Femalefirst.co.uk has an interview with Gurinder Chadha on her thought process in remaking Pride and Prejudice as a Bollywood spectacular:

I was washing up one day when I had the idea: why not take the most fantastic love story ever written? It was about a big family, they don’t have much money, daughters that need marrying off… very Indian! And the more I started working on it, the more I realised how pertinent Jane Austen’s writing of the late 1700s is to contemporary small-town India. And that’s when it all really started fitting and taking shape.

She describes the beginning of the film, which sounds great, hilarious and very Janeish:

The opening titles of the film are very Indian: every Bollywood movie always starts with a religious icon, and I’ve started with the Golden Temple in Amritsar so you know you really are in India as opposed to Brick Lane or something. It starts with lush fields and seemingly romantic images of India, but then the foreigners arrive: they’re all having a bit of trouble with their luggage and traffic, and then you’ll notice the music goes down, the noises start coming up, you hear market sellers and animals and total chaos! That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen – after the opening sequence you’re supposed to be thinking “Oh my god, where the hell am I?!” Which is exactly what Darcy articulates.

Could Gurinder be working with the “other” Lizzy Bennet for her next project?

And I start shooting next spring the prequel to I Dream of Jeannie, a big summer blockbuster for Columbia Pictures which is all set in Arabia 200BC. It’s all about a young girl who really wants to be a soldier and she’s really good at sword-fighting but she’s not allowed to do it. Basically she gets into trouble and the king turns her into a genie and she ends up spinning round space and then turns up in 2004. It’s much bigger and better than the original TV series, and for me it’s fantastic because it’s like a big Boy’s Own-style adventure only with a girl in the lead. And it’s an opportunity for me to work on lots of special effects and action stuff in a way that I was never ever going to be able to do. We’re speaking to a number of actresses for the lead role, but I’m not allowed to tell you who [internet rumours suggest Keira Knightley or Lindsay Lohan]. We start shooting next Spring.