Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." Sonam Kapoor's Aisha, loosely based Austen's Emma, only stuck to the last bit opulence. Which, without context and the statement that Austen made, was basically just another karan johar movie.
Highbury in Austen's Emma is a fictional village. Aisha speeds her yellow Beetle through the streets of Delhi. Wait, why sell us a dream and then root it at all? Let it be as absurd and fantastical as Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya, with bridges and gondolas, where the sun never shines and the moon turns everything blue. Not Aisha. Aisha whips her credit card out at malls, beauty salons, plush restaurants and things are taken care of. Not just for her, but for her "bechari" friend Shefali Thakur (played by amrita Puri), too. While Austen's Emma, despite her class-superiority, was empathetic, the fact that Sonam's Aisha refers to her "gareeb" friend as "bechari" is proof enough that she's not. To her, this is charity, and she should, therefore, get brownie points for it. After all, she bettered her life, right?
Back when Aisha created a pre-release stir, simply by virtue of it being "loosely based on Austen's Emma", Sonam defended her 2010 film. "Victorian society’s rules and regulations, and the class system is still prevalent in our country and I think is prevalent all over the world. It’s about having the right address, the right cars, wearing the right clothes, getting married to the right guy, having enough money. I think you can relate to it, because these are situations you can never get rid of," Sonam had said in a BBC interview. Unfortunately, that's all she and the makers of Aisha saw Victorian society’s rules and regulations, and the class system and shut their eyes to the critique Jane Austen so eloquently penned. In that, Aisha is more a copy of Alicia Silverstone's Clueless (1995) than that of Austen's Emma.
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