An unsuitable novel

Not everything can be adapted for TV

This year has, so far, not been the best of years. I very much fear, however, it is about to get worse. Nothing is as chilling as the thought that someone is about to muck up a book that you love with a film or television adaptation. And so, ever since I learned that this is the week that an adaptation of A Suitable Boy  will start airing on BBC One, I have lived in fear. Well, there’s a pandemic on, so we are all living in fear more or less, but let’s say the fear has intensified. 

Adaptations of a revered book can be a disaster. Much depends, of course, on who is writing and directing the adaptation. Andrew Davies, the writer of the new BBC adaptation is an old hand at adaptations, and perhaps the most accomplished. If the 1995 BBC  Pride and Prejudice,  with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy, is the gold standard for Austen adaptations, it is partly because of the work put in by Mr Davies. But the churidar-kurtas of A Suitable Boy will be new and strange material for a writer who has hitherto specialised in men in frock-coats. 

Mira Nair, now, will always be one of my favourite directors. Partly this is because, when I was cut off from home in a far, cold country, I thought of Monsoon Wedding as therapeutic. I used it to treat homesickness, it was like stepping back for a short while into the most familiar parts of Delhi. I suspect you, too, cannot hear the first notes of Sukhwinder Singh’s “Kava Kava” without being transported back to the Delhi of the 2000s, from which we are all today as distant as I was then. 

But film adaptations are a somewhat different thing, and more difficult. 

Ms Nair has directed three adaptations, all of books that are loved — if in different ways and usually by different people. In 2005, she did an exuberant — and, to my mind, disappointing — version of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.  Shortly thereafter, she adapted Jhumpa Lahiri’s  The Namesake  — a sacred text for all graduate students from Kolkata living in the American Northeast. And then, in 2012, she made a film version of Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist,  the novel of alienation and rootlessness which had become something of a touchstone for those concerned about the treatment of Muslims in the West following 9/11.

These are three very different books. Vanity Fair — a sprawling, complex, and often confusing dissection of individual and social hypocrisy — always struck me as impossible to adapt. It is — unlike the other historical novel about the Napoleonic Wars to which it is often compared, War and Peace —  really quite subtle. “A novel without a hero,” as the subtitle has it, and indeed can’t imagine how you could bring to the screen the three-dimensionality with which Thackeray endows his characters. The movie did not try—  it was, in some ways a romp, and what most of us will remember of it now is the concluding scene, with Reese Witherspoon’s Becky Sharp on an elephant in Jodhpur amid properly exuberant colours, accompanied by Jos Sedley.

And that is, of course, the common thread in those three adaptations: The links that bind South Asia to the world. And, of course, there are some of those elements in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy  as well —but mainly through the memories of Haresh, one of the possibly suitable boys, who attended in England what would, in the next decade, begin to be called a polytechnic. 

What worries me is that  A Suitable Boy is not a book about India and the world. It is a book about India. It is, in fact, the best book about India, and the one I recommend people read if they want to understand our history, rather than India After Gandhi. Even Haresh’s experience abroad is used mainly to provide us with a sense of how those he meets in India slot him — not quite Oxford, eh? One of the most memorable sections in the book, at least for me, is when Haresh, travelling to Bengal, meets an upper-class couple who patronisingly quiz him about what he did in London, demonstrating an encyclopaedic knowledge of the city — only it turns out they have never gone to England. Nowhere else has Kolkata been as effectively summed up in a single page. 

A Suitable Boy  lends itself, of course, to colour and festivity. If that is what you want. But the brilliance of the book is that it provides us with a genuine understanding of the different and conflicting conceptions of what the Republic of India was at the very moment of its birth. Lata’s marriage matters, of course — and I am sure there will be marigolds — but the true climax of the book is India’s first election. How will the adaptation deal with the debates over landholding? Over patronage? Over status in All India Radio, and the soul of the Congress? That is actually what the book is about. The famous anecdote about Salman Rushdie asking Mr Seth if the latter had written “a soap opera” may be untrue. But my fear is that this adaptation will make India’s greatest novel look like one.