The publicists of Bride & Prejudice do not tire of telling the world that Gurinder Chadha's new film is "Bollywood-meets-Hollywood in a perfect match" fare. But the director herself seems to be unwittingly at odds with that assertion. "Bride & Prejudice is a British film with a nod to popular Hindi cinema," she insists. So, does that make the Aishwarya Rai-starrer Bollywood enough?

I guess not. Bride & Prejudice, of course, has an array of Indian characters - those living in India, some residing in the UK, others denizens of the US. The film also has several song-and-dance routines, including one on the streets of Amritsar that has virtually the whole town joining in. Moreover, the female protagonist of the film, Lalita Bakshi, is every inch an Indian. But being Indian in today's cross-cultural context is not necessarily being merely Bollywood.

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding and Chadha's own Bend It Like Beckham, both great global success stories, did borrow some elements from Bollywood masala movies, but they remained firmly rooted in an international sensibility. That indeed was the reason why they travelled so well across borders. It would really be in the best interests of Bride & Prejudice if it were not too overtly an imitation of a Bollywood blockbuster.

Chadha, on her part, feels that her new film is well removed from Bollywood potboilers. She would, she ways, love to watch Bride & Prejudice at a public screening in the very Mumbai movie hall where she remembers watching Raja Hindustani some years ago. "I make films about Indians living in the UK. It would be wonderful to know how Indians here react to the humour and drama in my new film," she says.

"For all its apparent Bollywood trappings, Bride & Prejudice is designed essentially as a foreign film," she asserts. "Yes, in a sense, it is an attempt to make the Bollywood idiom accessible to the rest of the world." But the film, she adds, is a tribute as much to Bollywood as it is to all the Hollywood musicals that she grew up watching.

-Saibal Chatterjee