Multicultural Perspectives, 12(2), 8186 Copyright C 2010 by the National Association for Multicultural Education ISSN: 1521-0960 print

/ 1532-7892 DOI: 10.1080/15210960.2010.481190

Bend It Like Beckham: Dribbling the Self Through a Cross-Cultural Space

Mary Ann Chacko
University of British Columbia Bend It Like Beckham revolves around a middleclass, Indo-British, Sikh girl and her struggle to beat the odds to play professional football. Analyzing the lm using postcolonial theories of diaspora helps reveal the limitations of an understanding of culture as homogenous and static. Implications for multicultural classrooms are discussed. Historically, the term diaspora refers to communities of people dislocated from their native homelands through migration, immigration, or exile as a consequence of colonial expansion (Braziel & Mannur, 2003, p. 4). In the lm, for instance, Mr. Bhamras (Anupam Kher) ancestors were part of the Indian diapsora who were taken to East Africa as laborers by the British during colonial rule. Mr. Bhamra had since migrated to England. Such multiple mass movements of people have led to increasing diversity within nation-states, given rise to multicultural societies, and made cross-cultural interactions inevitable, facts often mirrored by our classrooms. Through this reading of Bend It Like Beckham, I suggest that this lm can be a powerful and relevant pedagogical tool in a multicultural classroom. While there have been deliberate attempts to transform a Eurocentric curriculum through the inclusion of culturally diverse texts, including lms such as Bend it Like Beckham (Sharma, 2006), cultural difference, particularly third-world cultures, continues to be portrayed as being patriarchal, traditional, homogenous, and as deliberately choosing ghettoization over assimilation in multicultural societies. By engaging with Indian diasporas negotiation of Indianness as well as the moments and processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences (Bhabha, 1994, p.1), this paper attempts to refute the myth of a coherent and authentic culture as well as the perception of people of color as the product of their cultural origins preserved uncontaminated by history (Spivak, 1991/1996; also Bhabha, 1994). In the rst section of the paper, I examine the gendered nature of the diaspora to highlight continuities between the way in which home or the private sphere was constructed within nationalist discourse in colonial India and in the postcolonial diasporic space. The second section explores the uidity inherent in cultures, allowing them to be contested, in this case, by the younger generations of Indian diapora. The nal section engages with the depiction of hybrid identities in the lm and the possibilities they offer for challenging patriarchy, stereotypes about Indians and Indian culture, racism, and the depiction of whites as a monolithic Other.

Introduction This paper proposes to theorize the articulation of diasporic identities in the lm Bend It Like Beckham directed by the Kenyan-born, Indo (Punjabi1 )-British lmmaker Gurinder Chadha. Jasminder Jess Bhamra (Parminder Nagra), the protagonist of the lm, is the youngest daughter of a Punjabi, Sikh2 family living in Southall, England, a large vibrant community of South Asians. Jess idolizes David Beckham, the British football celebrity, and plays football at school, in the park, and even in the kitchen. Her passion for football, however, forces her to confront patriarchal stereotyping at home and racism on the eld. The lm, a feel-good comedy, tells the story of Jess struggle and victory, a victory which meant that she was going to play professional football. The title Bend It Like Beckham refers to David Beckhams ability to kick the ball in a way that it curves and bends, confusing the goalie as to the trajectory of the ball. Chadha uses this as a metaphor for the ways in which girls like Jess attempt to bend the rules prescribed by their cultural backgrounds to achieve their goal (Chadha, in Morales, 2003).
Correspondence should be sent to Mary Ann Chacko, c/o Mosarrap H. Khan, 19 University Place, Department of English, New York University, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: maryannchacko.khan@gmail.com 1 Punjabi is derived from Punjab, the name of a state in India and Pakistan. It was divided between the two countries during the Partition of India in 1947. Punjabi is a geographical, cultural as well as linguistic identity of those who live or trace their origins to Punjab. 2 A Sikh is a follower of Sikhism, a religion that originated in the Punjab region.

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The Womens Question Jess craze for football unsettled the Bhamra family as it made imminent the invasion of foreign cultural practices into their domestic space. As Jess confesses to Joe (Jonathan Rhys Myers), her Irish coach, They want to protect me. . . . This is taking me away from everything they know. Home in the lives of the diaspora is a metaphor for their cultural relationship with the mother country, in this case India, and is one of those spaces where India is innitely reproduced (Ghosh, 1989). Hence the urgent need to protect the home is symbolic of the immigrants need to safeguard their cultural autonomy. This attempt to protect the domestic space from the intrusion of a dominant culture recalls aspects of the nationalist discourse in colonial India. Partha Chatterjee (1989, 1993) gives us crucial insight into the cultural dimensions of Indian nationalism as it evolved in the early and mid 19th century Bengal,3 the cradle of the Indian nationalist movement. The Indian nationalist movement, like movements for independence in other colonies, faced a paradox. The only way to freedom from European colonial rule lay in the colonys ability to organize itself into a modern nation state, which was itself a product of European thought. The middleclass Hindu intellectuals, spearheading the nationalist struggle, realized that to overcome western colonial domination it was imperative to transform the traditional nature of the material/outer sphere through the adoption of western models of economy, statecraft, science, and technology. They were determined, however, to safeguard the superior spiritual essence of the East from western materialism. In daily life, the home represented this spiritual sphere, the inner, essential identity of the East (Chatterjee, 1989, p. 239) which the European powers had failed to colonize. And like binaries of masculine/feminine, strong/weak, and active/passive, the inner/outer or the home/world binary too was gendered. The woman became a metaphor for the sanctity of the home or the inner sphere while the outer sphere was a male domain. Crisis set in, however, when it became obvious that the home could not for long remain insulated from the transformations taking place in the world. It was conceded that the home and, by implication, the woman will have to be modernized without sacricing her spiritual core. Describing the construction of the new woman Chatterjee (1989) writes,
Once the essential femininity of women was xed in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities,

they could go to school, travel in public conveyances, watch public entertainment programs, and in time even take up employment outside the home. But the spiritual signs of her femininity were now clearly marked: in her dress, her eating habits, her social demeanor, her religiosity. . . . The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination (pp. 247248).

3 Bengal is a region situated in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent. During the Partition of India in 1947 Bengal was divided into the state of West Bengal in India and East Bengal in Pakistan. The latter has since gained its independence to become Bangladesh.

What is the relevance of the problematic relationship between the womens question (Chatterjee, 1989) and Indian nationalism for our understanding of the post-colonial immigrant situation? According to Ram (2005), the middle-class, immigrant experience recalls the crisis faced by the middle-class in pre-independent India, because the existential crisis of migration (Ram, 2005, p. 130) compels the diaspora to represent ones culture to an alien audience as well as bequeath it to ones own children. In Bend It Like Beckham, the Bhamra home is replete with signicant and essential markers of Indian cultural identity such as Indian food, Indian television programs, the Punjabi language, religious icons, and heated discussions regarding the codes of conduct for Indian girls. As Kamdar (2004, pp.7879) opines, For us, there was no escaping India. . . . In our home, India came to us. The resemblance between the cultural domain of the middle-class in colonial India and that of the post-colonial diaspora is most acutely experienced by women in the context of gender relations. In the lm, Jess passion for football plunges the Bhamra family into a crisis. Jess breaking away from tradition to play football, running around in shorts showing her bare legs to 70,000 people (Mrs. Bhamra played by Shaheen Khan) instead of behaving like a proper woman (Mr. Bhamra), was threatening to destroy the sanctity of their home and their cultural identity. In this context even the efforts of the well-intentioned Joe, Jess Irish coach, who comes to the Bhamra home to convince the parents to let their talented daughter join the team, becomes suspect. Mr. Bhamra snubs him saying, I think we know better our daughters potential. Here I venture to suggest that the encounter between Joe and Mr. Bhamra might have re-opened history (Ram, 2005) for the latter. In other words, Joes attempts might have brought home the memory of the colonizer who, in his mission to civilize the irrational and orthodox Indian, took it upon himself to liberate the oppressed and long-suffering Indian woman. The existential crisis of the diaspora, its relationship with the past, and its womens question are also shaped by its reception in the New World. The New Worlds they

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inhabit fail to give them, according to Radhakrishnan (2003), a sense of being a rst-class citizen and instead tag them as different owing to their skin color, their family background, and other ethnic and unassimilated traits (p. 122). These markers of difference ensure that the third world diaspora remain visible minorities and immigrants even generations later and often continue to exhibit characteristics of rst generation immigrants such as ghettoization (Bannerji, 2000; Worrall, 2008). In Bend It Like Beckham, Mr. Bhamras Indian consciousness is, to a large extent, shaped by his experiences as an immigrant in Britain. Mr. Bhamra grew up in Nairobi where he was the best fast bowler in his school and their cricket team had even won the East African cup. His attempts at playing cricket in England, however, were thwarted by racial prejudice. As he explains to Joe, But when I came to this country, nothing. I was not allowed to play in any of the teams. And these bloody goras [whites] in their club houses made fun of my turban and sent me off packing. . . . None of our boys are in any of the football leagues. Do you think they will let our girls? Thus for him, to be an Indian and Sikh in England was to be marginalized and discriminated against by the white majority, which in turn served to deeply etch the polarity of Self and the Other in his consciousness. Women in the diaspora pay a greater price as a racialized immigrant identity indenitely delays the resolution of the womens question. It jeopardizes their emancipation because in the guise of protecting our women in a foreign land or what Gupta (1988, p. 27) refers to as the ideology of protection, patriarchal oppression persists and delays consolidated efforts to ght oppression. It would, however, be reductive to conclude that (Indian) culture is inherently oppressive and antagonistic to womens rights (Tamale, 2008). What is crucial is the recognition of womens agency and the understanding that cultures are constructed and contested rather than given, xed, and consensual.

Problematizing Indianness A diaspora draws sustenance from common historical experiences and shared cultural codes (Hall, 2003, p. 234). Stuart Hall (2003) in his discussion of AfroCaribbean diasporas in the West names this shared culture as Caribbeanness or what we, in the context of this paper, might call Indianness. As described in the previous section, an essentialized notion of Indianness and Indian culture might be useful for political and strategic reasons (Spivak, 1985/1996) but Indianness as lived, however, is hardly a cohesive, consensual, and bounded marker of identity. Lowes (2003) insight into Asian-American cultures illustrates this point. She

points out that the cohesion of Asian-American cultures is complicated and made unstable by a different past, different notions of what it means to be an Indian or Chinese and female/male, by intergenerationality, by varying degrees of identication with and relation to a homeland, [and] by different events of assimilation to and distinction from majority culture (Lowe, 2003, p. 437). For instance, Mr. Bhamras confrontation with racism might result in his deriving greater sustenance from his sense of Indianness than a person like Jess who has grown up in a society with state-fostered tolerance of racial differences. Initially in the lm, Jess notion of Indian culture and Indianness is represented primarily as a vertical generational model (Lowe, 2003, p. 135) of culture, handed down by her parents. As she laments to her Indian friend Tony (Ameet Chana), Anything I want is not Indian or good for them. Jess nds the Indian identity that is thrust upon her by her parents oppressive as it is one that does not accommodate her aspiration to play football, her inability to make round chapattis4 and aloo gobi,5 and according to which she is not a proper woman. She nds it particularly restrictive because of her having grown up in a society with different expectations and constructions of gender roles. In the course of the lm, however, this vertical generational model of culture is contested by horizontal relationships (Lowe, 2003, p. 135) across gender, sexuality, and race. The relationship between Jess and Tony who are second or third generation Indian diaspora, particularly the scene where Tony confesses his homosexuality to Jess, is a case in point. Jess realization of the mutual attraction between Joe, her Irish coach, and herself leaves her confused and distressed. The Indianness that she has internalized in the context of her home tells her that she needs to have an Indian boyfriend. In an attempt to deny her attraction for Joe, she approaches Tony, asking him if they could go out together. It is in this context that Tony confesses his homosexuality. Jess is taken aback and the only response she can manage is, But youre Indian! As the scene concludes, Jess tells Tony that his being gay is okay with her and Tony admits that Jess fancying her gora coach is also okay with him. As Tony tells her earlier in the scene, Jess, you cant plan who you fall for, it just happens. Tonys identity as simultaneously Indian and gay enables the lm to contest the dominant discourse about Indianness and South-Asian sexuality. As Gopinath (2003) opines, the representation of homosexuality in South-Asian cultural productions resists hegemonic and patriarchal nationalistic discourses that glosses over nonreproductive sexualities. It also, according to her, serves
is a at unleavened bread made of wheat our. Gobi is an Indian dish made of allo (potato) and gobi (cauliower). It is a popular accompaniment to chapatti.
5 Allo 4 Chapatti

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to dispel the myth regarding South Asian sexualities as being different from, inferior to, and less complex than Western constructions of sexualities. The lm also attempts to resist and counter other stereotypes such as the representation of South Asian diaspora as conservative and backward (as described by Jess teammate) by highlighting the fact that a conservative attitude is not necessarily an Indian thing (as described by Juliet Jules, Jesss British friend and teammate, played by Keira Knightly). Tonys anxiety to keep his homosexuality a secret and Jules mothers (Juliet Stevenson) paranoia, stemming from her suspicion that Jess and Jules share a homosexual relationship, reveal the discomture aroused by same-sex sexual practices and identities in the majority as well as minority cultures. Jess with her love for football is a character who enables Chadha to re-script the notion of an Indian girl. As Joe admits, Ive never seen an Indian girl in the football. Jules mother has xed notions about Indians and Indian culture. During her rst meeting with Jess, she makes this plea, Teach my daughter something about your culture, especially respect for elders. In her attempt to make her football loving daughter see sense, she continues to Jess, I expect your parents are xing you up with a handsome young doctor. The look of disbelief that washes across her face when Jules informs her that Jess is in her football team, eloquently reveals her incredulity at her assumptions being proven wrong. Such instances, when stereotypes and essentializing notions are thwarted, have the potential to expose and illuminate the sheer heterogeneity of the diverse social forces always repressed into the margin by the monologism of dominant discoursesdiscourses of domination (Mercer, 2003, pp. 257258). The lm also underscores that both Jess and Jules, despite occupying different rungs in the hierarchy of power relations, have to ght against the traditional roles conferred on young women. Jess initially envies Jules believing that, being white, her parents must be extremely supportive of her decision to play football. Things arent very different however in Jess Indo-British home and Jules British family. The latters mother is under perpetual fear that her addiction to football might prevent her from getting a boyfriend since no boy wants to go out with a girl who has got bigger muscles than him and Mrs. Bhamra is anxious that Jess might remain a perpetual spinster as no family will want a daughterin-law who can run around all day but cant make round chapattis. Thus, both women blatantly collude with the patriarchal discourse and its stereotypical roles assigned to women establishing that patriarchal attitudes are not the exclusive domain of men. . . (Seshagiri, 2003, p. 181). The fathers, on the other hand, are portrayed as avid sportsmen who turn out to be their daughters greatest support. Initially, Mr. Bhamra does try to dissuade

Jess but eventually her dedication to football and the recognition she receives as a footballer wins him over. To his wifes protests he responds, I dont want her to make the same mistake her father made of accepting life, of accepting situations. I want her to ght. While there are similarities in the lives of Jess and Jules, Hussain (2005) points to a crucial difference between them. Unlike Jules, Jess experiences the burden of negotiating the boundary between her home and the world forcing her to bend the rules and even lie to her family about the extent of her involvement in a womens football club. Until she is caught, that is.

. . . Neither the One . . . Nor the Other . . . But Something Else Besides . . . (Bhabha, 1994, p. 28) Bend It Like Beckham is a strident criticism of essentialization and the xing of identities into binary polarities of self and other. No single identity can sufciently articulate the concept of self as each individual occupies multiple subject positions or identities simultaneously. Let us, for instance, examine the label South-Asian. While it does serve the purpose of empowering and uniting the diverse Asian communities in their new homes under a common marker (Koshy & Chadha, 1996), it also threatens to blur and suppress the differences among the various Asian groups by pasting the homogenous SouthAsian label onto them (Lowe, 2003). The impossibility of being either the One . . . or the Other (Bhabha, 1994, p. 28) might be acutely experienced by the diaspora who, on the one hand, might nd markers such as Asian or Punjabi too limiting (Koshy & Chadha, 1996) while, on the other hand, their displaced selves are denied the wholeness of a British or American identity and thus remain imperfectly British (Ghosh, 1989) or American. The constantly recurring image of the airplane in ight throughout the lm might be interpreted as a metaphor not just for the movement of peoples, and hence the diaspora, but also for identities in motionhyphenated identities that occupy an in-between space. Similarly the various relationships in the lm, such as between Jess and her parents, Jess and Tony, or the interactions between Jess and Jules mom serve to highlight the impatience of the diasporic subject to slip past pre-conceived expectations and assumptions about Asian/South Asian/Indian in the dominant discourses. It is evident that Jess often nds the baggage associated with her Indian identity cumbersome. At the same time her literal and metaphorical distance from India enables Jess not to be overwhelmed by her Indianness, thereby making it easier for her to negotiate the us and them divide (Ray, 2004). She challenges and subverts essentialized notions about an Indian girl, and thus gives

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rise to a narrative which thwarts the binary hierarchy of center and margin: the margin refuses its place as the Other (Parmar, 1990, p. 101). Such a decentering involving the refusal to be assimilated by the center as well as resisting being categorized as an essentialized Other gives rise to a hybrid third space enabling the emergence of other positions and new alliances (Bhabha, in Rutherford, 1990b). I thus see hybridization as an ongoing process, a journey rather than an arrival. Jess hybrid condition does not, however, imply that she ceases to be vulnerable to persecution in the guise of racism. Racial prejudice seems to be a reality which Third World diasporas will be forced to encounter as long as they inhabit territories where people despise them for what they are rather than what they do (Jordon, in conversation with Parmar, 1990). The racism that Jess confronts on the football eld leaves her speechless and visibly shaken. A white girl in the opposite team pulls her down by her shirt and calls her Paki.6 The only reaction Jess can manage to this racial slur is to get up and push the girl away, for which Jess is shown the yellow card. I nd the fact that Jess has no words to resist her experience of oppression highly symbolic and signicant. The discourse of self-articulation, which Jess seems to lack, is imperative for establishing, representing, and negotiating ones identity through potentially antagonistic (Bhabha, in Rutherford, 1990b) multicultural spaces. For, when the margin resists and discovers its own words [my italics], it not only decenters the dominant discourses and identities that have suppressed it, but also transforms its own meaning (Rutherford, 1990a, p. 23). At the same time, however, Jess silence may also be interpreted as a conscious stance by which she resists and refuses to be sucked into the vortex of a discourse of binaries. As Gandhi (1998) opines, in todays globalized scenario it is imperative that the discourse of self-representation be one which paves the way for solidarity rather than multiplying the existent discourses of binaries. To enable a discourse of solidarity, it is crucial that the diverse, often mutually antagonistic identities discover the need for collaboration (Gandhi, 1998). In Bend It Like Beckham, one comes across interactions that signify the possibility of forging alliances across difference. After Jess is given the yellow ticket, Joe, her coach, shouts at her for having gotten into a row. Jess cries out in indignation, She called me a Paki, but I guess you would not understand that would you? To this Joe emphatically replies, Jess, Im Irish. Of course I understand what it feels like. His reply serves to problematize the representations of whites as a monolithic Other. There is a scene in the lm where Pinky, Jess sister, ares up
is a short form for Pakistani. The word acquired racial overtones in 1960s when the British tabloid used it to refer to immigrants from South Asia.
6 Paki

when she suspects that Jess might be in love with Joe. She is worried that Jess will be stared at if she marries the English bloke. When Jess tries to tell Pinky that Joe is not English but Irish, she says, Ya, well they are all the bloody same thing to them, isnt it? Joes response to Jess, however, reveals the power struggles within the white nation. Though the signicance of their experiences is different due to specicitic in terms of race, culture, history, and gender, Joes reference to the racism he confronts on account of his Irish identity enables Jess and Joe to take comfort in each others ability to comprehend the pain of racial prejudice. The collaboration between Jess and Jules on the eld might also be regarded as a metaphor for alliances across difference. It is the tactics of pass and play which the two have mastered between them that fetches the goal for their team in almost all the instances. As June Jordan, the Black American poet and essayist, opines in Parmar (1990), no change is guaranteed by black people or black women organizing themselves into a partnership in misery. The need is for an active partnership for change between blacks and whites, for the latter are in a position where they can alter the socio-economic arrangements that have guaranteed the continuity of racism. But such a formation of alliances will be possible only when we learn to acknowledge and negotiate differences as well as recognize the hybridity and indeterminacy of ones own identity. Conclusion Reading Bend It Like Beckham using postcolonial theories of diaspora can be valuable for teachers reaching out to students in multicultural classrooms. Are our pedagogical beliefs inuenced by the notion of a people having a culture? Do we perceive our students as shaped and limited by their cultural origins? The time is ripe for introspection and for multicultural classrooms to move away from a fetishization of culture as a bounded, xed, and hence knowable marker of identity. The lm illustrates that we seek xity of identities in times of crisis and change. It highlights that lives in multicultural societies are not lived on the basis of permanent differences but entail horizontal relationships across differences that have the potential for transforming identities. Shifting the focus of multicultural classrooms from xities to the uidity of identities might enable us to explore the power of pluralism while acknowledging the dark sides of a multicultural nation. Acknowledgments An earlier version of this paper was presented at the National Seminar on Nation, Region and Ideology in Film (2007) organized by the Department of English,
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University of Hyderabad, India. I wish to express my appreciation to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Dr. Francisco Rios, Senior Associate Editor of Multicultural Perspectives, for his encouragement, helpful editorial ideas, and the opportunity to publish this article. I am grateful to my teachers, Dr. Syed Mujeebuddin, University of Hyderabad, and Dr. E. Wayne Ross and Dr. Hartej Gill, University of British Columbia, for their unfailing support and constructive comments. I also wish to thank my friends Pooja Parmar, Gurjinder Hans, Marnie Boullard, Joanne Martin, and Mosarrap H. Khan for their generosity, patience, and critical feedback on drafts of this paper. References
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