How the ‘Delhi Downton’ will challenge view of the empire
ITV’S ambitious new series, Beecham House, aims to put a more acceptable face on Britain’s colonial past
A LAVISH television drama from the director of Bend It Like Beckham is to challenge the view that Britain’s involvement in India was all bad.
Beecham House, set in India at the end of the 18th century, will take a more sympathetic view of the East India Company than other screen portrayals.
The central character in the ITV period drama is John Beecham, played by Tom Bateman, an Englishman who resigned from military service to set up as an honourable trader. The show has been dubbed “the Delhi Downton” thanks to its portrayal of life in a grand house above and below stairs.
“The idea was to create a series for British TV about an Englishman in India who is good, and who is trying to do good at a time when a lot of Europeans weren’t,” said Gurinder Chadha, the director.
While troops from the East India Company are shown pillaging their way through the country, individual soldiers are shown to be honourable men opposed to the mistreatment of locals. The real villains of the piece are the French, who are vying with the British for control of India.
“Most people have a particular idea – India was colonised, and then there was the Empire, and then there was Partition – but people don’t generally know how that relationship started and how India became part of the Empire. It really was a battle between the British and the French.
“India was up for grabs. I was fascinated by the idea of the Seven Years’ War between the French and the English continuing on Indian soil, and how Indians in some cases helped the British as well as fought against them in order for Empire to happen. So, it was a very complex scenario,” said Chadha.
“As a director, I always want you to like my characters. Even if they’re really mean and horrible, I always have to find something about them that I understand and respect.
“Every single person in that East India Company was doing the right thing as far as they were concerned. It’s very easy to create drama where you have the good guys and the bad guys [but] for me, history is about, ‘Well, they’re largely good but they do some things that are bad’ or ‘They’re very bad but within them there’s good’.”
That approach contrasts with the last time the East India Company was on the small screen, in the 2017 BBC drama Taboo starring Tom Hardy.
Taboo’s writer, Steven Knight, portrayed the company as “the biggest, baddest multinational corporation on Earth, all rolled into one self-righteous, religiously motivated monolith”.
The East India Company was set up as a trading company but by the end of the 18th century had a private army of 260,000 men. In the words of William Dalrymple, the historian: “It was not the British government that seized India at the end of the 18th century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London.”
Bateman, who also appeared in ITV’S last major period drama, Vanity Fair, said his research into the period had surprised him.
“I knew that they were bad, the East India Company – historically that is true. [But] I read a lot of books and what I learned is that they didn’t start off bad. They started off quite good, and were actually welcomed in parts of India to help get rid of other people.”
He has a shirtless scything scene in the opening episode which owes more than a little to Poldark. Chadha said: “It was ‘Gurinder, come on, get them to take their shirt off’. We did resist some of that, but [Poldark] has set the bar in terms of period dramas.”