NRI filmmaker casts aside cliches about Indian immigrants

“I want to portray what life is actually like for 20-something Indian immigrants here,” said Indian-born, Maryland-raised director Shilpa Priya Jagadeesh, who is also known as Priyabharati Joshi. “The romantic struggle of not wanting our parents to arrange a marriage for us because that’s not the environment we grew up in, but also of not having a lot of experience finding someone on our own because our parents restricted our dating when we were younger. It’s kind of ‘Bridget Jones meets Bollywood.’ ”

So rather than setting the film’s show-stopper dance numbers in what Jagadeesh calls “the Indian movie version of Washington” — marble monuments, ethnic Indian restaurants and sari shops — she has chosen the sort of backdrops against which life really plays out for many first- and second-generation immigrants here. “I’m not setting this in Washington because of the pretty architecture,” said Jagadeesh, 29, who has worked on television movies in India. She aims to correct Indian misconceptions about immigrant life in the US.

“There’s this stereotype in Indian movies that Indian girls raised here are morally debauched and end up being rude to their parents, promiscuous and losing their values. Also, the women characters are either self-sacrificing mother types who are put on a pedestal, or jezebel vamps to be reviled. Well, what about the rest of us who are just trying to live our lives?” she asks.

Of course, there are already several well-received non-musical films that explore the nuances and contradictions of Indian immigrant life, including The Namesake and Monsoon Wedding.

But Jagadeesh said the Indian-language song-and-dance masala genre that is the staple of commercial Indian cinema is a better vehicle to spread her message.

To cut costs, Jagadeesh has drawn on the Washington area’s tightly knit South Indian community. Dozens of friends of friends have offered her their businesses, apartments and homes to use as shoot locations free of charge. Jagadeesh’s own parents agreed to put up several of the actors in their Rockville house and to allow Jagadeesh to turn their large finished basement into a production office.

The scene there on a recent evening had the feel of an unusually efficient student film project. In one corner, Jagadeesh, who looked younger than her years in black corduroy jeans and owlish glasses — was deep in consultation with her sound engineer over various microphone options. A few feet away, producer Manan Singh Katohora sat in front of a computer screen, watching a rough cut of a dance sequence the crew had filmed in India.

Jagadeesh’s mother, Jaya Shree, 55, a gene therapist with the National Institutes of Health, walked past the actors, carrying a bowl of chips with a look of resigned good humour. This was not the future that she and her husband, a pharmacist with the Food and Drug Administration, had envisioned for their daughter when they moved to the US three decades ago, she said. Like many Indian immigrant parents, they hoped that by her late 20s Jagadeesh would have an engineering or a medical degree and a budding family with a fellow Indian from a good family. But like some of the characters in her movie, Jagadeesh always resisted her parents’ attempts to introduce her to eligible young men.

“One time, she even got hold of one of their e-mails and wrote, ‘Look, my mom is trying to get me to marry but this is not the right time, so please don’t follow through with this meeting,” recalled Shree, shaking her head at the memory.

Then a trip to India midway through college inadvertently led Jagadeesh to a job with a Bangalore television production company. She was hooked. She said, “I’m not averse to doing American cinema, but the song-and-dance culture is so engrained in me that I feel like it would be boring.”

Meanwhile, Shree said that getting a first-hand look at Jagadeesh’s passion and skill at pulling together such a complex production was helping her overcome her initial horror at her daughter’s career choice.