A Suitable Boy review: Settle down for an Indian summer of love with this ambitious adaptation

Those who know call it The Hour — that time at the end of the day when you finally stop and dedicate yourself a good, intelligent TV drama.

It’s happening less now — we stream instead — but watching A Suitable Boy I felt that The Hour was back. This is a Sunday-night saga. That means a love story, a flick of humour and an ambitiously complicated plot that you can’t always follow.

The novel it’s based on, by Vikram Seth, is an epic 1,349 pages and I’ve never managed to get through it despite multiple attempts. Thankfully, the TV adaptation (which took three years to make) has culled a few peripheral characters so it’s easier to keep track. Set in the fictional town of Brahmpur in India just after Partition and Indian independence, it tells the story of 19-year-old Lata Mehra, an intelligent university student whose widowed mother wants her to have an arranged marriage to “a suitable boy”.

Lata thinks of herself as a modern woman and has other ideas (and other suitors, including a Muslim man, unthinkable for a Hindu woman). It’s a close-knit society with plenty of sub-plots and a political undercurrent of building Hindu nationalism, stoked by temples being built next to mosques that have been there for centuries. Seth wrote the novel in 1993 and it’s set in 1951 but themes of religious violence still feel relevant as Prime Minister Narendra Modi fuels divisions.

The show’s director Mira Nair, who made Monsoon Wedding, has called it “The Crown in brown”. The cast is all south Asian, although Nair has been criticised for not choosing an Asian scriptwriter. It’s adapted by Andrew Davies, who was behind the 1995 TV series of Pride and Prejudice and the 2016 TV series of War and Peace, and put a gay relationship into his 2017 Les Misérables.

His script is sweet, if occasionally cheesy. There are similar impulses at play here as in Davies’s previous period dramas — Seth shows how people are driven by money and status but love can get in the way. He spent 10 years at Stanford studying for a PhD in economics and while he never completed it he has an understanding about how money makes society tick.

It was filmed in Lucknow, which looks beautiful with misty rivers, lively markets and flower-festooned parties where women twirl around in bright saris. The music adds to the romanticised vision — heavy on the sitars with a jaunty theme tune. Anoushka Shankar and Alex Heffes (who won a Bafta for Touching the Void’s music) wrote the score.

Tanya Maniktala, who plays Lata, is very likeable — and we see what a grip European culture has on her life and how tedious her mother’s grip is. She writes essays on whether Shakespeare’s tragic heroes deserve their fates, longs to read James Joyce (not suitable for women according to her teacher) and goes to a café called The Blue Danube. Humour comes from the female elders, who make sly digs at the men, and the upper classes, who covet each other’s earrings.