Improvement, Development, and Consumer Culture in Jane Austen and Popular Indian Cinema

TLDR: Kao as mentioned in this paper argues that the adaptations of Bride and Prejudice and Aisha take issue with one of the fundamental assumptions of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century improvement ideology: the connection between progress and teleology.

Abstract: Kao reads Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Emma (1815) alongside recent British Indian and Indian adaptations Bride and Prejudice (2005) and Aisha (2010), arguing that the novels and adaptations take issue with one of the fundamental assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century improvement ideology: the connection between progress and teleology. The chapter’s first section reviews the ways that improvement, as both ideology and self-directed change, has been understood in the critical history on Austen. Kao’s reading of Emma illustrates Austen’s use of non-teleological development and examines the translation of this escape from futurity into late-capitalist consumer culture in Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), a film that functions as an important point of reference for both Bride and Prejudice and Aisha. The chapter ends by analyzing both films in the context of colonial and postcolonial understandings of economic and moral improvement in India.