A temple is built next to a centuries-old mosque and the police open fire and kill peaceful protesters. Most of A Suitable Boy seems pretty Bollywoodised and characters typified and charicaturised. That is the power of this genre, one that my Indian family has gobbled up since my parents first fell for The Barchester Chronicles. When “A Suitable Boy” was published in 1993, the 1,349-page tome about post-Independence India, written by Vikram Seth, became one of the longest English-language novels in print. A Suitable Boy Review: A still from the series. ‘A Suitable Boy’ review: A lavish, if predictable offering from Mira Nair Mini Anthikad Chhibber October 23, 2020 13:05 IST Updated: October 24, 2020 13:15 IST critic's rating: 3.0/5. The production design by Stephanie Carroll and the costumes by Arjun Bhasin accentuate the sense of place and period. This panoramic portrait of a newly-free nation and fast-changing social segments within it has an easy-flowing quality that belies the sheer magnitude of the exercise." The central theme by itself is non-political – of a mother trying to find her younger daughter a suitable groom, but the sub plots and characterizations are too politically shrill to ignore. A brief interaction that says so much about colonialism, 50s India, patriarchy and Lata herself. Screenplay. A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, published in 1993. Channel 4’s Indian Summers in 2015 was glossy but slight. “I don’t think I ever want to get married,” says Lata, to the horror of Rupa, who wastes no time in enlisting the rest of the family to pair off this maverick. British creators struggle to get past all the tourist-board cliches and creaking colonial buildings. But The Crown is permitted to move at a stately pace. In the BBC's A Suitable Boy, the pious, stubborn insistence on getting children married off feels caricatured and two-dimensional, as do other characters’ oppositions to it. He is handsome, clever and has a wicked cover drive. Want an ad-free experience?Subscribe to Independent Premium. No, not even one cantankerous dame protecting her fortune from her deathbed. Vikram Seth’s most famous novel A Suitable Boy came out in 1993. A Suitable Boy Critics Consensus. In depicting the dangers of Hindu nationalism, the programme also nods towards modern Indian politics. The novel is very happy and consoling, but it is reluctant to commit itself, perhaps not to depth, but to exegesis. Review. Nair has jokily called A Suitable Boy “The Crown in brown”. And Davies, who would find an elegant way in adapting the dictionary to reduce it to its dirty words, is masterly at weaving the small thread into the big picture. Does A Suitable Boy succeed? A Suitable Boy is set in a newly post-independence, post-partition India. Amid this long year of isolation, such an aesthetic signature practically qualifies as a superpower. A Suitable Boy review: The Mira Nair series is worth your time The book has enough time and more to get into long, languid, eloquent descriptions of locations, characters, situations; in Mira Nair and Andrew Davies hands, the chop-chop eventually overcomes the choppiness, and becomes its … But I will come back to that. A Suitable Boy review – a very British, Indian period drama. Like The Luminaries, it is more often admired from a safe distance than read. These are the oddities of the genre: no one spoke Russian in Davies’s War and Peace, either. The love affairs take place against the backdrop of simmering Hindu-Muslim tensions, four years after partition. In a positive note, Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV wrote "A Suitable Boy, does not miss a beat in funnelling a massive novel into an intricately stitched, necessarily pared filmed version. It is just that in the midst of our cultural reckoning, the old ways are starting to look downright weird. It is beautiful, expensive and groundbreaking in its casting, yet Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Vikram Seth’s tome still feels uncomfortably old-school, Last modified on Mon 27 Jul 2020 22.02 BST. Take the scene in which Lata argues with her English professor about why TS Eliot – “He’s American, isn’t he?” – is on the syllabus of “British Masters of the 20th Century”, but James Joyce is not. The director, Mira Nair, who has apparently wanted to film the book since its release, has assembled an almost exclusively Indian cast and crew. Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Suddenly, everyone had a copy of A Suitable Boy, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things busting out of their bag. Great period drama speaks to the times. There is a lot riding on A Suitable Boy (BBC One), which is a fate that befalls pioneering and overdue series such as this. We hope he’s not the only suitor. She can barely bring herself to go to a poetry reading with him, let alone risk her family’s censure. With 'A Suitable Boy,' Mira Nair and Andrew Davies adapt Vikram Seth's 1993 intergenerational saga set during the period after the Partition of India. Suitable in nearly every way, you might think. With 'A Suitable Boy,' Mira and Nair and Andrew Davies adapt Vikram Seth's 1993 intergenerational saga set during the period after the Partition of India. ‘A Suitable Boy’: TV Review By Fionnuala Halligan 2020-08-07T12:48:00+01:00 Mira Nair joins forces with Andrew Davies to televise Vikram Seth’s novel set in India of the early 1950s. It was a different time, and in spirit and tone A Suitable Boy is like a period drama from then. Their early flirtation is characterised by some unforgivably flat dialogue, as he says simpering things about books and reveals his devil-may-care attitude by sitting on a bench before she has asked him to. You don't have to see this unless you are fond of the genre or the director or the location. A Suitable Boy review: An astonishing cast, led by Ishaan Khatter, Tabu and Tanya Maniktala, struggles to make the most of minimal screentime and a … Some people were not happy with the choice of Davies – who is not just a white British writer, but the white British monarch of the period adaptation – to tell this vast story of newly independent India. After the early exposition, understandable given the number of characters, the programme settles into its stride. Where, A Suitable Boy presents an orange-filtered fantasy version of India, Booking.com discount code: 10% with Level 1 Genius membership, Use this Debenhams discount and save up to 70% on men's lines - Spring offer, Up to 30% discount with garden offers at Ideal World, Receive a £2 AliExpress promo code with the official App, Argos kids: 25% off PAW Patrol toys, baby & nursery items. It was shot on location, so the buildings and landscapes at least look vaguely accurate. Naughty boy Maan (played by the Bollywood lead Ishaan Khatter) embarrasses his father, a high-ranking politician, by throwing the home minister into a fountain during Holi festival, then pursuing a ghazal singer, Saeeda, played by the legendary Indian actor Tabu. Your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later in Davies ’ s House... Of silent servants and with no anxieties about money post-independence, post-partition India,! 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