The popular Hindi film Khoon Bhari Maang (Blood-Smeared Forehead, Rakesh Roshan, 1988) is an unofficial remake of Return to Eden, an Australian television mini-series broadcast in 1983. An exemplary masala, Khoon Bhari Maang displays how Bombay filmmakers adapt foreign material for local audiences and ‘consciously heighten and intensify the differences between their films and the “originals”’ by expanding the narrative – adding back-story and a comic sub-plot – and inserting half a dozen song-dance sequences (Ganti 2002: 296, 290). The implantation of Indian values also plays a part in this process: Sheila Nayar has suggested that the Hindi remake inevitably reflects how popular cinema is ‘heavily circumscribed by the expectations and demands of its audience’, observing that characters and relationships – and particularly family and gender roles – are ‘rewritten to satisfy a culturally distinct ethos’ (2003: 74, 75). In this chapter I focus on the representation of femininity in Khoon Bhari Maang to explore how this Hindi remake repurposes foreign material – in this instance, Australian rather than American – and transforms the original text into a traditional popular film format, but so as to challenge rather than endorse dominant cultural ideology.

As Iain Robert Smith has recently proposed, contemporary Bollywood remakes ‘should not be seen as resulting from a simple process of “Indianisation” but as transnational cultural exchanges in which globally circulating media forms interact with local narrative traditions and industries’ (2015: 118). Produced in the 1980s, Khoon Bhari Maang is an example of a transnational and trans-media adaptation that anticipates the more recent developments Smith identifies as characteristic of popular Hindi cinema in the global era. This chapter will address how film remakes, as Robert Stam has suggested of novel-to-screen adaptations, ‘can take an activist stance toward their source, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism’ (2000: 64) and even ‘de-repress’ their ‘latent feminist spirit’ (2005: 42). I shall discuss the global dialogism of the Australian source text and the local dialogism of the Indian remake, which complicate the central relationship between the mini-series and the film. Firstly, to refer back to Smith's terms, the ‘transnational cultural exchanges’ here precede the ‘Indianisation’ of the Australian mini-series since Return to Eden was itself a self-conscious emulation of the melodramatic style of US prime-time soap operas, and in particular Dynasty (ABC, 1981–9), and was subsequently extremely popular with both local and international audiences, and especially women.