The dark humour of Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach This 1993 film about a group of British-Indian women on holiday uses comedy to navigate themes of inherited cultural baggage. When Meera Syal was a child, her family would holiday in Blackpool. In the early 1990s the British-Indian playwright and actress told the then Channel 4 film commissioner Karin Bamborough that she’d like to write a film (her first) based on those trips to the seaside. Legend has it, Bamborough said yes on the spot. That film became 1993’s
Bhaji on the Beach, a dark comedy about an intergenerational gaggle of Indian women, and a subversion of the “British” summer holiday. It was the feature debut of a young director named Gurinder Chadha, and was nominated for Best British Film at the Baftas in 1995.