‘Suitable Boy’ not quite as good as it looks
Vikram Seth’s sprawling 1993 novel “A Suitable Boy” rivals a 1980s phone book for heft — landing with the thud of around 1,500 pages in its paperback edition — and is considered a classic of contemporary Englishlanguage, Indian literature.
So anticipation was running high when it was announced that the BBC was turning the tome into a miniseries co-directed by Mira Nair (“Monsoon Wedding,” “The Namesake”) and written by Andrew Davies (“Pride and Prejudice,” “War and Peace”). But the mixed results may leave the book’s most ardent fans still waiting for a TV series that matches the novel’s heady ambitions.
The lavish six-episode “A Suitable Boy” — which begins streaming Dec. 7 on AcornTV — is set against the backdrop of seismic political and cultural shifts of 1950s post-colonial India as the British retreated and the region was cleaved into largely Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan. In the foreground are four middle- and upper-class Indian families — the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, the Mehras and the Khans — whose lives are sometimes disastrously intertwined.
Much of the focus, though, is on Lata Mehra (Tanya Maniktala), a headstrong college student whose mother, Rupa (Mahira Kakkar), worries she won’t ever settle down and find a husband. There’s certainly no lack of suitors, ranging from the erudite, intellectual poet Amit Chatterji (Mikhail Sen) to the passionate, athletic Kabir Durrani (Danesh Ravzi) and the relentlessly middlebrow, slightly doughy but goodhearted shoe manufacturer Haresh Khanna (Namit Das).
For those of us who have not read the book, the problem with “A Suitable Boy” the series is that there’s so much history and so many characters and plot points being crammed into six hours that it often feels — especially in the first three episodes — as if it’s in a breathless rush to simply get through it all. Motivation, mood and subtlety are hustled out of the way like houseguests who have overstayed their welcome. (By comparison, “The Jewel in the Crown,” the phenomenal 1984 British miniseries set amid the dying light of English colonialism in India and based on the nearly 2,000 pages of Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet” novels, unspooled over a less hurried and more involving 14 episodes.)
So the incendiary love that flares between young hothead Maan Kapoor (Ishaan Khattar) and the older singer Saeeda Bai (Tabu) — as well as between Maan’s best friend, Firoz Ali Khan (Shubham Saraf), and Tasneem ( Joyeeta Dutta), not to mention the unspoken homoerotic underpinnings of Maan and Firoz’s friendship — come across as contrived and melodramatic. The variable acting doesn’t help.
Still, “A Suitable Boy” has its pleasures, the first of which is that it’s the unusual production aimed at a non-Indian audience in which the story focuses on Indians exclusively. In many of the other high-profile movies or TV series set in the colonial or immediate post-colonial era — “A Passage to India,” “The Far Pavilions,” “Indian Summers,” “Beecham House” and the aforementioned “The Jewel in the Crown” — the British are still very much front and center. In “A Suitable Boy,” the English are irrelevant, verging on invisible.
Then there’s the transporting music that the character Saeeda sings as well as Declan Quinn’s often sumptuous cinematography and Stephanie Carroll’s production design, both making good use of the show’s shooting locations in the Indian cities of Lucknow, Kanpur and Maheshwar.
Even with all of the series’ flaws, it’s hard not to get swept up in the drama of which potential husband Lata might choose — or if she will check none of the above in her quest for independence. But considering what “A Suitable Boy” could have been, these rewards are not quite enough.