Nina Shah and Lisa Mackinlay in Nina’s Heavenly Delights

Nina’s Heavenly Delights, the latest British-Indian cinematic offering, follows the return of young South Asian Nina from London to Glasgow in a bid to save her family restaurant after her father’s death. She is certain that the best way to bolster the reputation of the family’s pride and joy, The New Taj, is by making it third-time winner of Glasgow’s annual Indian food contest, The Best of The West Curry Competition.

The film, directed by Pratibha Parma, is a romantic comedy, with a difference. In flashbacks, Nina is shown remembering her father’s words, “No matter what the recipe says, follow your heart.” Taking this advice, Nina really does follow her heart, and manages to fall in love with her business partner at The New Taj, a bonny Glaswegian girl, Lisa.

And so we come to the precise ingredient giving Nina’s Heavenly Delights its distinctive flavour: a lesbian affair.

One might think that in Britain Asians are depicted ‘queerly’ as a means of emphasising the racial gap. But Nina’s Heavenly Delights takes a different stance.

Aside from the fact that the love scenes themselves are sugary, inexplicit and unlikely to offend, the film celebrates the Scottishness of the Shah family. At the end of the film the whole family, dressed in traditional Scottish regalia, delivers a Highland dance routine before Loch Lomond — albeit with a Bollywood dance-number feel.

At the same time, Nina’s family are shown as completely accepting of her lesbian relationship.

Indeed, it has been suggested that gay plotlines feature in Asian films — such as My Beautiful Laundrette, East is East or Bend It Like Beckham — as a way of depicting South Asians as more, not less, at home in the West.

In her book Beyond Bollywood, professor Jigna Desi notices this trend. “Deviance, such as homosexuality, is seen as familiar to white liberal audiences who can feel empathetic with British Asians and feel that homosexuality is a sign of assimilation into Britishness.”

Certainly, there is a triumphalist tone to the sexual politics of Nina’s Heavenly Delights. Moments before Nina and Lisa succeed in winning the Best of the West Curry Competition — which is presented on Korma TV — the couple goes in for a prolonged kiss, live on air. The studio audience applauds rapturously; so that when Nina and Lisa are victorious it seems as if it may as well be their lesbian kiss, rather than their chicken curry, that makes them ‘Best of the West’!

So can we tuck into this sweet-smelling story, unworried at the representation of Asians in Britain? A question lingers. I am wondering: is there not something a little odd about all this Western South Asian celluloid presenting itself as edible?

In the end, that ‘delicate mix of spices’ may be just too clumsy and worn out a metaphor for communities diversified by South Asian immigrants. Every pot containing curry should not have to allude to a melting pot; every sexuality need not constitute an exciting new flavour. After all, people are people, not merely spices, smells and tastes.

Then again, maybe I’m a hypocrite: after the film’s visual savouring of all things desi-licious, my friend and I, tummies rumbling, headed straight for the nearest Indian restaurant and ordered samosas, daal, lamb korma, tandoori chicken…