Bangladeshi Women in Bricklane
BANGLADESHI WOMEN IN BRICK LANE: A STUDY OF MONICA ALI’S NOVEL AND SARAH GAVRON’S FILM
“I always said I will not marry and be sent far away. I will go no farther than these paddy fields. But our mother told us we must not run from our fate. What cannot be changed must be borne. The test of life is to endure.”
Through such representation of gender and focus on history and dislocation, Monica Ali has extended the migrant voice in British fiction. In her stunningly accomplished debut novel Brick Lane (2003) which also got adapted in a film four years later, Ali tries to reconstitute the traditional Bangladeshi culture in a London East End setting. She uses her characters to explore the positioning of Bangladeshi women within Britain, as the novel focuses on their social relations inside and outside the home.
This paper aims to explore whether Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) and Sarah Gavron’s controversial screen adaptation of the same name (2007) can open up avenues to discuss a new, if problematic, inclusion of Bangladeshi women in the transnational world; and also to gauze the similarities and dissimilarities within the two.
Both the novel and the film created a controversy among the Bangladeshi community living in London because they found problems with Monica Ali’s negative portrayal of their community members as being illiterate and backward, which they considered insulting. They claimed that the novel encouraged “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes”.
Brick Lane is the story of the Bangladeshi Muslim community living in the East End of London and in particular, that of Nazneen, her husband Chanu and Hasina, Nazneen’s good looking sister, who resides in Bangladesh and who was disowned by her family for flouting the traditional arranged marriage system which she did by eloping with her lover and marrying him at the age of sixteen. Hasina’s chaotic day to day life in Dhaka is revealed to us through
“I always said I will not marry and be sent far away. I will go no farther than these paddy fields. But our mother told us we must not run from our fate. What cannot be changed must be borne. The test of life is to endure.”
Through such representation of gender and focus on history and dislocation, Monica Ali has extended the migrant voice in British fiction. In her stunningly accomplished debut novel Brick Lane (2003) which also got adapted in a film four years later, Ali tries to reconstitute the traditional Bangladeshi culture in a London East End setting. She uses her characters to explore the positioning of Bangladeshi women within Britain, as the novel focuses on their social relations inside and outside the home.
This paper aims to explore whether Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) and Sarah Gavron’s controversial screen adaptation of the same name (2007) can open up avenues to discuss a new, if problematic, inclusion of Bangladeshi women in the transnational world; and also to gauze the similarities and dissimilarities within the two.
Both the novel and the film created a controversy among the Bangladeshi community living in London because they found problems with Monica Ali’s negative portrayal of their community members as being illiterate and backward, which they considered insulting. They claimed that the novel encouraged “pro-racist, anti-social stereotypes”.
Brick Lane is the story of the Bangladeshi Muslim community living in the East End of London and in particular, that of Nazneen, her husband Chanu and Hasina, Nazneen’s good looking sister, who resides in Bangladesh and who was disowned by her family for flouting the traditional arranged marriage system which she did by eloping with her lover and marrying him at the age of sixteen. Hasina’s chaotic day to day life in Dhaka is revealed to us through
Cited: Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. Black Swan. Great Britain. (2003). Print. Brick Lane. Dir. Sarah Gavron. Perf. Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik and Christopher Simpson. Ruby Films.(2007). Film. Lea, Richard and Lewis, Paul. “Local protests over Brick Lane film”. Gaurdian. (Monday 17 July,2006). Web. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jul/17/film.uk Hussain, Yasmin. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. England. (2005). Print. McLeod, John. The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Routledge. London. (2007). Print. Mukherjee, Meenakshi and Trivedi, Harish. Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory, Text and Context. Indian Institute of Advanced Study. Shimla. (1989). Print. Sinha, Sunita. Post-Colonial Women Writers: New Perspectives. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd. New Delhi. (2008). Print. ----------------------- Nazneen and Karim consummating their affair. Nazneen and Hasina in their childhood.