A Suitable Boy: How the BBC's new drama presents a fresh perspective on India's history

A beautiful, clever girl; an off-limits love interest; a forbidding matriarch — sounds familiar, right? And yet, in the BBC’s ambitious new Sunday night offering, all of them are Indian. There’s not a brooding English protagonist in sight. You may think you’ve seen dramas about India before but you’ve never seen one like this. This time, things are being done differently.

Set in the 1950s, the six-part adaptation of Vikram Seth’s celebrated novel A Suitable Boy follows four families attempting to find their way in a country which is doing the same, As India’s first ever election looms, political tensions and religious conflicts, exacerbated by decades of British rule, endure.

In a landmark moment, the series features the BBC’s first-ever all-Indian cast and boasts a crew made up almost entirely of Indian talent, with every single second of filming being completed on location in the country.

Of course, A Suitable Boy is far from the first TV drama to bring India and its rich history to life — The Jewel in the Crown, from 1984, often being thought of as, well, the jewel in the crown of such things. But while the allure for Western producers of the colourful Holi festival, opulent weddings, blissful train journeys and swathes of cool muslin has often proved too tempting to resist, there are other aspects of Indian history and culture which have not been given the same airtime.

Britain began trading in the subcontinent in the mid-1600s and Crown Rule began in 1858. Independence was not gained until 1947, when Partition saw the country split into present-day Pakistan and India. The bloodshed that followed saw an estimated one million deaths and over 10 million displaced. Pakistan would later be partitioned again, when Bangladesh fought its own war for independence in 1971. And yet, even now, this huge period in history is still not a compulsory component of the National Curriculum. Nisha Parti, a producer whose credits include the BBC hit Boy with a Top Knot, points out that the struggle to acknowledge the reality of colonialism is not limited to fictional works. “Britain basically divided India into two countries, and no-one knows the history of why it happened and why it went so wrong,” she says. “I wouldn’t just blame the TV and film industry, I blame the entire, kind of, very non-diverse run country.” Still, surely there’s a gap ripe to be filled by TV? So far, not so much.

While penned and directed by Bend It Like Beckham writer Gurinder Chadha, ITV’s Beecham House fell far short. Its depiction of life in 18th century Delhi was centred on the story of a former East India Company man (played by Tom Bateman) and was derided by critics, who labelled the series “a desperately clichéd period drama” with “a straightforward white saviour narrative” on its release in 2019. One described it as “One man and his beard try to save India”. Despite a cliffhanger finale, the series was canned.

Channel 4’s 2015 effort, Indian Summers, was better received. Set in the 1930s, the two series tackled the tail-end of British Raj but again, the narrative was driven by white protagonists and devised by white writers. When it came to filming, the Malaysian island of Penang stood in for the Shimla. The promotional posters for both dramas said it all; ensemble casts stared straight into the cameras, the white actors in the foreground, their Indian co-stars lingering behind.

Vinay Patel, who wrote the BBC’s critically-acclaimed Murdered By My Father, argues the frequent use of period dramas to examine colonialism is precisely part of the problem. “When you create these dramas it’s more about putting a little bit of exoticism on the telly that’s nice to look at, rather than really trying to investigate it,” he says. “Even if you’re trying to be critical, an audience looks at that and goes, ‘That’s very beautiful. It can’t be that bad’. That wonderful high-budget, detailed, glossy aesthetic gets to undercut any critique you’re trying to make of it.”

Patel has, in a way, already proven his theory. In 2018, he penned an episode of Doctor Who, Demons of Punjab, which sent the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) and her companions back to the eve of Partition. Despite their assumptions, it transpired that the titular monsters were not the aliens but the humans. Without the veneer of a costume piece, the instalment is affecting, gritty and, vitally, informative.

In A Suitable Boy, we meet our leading characters in North India in 1951, with the story beginning in the fictional city of Brahmpur before including Calcutta, Delhi and Lucknow. Yes, there are weddings, a day of Holi and boat trips on Ganges, but these are interspersed with stories of religious conflict: a temple controversially built next to a Mosque; a local government at war with itself; an examination of rural inequality.

There’s a snag, though. While its cast, story, and location are authentic, Andrew Davies, a Welshman, is credited as the sole writer. As the show’s debut nears, many have labelled this a letdown. But the perspective from which we see India in A Suitable Boy does not come from Davies — it is the director Mira Nair’s. Big budget, yes, but Nair’s India is not always a glossy one. The filmmaker says she “threw my sari in the ring” when she heard rumours about the project, contacting the production company to explain why she was the right director for the job. At that point, eight draft episodes had been penned but a partnership soon developed. Nair shaved off two episodes and worked with Davies and Seth to reshape the rest of the series in what she describes as “a very strong collaboration on the structure”. She also “restored” the language in the script, adding the Urdu and Hindustani between which the characters frequently switch.

“I asked that the characters that would speak in these languages, must speak in these languages on screen,” she says via Zoom. “There was a lot of work in the writing, layering and actual execution that you would not have seen on the page before.”

Nair also reveals that she pushed for the character of minister Mahesh Kapoor’s wife to be a bigger role. “She barely appeared in the earlier drafts, she wasn’t a character in that full-fledged way,” she explains. “But I saw how important she was as the foundation [for] a spiritual India that she brought with her, and so she becomes this much greater part.”