TAKE PASSAGE TO INDIA
A Suitable Boy, a novel of family and love, comes to the small screen
Mira Nair is the director of the BBC’s forthcoming six-part adaptation of Vikram Seth’s epic saga A Suitable Boy – a job that sounds less like work and more like destiny. Nair, who was born in what was then the Indian state of Orissa, and is now based in New York, made her feature-film debut with Salaam Bombay! in 1988; Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake soon followed, and she established herself as a storyteller fascinated by family, by cross-cultural currents, by the way in which Indian and Western histories intertwine.
She tells me she adored Seth’s novel from the time she first read it when it was published in 1993. ‘It fed my soul completely,’ she says of the book, which traces the lives of four families in 1951, not long after India’s independence and brutal partition into India and Pakistan. She feels a deep personal connection to the story. ‘It was set in the era when my parents married; one that I longed to live in. This was the time that made India,’ she says. ‘Vikram wrote with so much wit and wisdom about what makes us who we are. It gave me a lot – it’s a whole world, and it’s a truthfully told world, with a lot of humour as well. It was like a best friend. That type of book is not easy to come by.’
The narrative begins with 19-year-old Lata going to her sister’s wedding, where their mother tells her it is time that she too found ‘a suitable boy’ to marry. At half a million words long, this vast tale is almost impossible to capture in a summary – how, then, to recreate it on screen? Television offered a solution. ‘The only way to do this novel is over six hours, definitely,’ Nair says. ‘The story is made for this form.’ It’s her first venture into the medium but she was supported by the ‘film family’ she has worked with for over 25 years, including the cinematographer Declan Quinn and the producer Lydia Pilcher. The adaptation was written by Andrew Davies – a giant of the industry, whose most recent credits include War and
Peace, Les Misérables and Sanditon. So, as Nair says, the series is ‘crafted within the form of television, while still going for the larger, sweeping frames of cinema’.
Over the years, Nair has come to call
Vikram Seth a friend; I ask what he thinks of the adaptation. ‘He’s said one big word – well, two words – “Thank you”. He’s very happy.’ He also made some personal contributions to the production. ‘Whenever I really needed him for something very deep, like an exquisite translation of an old Urdu line in a song, he would oblige overnight,’ she says.
Nair is excited by the scope of the project, which was filmed entirely on location over the last four months of 2019, with an Indian cast that included the Bollywood stars Ishaan Khatter and Tabu; Lata herself is played by the newcomer Tanya Maniktala. It sounds as though there’s never been anything like it on the BBC before, I venture. ‘It’s about time,’ Nair says, laughing. ‘We were lucky, because Vikram created Brahmpur, the fictional town, as an amalgam of northern Indian towns – Lucknow, Allahabad, Benares – which is exactly where we were filming. Lucknow is a great Islamic city, with forts and bungalows and mosques and temples. It’s extraordinary.’ The residents were eager to co-operate with the production. ‘We had people begging us to come to their houses,’ she says.
The rich particularity of A Suitable Boy – both the novel and Nair’s all-encompassing adaptation – should speak to everyone. ‘The local becomes universal,’ she says. ‘It’s my absolute adage. I really believe that. And people are smart; they feel it – they’ll understand.’ Throughout her career, Nair has brought vivid, individual lives to the screen;
A Suitable Boy is an intimate yet epic addition to her canon.
A‘ Suitable Boy’ is coming soon to BBC One.