Still from Philippe Lioret’s Welcome

Whether on a shopfront mannequin, the fashion pages of a women’s glossy, or a promising travel brochure, it seems French chic is everywhere in the Australian metropolis. Not that the European nation’s much-celebrated sophisticated, effortless, classic style ever moved from the top rank of our ladder of aspirational Eurocentrism. However, in the noughties, it seemed to temporarily shift from the spotlight, thanks largely to Sex and the City’s New York fetishism.

Ism-s aside, a certain version of Parisian chic is hitting our leisure and style pages again – in the form of stripes, berets, trench coats, Julia Child’s How to Master the Art of French Cooking, chocolate croissant moments, and numerous other tokens of mainstream and sub-stream cultures. But all these symbols of France’s enduring cultural capital fail to articulate the not-so-classical reality of contemporary French life. They almost make us forget the 2005 racial riots in Paris, often euphemistically described as ‘civil unrest’. It also almost makes us overlook that there are other races, other colours, other textures to the classical French myth that is exported to the rest of the world. Read more

Guest blogger Sukhmani Khorana interviewed New Delhi novelist Manju Kapur for Kill Your Darlings at Adelaide Writers’ Week.

When I first read Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters in 2006, I had just submitted an Honours thesis in Media and English. I realised it wasn’t very Indian of me to be pursuing a qualification at an overseas university that was not remotely related to medicine, science, engineering, accounting, law or management. Nor was it very feminine of me to crave financial and emotional independence over the security blanket of a bourgeois upbringing. And, worst of all, being an Indian national wasn’t proof enough of my fluency in English – despite thinking and feeling in a hybrid version of the language, I would have to pass an IELTS test.

Reading Difficult Daughters was a simultaneously familiar and removed experience. Set against the backdrop of the partition saga that divided India and Pakistan into two independent sovereign nations in 1947, it is both a love story and a coming of age tale. I had heard mention of the violence surrounding the historical event from the maternal side of my family, which had migrated from Lahore to Amritsar, crossing over to the Indian end of the divided province of Punjab. The central character of the novel, Virmati, is based on Kapur’s own mother, who was a difficult daughter living in a joint Hindu household in Amritsar. The family’s tenant, a progressive (and married) professor, fell for her independence and interest in education. Needless to say, her family was hostile towards the situation, and the state of the nation mirrored this hostility.

In reading Difficult Daughters, I was surprised to learn that difficult Indian daughters are not a 21st century phenomenon. Indian women were proactive during the independence movement, and entered public and political life before many of their western counterparts. Of late, they have begun to voice their concerns on the global tide entering India, and its impact on gender and family relations. Notable figures in cinema include Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Aparna Sen, while their literary equivalents are Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Manju Kapur, and numerous others. I looked forward to interviewing a role model of sorts during her visit for Adelaide Writers’ Week. Had she been a difficult daughter too?

Read more