Priyanka Chopra on how centuries of empire, displacement, cultural exchange shape people’s understanding
Washington, March 8 (IANS/WISHAVWARTA) Priyanka Chopra Jonas has spent much of her career navigating worlds that rarely intersect easily – the vast and multilingual film industries of India, the global machinery of Hollywood, and the cultural space in between where questions of identity, migration, and history often collide.
In a wide-ranging conversation on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Chopra moved fluidly between personal reflection and historical observation, describing how centuries of empire, displacement, and cultural exchange continue to shape how people understand themselves today.
For Chopra, those themes are not theoretical. They inform the emotional foundation of ‘The Bluff’, her new action film set during the era of colonial expansion and maritime conflict.
“My character’s story, her parents and her family are indentured servants, which was the truth of many, many people, especially in India where young people were told better opportunities, new lands, more money come with us and take them off as servants and then drop them in different parts of the world in islands,” she said during the conversation.
The system she referred to – indentured labour – was one of the defining migrations of the nineteenth century. After slavery was abolished in the British Empire, colonial authorities moved hundreds of thousands of Indians across the world to plantations in the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia.
Those journeys created communities that remain deeply connected to India but often separated from its geography and memory.
“The Caribbean has a huge Indian community whose history started with just being displaced from their lands and dropped somewhere else in the world,” Chopra said.
Yet time has blurred the origins of many of those families.
“I met so many people, actually when I went to the Cayman, who don’t know anything about their family tree beyond like five generations,” she said.
“That ambiguity in a history of a human being erases a part of you. It denies you of knowing the depth of your culture or where you come from or your roots,” she added.
India itself, Chopra noted, is shaped by centuries of conquest, migration, and cultural transformation – forces that have produced one of the most diverse societies in the world.
“India has been invaded over thousands and thousands and thousands of years,” she said, referencing waves of influence ranging from European colonial powers to earlier empires.
The result is a country whose diversity defies simple description.
“The amount of diversity you will see, the kind of range of people that you will meet is impossible to fathom,” she said.
Language alone illustrates the complexity.
“We have written and spoken languages which are almost like 20-something or in their thirties… absolutely different alphabet, absolutely different sound,” Chopra said.
“I can’t, if I go to another state, I won’t be able to understand what people are saying,” she added.
That diversity also explains why India does not have a single film industry but many. While “Bollywood” has become shorthand internationally, it represents only the Hindi-language cinema based in Mumbai.
“Bollywood is the Hindi language industry which exists in Mumbai,” Chopra said.
Across the country, other industries produce films in languages such as Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Marathi.
“Cumulatively, we make thousands and thousands of movies a year,” she said.
Chopra’s own career spans both India and the United States, a path that has not always been easy. When Indian actors first began appearing regularly in Western productions, she said, the roles were often shaped by cultural stereotypes.
“Indian casting in English language entertainment was usually seen as a diversity check by us,” she said.
Many characters were written as exaggerated versions of Indian identity.
“It was mostly a stereotypical actor or a stereotypical character with an actor having to speak in the accent or having to… do the work at 7-11,” she said.
She recalled an audition in which she was told the role needed to appear “more Indian.”
“What does that even mean?” she said.
Even so, Chopra acknowledged that earlier actors who accepted such roles helped open doors for others.
“Those were the actors whose shoulders I stand on… because that was all that was available,” she said.
More recently, a different life experience – motherhood – has influenced how she approaches her work.
Chopra said she filmed ‘The Bluff ‘shortly after becoming a parent, and the experience changed the way she understood the character’s motivations.
“I was a new mom at that time when I was filming this movie,” she said.
The film’s central conflict revolves around a mother protecting her child in a violent world.
“If somebody came after my kid… what am I capable of? I’d rip your head off,” she said.
“What is a parent capable of doing if somebody came after your kid?” she added.
“You would definitely put yourself and do whatever you could to make sure that your kid’s fine.”
In that sense, the film’s themes echo far beyond its historical setting. Questions of belonging, identity, and protection – of family, culture, and memory – remain central to how people navigate the modern world.
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