanveer Ghani and Akbar Khurta do plenty of standing around, watching Jimmi Harkishin suffer and emote. (It’s a little ironic that, of these three, Harkishin’s the one who has ended up making a career out of a long-running TV soap role: he’s been Dev Alahan in Coronation Street for decades now, throughout the show’s long decline.) In the interracial story, Mo Sesay is more nuanced than Sarita Khajuria, but Hashida’s angry frustration comes through strongly, and Khajuria’s jolie-laide looks give an extra twist to the idea of Hashida and Oliver being unexpected partners.
As well as driving the bus, feminist Simi (Shaheen Khan is another member of the cast whose line readings are too samey), glues the main dramatic parts of the story together. It’s she who points Hashida in the direction of a Blackpool family planning clinic; Ginder presumably came as a battered wife to the women’s centre where Simi works, though the latter is exasperated by Ginder’s continuing ambivalence towards her abusive husband. Gurinder Chadha is able to show more humour and imagination in a third pairing, ephemeral as it is. Asha (Lalita Ahmed), who originally trained to be a singer, is now stuck helping her husband run their convenience store in Birmingham: Asha’s fantasies (there are several of them over the course of the film) are conflations of her thwarted Bollywood dreams and devout Hinduism. In Blackpool, she’s escorted round the sights for an hour or two by a droll, courteous, superannuated actor, Ambrose Waddington, played by Peter Cellier with easy flair and charm. You can tell just from his name that Meera Syal has written this character as a comedy sketch; that’s not too much of a problem since Ambrose doesn’t overstay his welcome.
Although Pushpa, well played by Zohra Segal, emphatically represents the older British Asian generation in the film, one of her remarks still resonates in political utterances today. Appalled to find out about Hashida’s pregnancy and who the father is, Pushpa explains her objections: ‘It’s not a matter of colour but a matter of culture’. The film’s handling of racism is more incisive when it’s presented almost casually – as when a group of white youths throw things at the women’s bus and jeer at its occupants. (One of the youths is Hugo Speer, in his film debut: he’s on screen less than a minute but you see why he got more work). A longer episode in a Blackpool café is interesting but more questionable. While two younger members of the party, the scrapping sisters Ladhu (Nisha Nayar) and Madhu (Renu Kochar), are interacting with a couple of white lads from a burger bar, Pushpa and Bina (Surendra Kochar) go to the café to get a cup of tea, but also to eat their homemade bhajis and parathas – Pushpa’s contained in a traditional tiffin case. The white café proprietor (Judith David), after telling the women they can only eat food bought on the premises, goes into a nasty racist rant long enough to divert attention from her not unreasonable objection to customers bringing their own food into the café.
At the end of the film, the day out is over and the women must return home; even though little has been resolved between the main characters, there’s an implication that some of their lives won’t be the same as before. With one exception, they’re all back on the bus, and Ginder is reunited with Amrik. After driving through the beautiful nighttime Blackpool illuminations, the women catch sight of Hashida by the roadside, preparing to return to Birmingham as Oliver’s motorbike passenger. There’s a final reprise of ‘Summer Holiday’. It’s a graceful finale and Bhaji on the Beach certainly has its place in British cinema history – the first feature directed by a British South Asian woman. I still wish that the film was stronger than it is.
15 July 2026
