‘Race doesn’t come into your suitability for a project’
The author of ‘A Suitable Boy’ defends choosing Andrew Davies to adapt his novel for television
WHEN A Suitable Boy begins on BBC One next Sunday night, it will be a very Indian affair: based on the bestselling ling novel by Vikram Seth, directed by one of India’s most acclaimed film-makers, kers, Mira Nair, and featuring an all-Indian dian cast.
But a row has broken out over the choice of screenwriter to adapt Seth’s eth’s sprawling tale into a prime time period riod drama. It is Andrew Davies, whose hose many credits include Pride and Preju- rejudice, War and Peace and Les Misérables, bles, and who is white.
Critics including Nikesh Shukla, cofounder of the Jhalak Prize, which celebrates books by British and British-resident black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) authors, asked ked why the BBC had denied a South Asian sian writer the chance to take on the project.
Now Seth has responded in strong ong terms by saying that race “should have nothing to do with it”.
He told The Sunday Telegraph: aph: “Should I as an Indian not have written tten
An Equal Music because it’s set in n an English string quartet? Or The Golden lden
Gate because it’s set in California and doesn’t have any Indian characters? ? “Should Ang Lee not have directed cted
Sense and Sensibility because he’s culturally Chinese? Should Andrew rew Davies not have adapted War and Peace eace because he isn’t Russian? There’s only one criterion: are you good at something or not. Colour, gender, sexuality, religion, age and how many whorls there are in the fingerprint of your left thumb should have nothing to do with it.”
Seth, who was educated at India’s most prestigious public school, Doon, and Tonbridge School in Kent before winning a scholarship to Oxford University, published A Suitable Boy in
1993 after working on it for six years. At 1,349 pages, it is one of the longest novels ever published, and follows a mother’s determined efforts to marry off her younger daughter, Lata, played in the TV adaptation by
Tanya Maniktala.
Nair, who previously directed the Baftawinning Monsoon Wedding, has jokingly referred to the new series as “The Crown in brown”. Seth was involved in choosing Davies as screenwriter. He said: “After seeing War and Peace and Les Misérables (neither of them particularly English), it was obvious to me that Andrew has a huge gift for bringing the essence of an expansive book into believable, filmable human vignettes – and for connecting these into an organic and compelling whole … [He] gets to the core of things.
“Of course Andrew is not Indian. But whenever something in the script did not quite fit the context of early post-Independence India – and how could he possibly have known every detail of that, any more than when dealing with Tsarist Russia? – there were other interpreters to point this out.
“The result is far better than I, the anxious author, could have imagined.” The decision to hire Davies was made before the BBC announced a £100million diversity fund to increase BAME representation on screen and behind the camera.