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OTHER STORIES RELATED TO ENTERTAINMENT ... & The Boys

Take a conventional upbringing, a risky enterprise like filmmaking and a group of Asian women. Throw them together in equal measure, garnish with a generous dash of creativity and you have a desi dish that's better than chicken tikka masala.

SURE CONFIDENCE: Chadha

And the Spice Girls who're cooking up a storm? In England, Gurinder Chadha's just top scored at the box office last week, making £2 million with Bend It Like Beckham, a cross-cultural tale of two girls' desire to play football like their idol David Beckham. The writer of Chadha's first film, Bhaji on the Beach, comedy star Meera Syal is preparing for the release of the film based on her best-selling novel, Anita and Me. And in the US, Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding has become an art house hit while producer Shameela Bakhsh recently won a nomination for Best Short Film (Live Action) at the Oscars. It wasn't as hyped as Aamir Khan's Lagaan nomination for Best Foreign Film but it was no less noteworthy.

KICKERS: Parminder Nagra, Kera Knightley in Bend It...

So what exactly is happening? Sabrina Dhawan, who scripted Monsoon Wedding for Nair, says: "It's a very Asian thing that though your family may disagree they still do back you fully. This gives you courage to take more risks. I have felt this in comparison to my classmates. I am always secure that I have a home to go to and this has allowed me to take chances.''

Indeed. For instance, Chadha, who was born in Kenya, raised in London and is married to a Japanese American, has never felt disadvantaged by her ethnicity. Her multicultural identity has never been a "confrontation". "I prefer to call it a dance, a new manoeuvre. It creates a symbiosis, a new culture that's neither British nor English, but has a bit of both,'' she says.

NARINDER DHAMI, Author, Bend It ... "I assumed it'd be a small British-Asian film. I really enjoyed writing Bend It ... As a children's book author, it was difficult dealing with someone else's plot and character but writing about the parents was fun."

It's evident in the confidence with which she released Bend It Like Beckham in the UK: 450 prints nationwide, 445 more than for her first feature. It's evident too in her joy at seeing posters of her film on the back of buses plying through Oxford Street. After all, when her father came to England from Kenya in the 1960s, he couldn't get a job at Barclays because he wore a turban.

As an excited Chadha says, "This is the first mainstream film I have made and I am very happy with the result. Earlier I made only art house films."

It's this willingness to experiment that drives London-based Syal too. In a recent interview, she said: "As immigrants, my father and his friends would meet and have this air of unfulfilled potential. They would describe their lives back in India and the lives that they had now, and it would make me weep."

The Goodness Gracious Me star put a lot of her own growing up in a mining village in the West Midlands into Anita and Me, her first novel. It will now be a movie starring Lynn Redgrave and Kathy Burke and she remains fiercely proud of its "resonance".

SABRINA DHAWAN, Scriptwriter "Whether it is Fire or Monsoon Wedding women make films which tend to be personal. We didn't expect Monsoon Wedding to be such an international hit. It has been a triumph for telling stories that we want to tell."

Not that it's been easy for women like her to break through. Syal may have loved having "two cultures" but she still found it difficult to adapt to being an actor, coming from an upbringing which prizes security. As she put it recently: "Everything about the immigrant outlook is planned."

It's the same for the US-based Bakhsh, whose Speed for Thespians, directed by Kalman Apple, was nominated this year. She says: "I grew up Muslim and a woman, and have been keenly aware of the subjugation of women. But my struggle is both as an artiste and as a woman. I am working in the context of an industry that is male dominated, Caucasian and then there is the issue of my colour."

Yet, instead of consciously trying to evade issues of race and colour, these women have decided to embrace them with irony. Like Nair's edgy look at an ostentatious Punjabi wedding, the climax of which she shot in a Gaudi swimming pool in a wealthy industrialist friend's farmhouse.

It has given them the confidence to work on subjects that are not necessarily "mainstream". And succeed. Dhawan says it's because women filmmakers, whether it's Nair or Deepa Mehta, tend to make films that are more "personal".

ARRIVED! Nair; a Monsoon Wedding party in Delhi

NEW RELEASES: Anita and Me Directed by: Meera Syal Hysterical Blindness Directed by: Mira Nair Mystic Masseur Directed by: Ismail Merchant Bollywood Hollywood Directed by: Deepa Mehta The Warriort Directed by: Asif Kapadia Four Feathers Directed by: Shekhar Kapur

Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com also votes for them when he says: "I think there is a lot of talent among the women writers and directors. When a film succeeds, it gives them more power in the industry. It then helps them open the doors for some other women in the industry. Sabrina is a very good example."

Dhawan agrees. After her student film featuring Nandita Das, Saanj (for which she received the Angelus Award for Audience Impact) , she received offers, but all sought that she break away from the Indian niche, and became commercial. "Now, after the success of Monsoon Wedding, I don't face this so much,'' she says.

In the process, filmmakers such as Nair and Chadha are changing the definition of what being Indian or English or American means. Nair has often said how she was "gobsmacked" by the fact that upper middle class Indian teenagers drink. The young Indians she portrays in Monsoon Wedding could just as well live in Australia or California.

Chadha has done the same in Bend It Like Beckham. A savvy clubbing of the English obsession with football and the Indian obsession with marriage, it rides the country's flavour of the season-multiracialism. And if the theme is universal, so is the hypocrisy. So while the Indians are shown cancelling a wedding because the younger sister is found kissing a gora (white man) at a bus stand, the English are shown as disapproving of a girl with biceps bigger than her boyfriend's.

What has made Chadha truly happy is that the movie has been accepted as completely British. And then, she says: " We've managed to change the definition of what being 'British' means."

She talks about flourishing marriages of melody such as bhangra acid and bhangra house. "Sometimes this stuff gets exported to India and everyone there thinks it's homespun. It's not. Remember, A.R. Rahman came much after the work of Bally Sagoo," she says.

The confidence to branch out comes with this mixed identity. So a Toronto-based Deepa Mehta can easily switch from a very American story like Camilla in 1995 to her incomplete trilogy or even her new film, Bollywood Hollywood. And a New York-based Nair can move genres as well as cultures: from the love song to India of Monsoon Wed-ding to the HBO movie Hysterical Blindness with Uma Thurman and Gena Rowlands.

Hysterical Blindness will be screened in London on May 5 at the National Film Theater. The story is a working class drama set in 1987 in the bars of New Jersey. "It's an untold story of what lengths we go to in order to feel desirable," she says. The film is nothing like the popular American sitcom Sex and the City. "The story is about a highly strung character played by Uma who is living with a working class mum, who unexpectedly finds love, and that creates tension."

This back-and-forth filmmaking doesn't always make these auteurs popular with critics. Chadha maintains that liberal newspapers in England may have written largely negative reviews because they can't accept a feel-good Asian comedy. Her film suffers in comparison with East is East because she says Damien O'Donnell's movie was about a mixed race Pakistani family and the filmmaker was English. The problem, says Chadha, "is that the British media expects expats to make films that focus on arranged marriages and other problems in the Asian community''.

But Bend It Like Beckham, like Nair's Monsoon Wedding, has also proved that you can have an Asian star cast in a film and still make money. Monsoon Wedding grossed over $6 million in the US and over £2 million in the UK in over four weeks. With positive reviews and continued word-of-mouth recommendations, the figures look set to increase quite substantially. At the moment the film is not even opened wide in the UK. It's being screened at 175 screens and is going to 500 screens in two weeks. According to Screen, it may be among the top five foreign films of all times.

"I try not to take it seriously," laughs Nair. "I live in New York and here it has run for a few months." Nair had no great ambition to make a film that would gross millions. Her main objective in making Monsoon Wedding was to prove that a "film can be made in 30 days without millions of dollars. I wanted to go back to the budget of my first film, Salaam Bombay. Sabrina, my teaching assistant at Columbia University, and I talked about making a film about our world, our families."

But to make a movie in 30 days was not an easy task. The ease is deceptive. A lot of planning, craft and discipline has gone into it, she says. "I wanted the film to make the audience feel like guests at any wedding," she says. The film's budget was a mere $ 1.5 million.

Like Bend It Like Beckham, Monsoon Wedding too benefited a lot from word-of-mouth. "These days it's not enough to make a good film, it's equally important to have a good marketing strategy. The film has to be good and has to create a buzz," says Nair.

About Lagaan, which was a good film and had an effective marketing strategy, she says: "I was very happy that it was nominated for the Oscars. The honour is in being nominated. Monsoon Wedding will be sent next year. It's eligible in all categories for next year." However, winning awards is not on top of the agenda. "A cup runneth over. I am more interested in seeking the hearts of people," she says.

Yes, like the Spice Girls, that is just what she and the others really, really want.

-with Anil Padmanabhan in New York and Anshul Avijit in Delhi