“Man, it would have been a great red carpet.”
That is what Mira Nair says, lamenting a bit now about the down-sized roll-out for a passion project that’s been burning inside her for more than 25 years. The long, long-awaited series adaptation of Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy” — one of the seminal novels of our time — that is to say. One that debuts in North America Saturday as part of TIFF’s closing night in Toronto, and is a six-part series that also happens to be the first BBC period piece with a cast made up with almost 100 per cent of people of colour.
It brims with 110 actors of South Asian descent, after all (plus, one lone German character). And Nair — one of the biggest-hearted of directors — was naturally fantasizing about what a non-COVID-time premiere would have looked like, considering that it’s a cast packed to the gills with gorgeous newcomers as well as real-deal Indian legends like Tabu (who plays a mysterious, but oh-so mesmerizing, courtesan-slash-classical-singer in the series).
I shared Mira’s pain.
For, I, too, have waited two-plus decades to see an adaptation of one of the novels of my life — a book that made me, in part, fall in love with novels in the first place. It was so transportive, when I first read it (carrying around the door-stopper when I lived abroad), that it instilled in me this idea of taking flight with books that even now, in a pandemic — if you are an avowed reader of fiction you’ll know the feeling — I never feel like I’m actually grounded. For our tribe, a trip is only a book away. The world we inhabit? Just one of many.
Almost fourteen hundred pages.
One of the longest novels ever to be published in the English language.
That is “A Suitable Boy.”
Braiding both the personal and political — and set in the years following Indian independence from the British — the sprawling, empathetic tome inhabits the inter-locking lives of four families on the sub-continent. Those lives and loves peak in the coming-of-age of our main heroine, Lata, who has three potential suitors in the mix, at the same time a whole country is in flux, and shuttling towards its first general election, in 1951 (then pegged as the largest democratic exercise in history!).
Nair, who was friendly with the author as he was writing, and has loved Seth’s story ever since, knew she had to be involved as soon as she heard BBC was going to take a stab. “I had to throw my sari in the ring,” she jokes from New York.
Fortunately, the BBC thought the woman behind such films as “Monsoon Wedding” and “Mississippi Masala” would be ideal, too.
So, what did I make of the series when I screened it? Well, the short answer is this: I loved it! Once getting past some of the structural compromises that any production like this must make when taking on such a lengthy novel — and then accepting a project like this on its own visual terms — I found it sweet and refined and playful. In the context of other recent prestige period dramas, it comes to us like Downton on the Ganges. And Lata, for one, is every bit the Indian answer to “Pride and Prejudice”’s Elizabeth Bennet — a comparison that’s been tossed about ever since the novel came to be in 1993.
Pride, Prejudice and Pakoras. Helpful, perhaps, to think of it that way.
With a £16 million ($27 million Cdn.) budget attached, and all of it filmed on location (nothing in studio), it is very much a flicker-book of images, the series: a gentleman on his feet rowing a river boat, garlands of flower hanging from street vendors, trains pulling away from dusky tracks, homes with minarets and arched doors, men playing the tabla, banyan trees, spectator shoes, colours of Holi in the breeze.
See, too: studs in knee pads and white sweater-vests playing cricket; another scene, in which a well-to-do party breaks out into a delish little tableau of Indians doing the tango.
Trysts and proposals, ballot boxes and botanical gardens. Yawning cows. Wheels of justice. An ominous knife. Floozies, showboats, strivers. Desire and heartbreak. Too much judgement and just enough courage. Noses pressed up to the windowpane of hope.
This is “A Suitable Boy.”
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A show now in which the following line is not out of context: “You know my papa does not like people shooting peacocks on the estate.”
And one that gamely takes on everything from Hindi/Muslim tensions to the craft of shoe-making.
The cup runneth over, as far as performances go, but the stand-out has got to be curly-haired Bollywood idol Ishaan Khatter, who makes the most of the role of Maan (the dude who falls for the aforementioned courtesan! Cue the gods of May-December romance!). Acquitting herself well, too, in the role of Lata, I gotta say, is Tanya Maniktala, a novice who gives good pluck, and a smile lighting up on the Julia Roberts register.
While there has been some pooh-pooh-ing about the series, particularly in the U.K., where it already aired — amid criticism about “authenticity” of the show and/or the idea that the Andrew Davies-written script falls into the trap of the British “gaze” — I really do not buy that. Considering that it is all based on a novel — a fictional story — why must we necessarily put this burden on ethnic art? It is like expecting “Pride and Prejudice” to be representative of the whole of the Georgian experience. (Never mind that it comes to us via a novel by an Indian, and a director who is Indian.)
Oh, and did I mention the music? It is sublime — one of the strongest parts here, whether it be the ghazals sprinkled throughout the series, or the score composed by Anoushka Shankar (daughter of the revered sitarist Ravi Shankar).
The extent to which independence — and the ensuing partition that it then led to between Indian and Pakistan — factors in the series is not really expressly discussed that much. This struck me. Apart from some oblique asides, people in the show are living it — not talking about it.
The closest we get to a commentary? It comes during a seemingly throwaway scene in the final ep, on the day of the massive election being depicted — when a trio are gathered in a bar, and a woman announces she cannot be bothered to vote (this, despite what India has just bled for) and another jaded fella says, just underneath his breath, “Between you and me, things were managed much better with the British.”
To which the third person in this group coldly looks back — extending a hand with the drink in his hand — and says: “Well, they are not here anymore. Cheers.”
The deadpan-ness and finality of that “cheers” is as much a thesis as Ms. Nair is going to give us about this fresh new India shackling off the chains of colonialism. In other words: namaste — and good-bye.
“A Suitable Boy” is featuring at TIFF on Sat. Sept. 19, and is also available for digital viewing at digital.TIFF.net. Air dates for its broadcast premiere coming soon, too.