Fatherhood Quote by Parminder Nagra

A lot is smuggled into Nagra's offhand phrasing: representation as arithmetic, and trauma as plot engine. When she says British Asian movies where you can "count on one hand" the number of fathers like this, she is quietly indicting an industry that too often flattens immigrant parents into stock obstacles - strict, funny, backward, conveniently cruel. Her point is that the film bothers to give the father a line that rarely gets written: a clear, spoken rationale for fear.

The subtext is defensive realism. "He says exactly why" signals a refusal of the usual moral shortcut where a brown dad's control reads as pure patriarchy. Here, his protectiveness is tethered to biography: he came to England and "had a bit of a crappy time". Nagra's understatement does cultural work. "Crappy" is deliberately modest, almost comic, the way people downplay racism and class humiliation because naming it plainly feels accusatory, or because they're tired of being asked to perform pain. That tonal lightness makes the motive land harder: the father's fear isn't abstract tradition, it's learned risk assessment in a country that punished him.

Context matters: British Asian cinema has often been asked to deliver uplift or culture-clash comedy, not complicated parental interiority. Nagra is pointing to a shift from caricature to causality, where the father isn't just the barrier to a daughter's freedom but a person shaped by Britain itself. The film, in her telling, doesn't excuse him; it explains the system that made him.