THE team behind international smash hit film Bend It Like Beckham has come up with a Jane Austen adaptation like never before.

For the reworking of one of the author's most popular works, now renamed Bride and Prejudice, is a spectacular fusion of East meets West.

The classic love story unfolds in a riot of colour and emotion, song and dance that jet-sets from rural India via London to Los Angeles.

Beckham director Gurinder Chadha believes Austen's novel was ripe for a Bollywood interpretation.

"The themes are so pertinent to contemporary India, especially a place like rural Amritsar, where I decided the Bakshi family should live. Austen's focus on money and marriage, false pride and false nobility are alive and well in modern India," she says.

Issues from the 19th century are also pertinent to 21st century India, adds the director. "Jane Austen was preoccupied with the horrendous idea that women were not worthy of anything, unless they were married, or unless they had money. Intelligence didn't count for anything. Most parents today dream to have their daughters married off respectively."

Gurinder says that while growing up, Pride and Prejudice was her favourite book. "I decided that like David Beckham, Jane Austen was another delicious English icon ripe for subversion. I would take her Elizabeth Bennet the ultimate, feisty independent heroine of Brit Lit and transform her into Lalita Bakshi, a proud firecracker with brains and balls who wants more than is expected of an Indian girl.

"Whereas Austen explored 18th century class divisions, I wanted to look at the first impressions we make of each other culturally in today's increasingly small world.

"The Bennets would now be the Bakshis from Amritsar Hicksville, India. Darcy would be a rich hotelier from LA and his best friend Bingley, a British Indian. Instead of meeting at dancing balls, the characters would meet at weddings on three different continents.

"My life (and my work) has always been about celebrating the diaspora, about seamlessly moving from England to India to the States. If so many people like me move happily across every corner of the world, then why couldn't my characters and my film language do the same? This was my shot at moving British filmmaking into a whole new direction.

"Once I started adapting the novel, I was convinced Jane Austen was Indian in a previous life! The characters adapted so freely and the story and themes fit perfectly into contemporary India.

"A hysterical mother with four daughters to marry off, who couldn't relate to that?

"Because I grew up watching Bollywood films in the same cinema that screened The Sound of Music and West Side Story, I've always had a great affection for the playful chaos of Hollywood (India's equivalent of its more famous US cousin). Like India itself, it's a cinema of vibrant contradictions that works when it seems it shouldn't.

"Any cinema which combines boundless emotion with heartfelt innocence (no kissing, we're Indian!), laugh-out-loud humour, cheesy punch-ups and a minimum of seven spectacular musical sequences is alright by me."

Bollywood's reigning queen Aishwarya Rai debuts in her first English language film as our heroine Lalita (AKA Austen's Lizzie Bennet). She says: "Elizabeth is the one character I have always connected with in the novel."

Starring alongside her is Martin Henderson, last seen in The Ring, who takes the role of Darcy. "It was hard to play a character so reserved and dismissive of the Indian culture when I was having such a ball revelling in all its wonders," he says.