A Grand Elegy to the Raj

By Pico Iyer

THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN, PBS, Sundays through March 17

The first things swept aside are the conventions of TV drama. There is no 21-gun pageantry here, no coffee-table scenery. Most of the characters, and there are more than 100, keep their secrets to themselves. When, after 14 episodes, all the subplots converge, none of them ends up resolved. Nonetheless, The Jewel in the Crown, which comes to the U.S. after conquering viewers and reviewers throughout Britain, delivers a sovereign account of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Slowly, painstakingly tracking its protagonists through a labyrinth of troubles, the show builds up a panoramic portrait of British India that is as levelheaded as it is evenhanded. More of an intricate tapestry than a flying carpet, Jewel dwells on the British raj in its dotage and behind its gilded scenes, at home though hardly at ease. In the process, it poignantly suggests that even the grandest of empires was made up of very small people and that no subject is more exotic than a divided heart.

In its singular complexity, Jewel is diligently faithful to its source, the late Paul Scott's magisterial four-volume novel known as the Raj Quartet. Like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Scott's story circles around charges of rape and the trials, both personal and legal, that ensue. Like Forster, Scott asks how Britain, in some ways the smallest of small worlds, managed to govern India, one of the hugest and most heterogeneous of countries. But Scott's book is set about two decades later than Forster's, in the final five years of British rule. By the time Jewel opens in 1942, the sun has not set on the Empire, but the clouds have begun to gather. Scott's protagonists are caught between two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born. In the brooding moments before the storm, the British must endure the ache of quitting a place that had come to seem like home, while the Indians restlessly await the bloody convulsions that attend the birth of a nation.

The series' domain is the subcontinental divide that separates those worlds. The action begins with an awkward mating dance between a shy English expatriate, Daphne Manners (Susan Wooldridge), and a tall, dark, handsome Indian, Hari Kumar (Art Malik). Straightforward enough, so it seems. But "in India," as one character points out, "nothing is self-evident." The exceedingly British Manners lives with an Indian lady she calls Auntie, and longs to make herself at home in India; the Indian-seeming Kumar has just emerged from a previous incarnation at an exclusive English boarding school, and finds himself an alien in the land of his fathers. While the lovers are drawing close enough to realize the distance between them, they are constantly shadowed by a working-class British officer, Ronald Merrick (Tim Pigott-Smith). Perversely relishing his lack of old school ties, Merrick remains a perennial odd man out in British India, resented by well-bred Britons, resentful of well-heeled Indians.

When Daphne is raped in mysterious circumstances, the brutal Merrick seizes on the opportunity to arrest and torture Kumar. While Kumar languishes in jail, the story follows Merrick to another posting, and to a potential odd coupling between another Englishwoman, Sarah Layton (Geraldrne James), and an Indian, Ahmed Kasim (Derrick Branche). Around them all and around every corner hovers Count Bro-nowsky (Eric Porter). In a world where British cliques and clans are mixed with Hindu castes and classes, Bronowsky--a Russian emigre, an aristocrat and a confirmed bachelor--does not fit on any score. But neither does Merrick or the Muslim Kasim. Indeed, Jewel presents a teeming society of outcasts--spinsters, exiles, maiden aunts and homosexuals for whom the Empire was a kind of straitjacket. As the end of an era approaches and the series wends its way through breakdowns both civil and nervous, one character after another implodes, goes mad, turns mute or sets her life aflame.

Connoisseurs of tales of the raj will recognize in Jewel most of the pukka props that have become the stuff of imperial legend: rusty colonels and their horsy daughters, schoolmarmy missionaries and pip-pipping young officers. Awful duffers are forever bashing off for a gin-and-tonic at the club, while social gaffers natter on about their rotten luck. India seems, on the surface at least, to be the ultimate British public school, an extended expatriate cocktail party.

But it is the humble genius of Jewel to look beyond this surface and settle on silences, interstices, uneasy moments between engagements. Forswearing the familiar group portrait of the raj in formal poses, it presents snapshots of disoriented individuals, alone and often at loose ends.

The show's occasional violence is all the more harrowing because so much of the action consists of nothing more than long dialogues in frumpy British parlors. Indeed, the series captures wonderfully an India so housebroken that it has come to resemble a dowdy British institution. Instead of the fairy-tale land of kohl-eyed houris and snake charmers, the subcontinent here seems to be a domesticated place of hospital corridors, puddly lanes and gently twittering birds.

All the while, however, the pressure of political events is relentlessly building. One of the production's inspired touches is to punctuate the private doings and undoings of the characters with snatches of contemporaneous news footage. These black-and-white bulletins from the front trumpet the glory of the Empire in all its turbaned pomp, while providing hearty reports on wartime developments in the Asian theater. But the newsreels also serve a subtler purpose. Through their gung-ho descriptions of Gunga Din's descendants they present, unvarnished, Britain's official stance toward its colonies, a paternalism compounded of arrogance and affection.

A sterling cast handles nearly all of Jewel's haunted souls with understated urgency. As the gawky Daphne, Wooldridge is a particular marvel. Eyes wide and full of a startled innocence, she galumphs through life with such sweet diffidence that plainness itself seems radiant. An equally luminous pathos surrounds Dame Peggy Ashcroft's Barbie Batchelor, a sad little figure of baffled devotion who has little to do save muddle through her final days "very tired and old and far from home."

As the third of Scott's mild and curious heroines, a sort of professional consoler to be found at the bedsides of the series' variously suffering characters, Geraldine James is unremittingly sensible. So too is Charles Dance as Guy Perron, the thoughtful, soft-spoken officer with whom she feels rapport. But the most dominant of all the performances is that of Pigott-Smith as Merrick. Holding together the entire series with the black magic of a self-made lago, he is a picture of twisted pride and prejudice, his face permanently pinched, his upper lip invariably quivering toward a sneer.

The initiators of the series, Britain's Granada Television, approached the adaptation of Jewel with a method that seemed like madness. Half of the episodes were directed by Television Veteran Christopher Morahan, 55 (Uncle Vanya, Old Times), the other half by Jim O'Brien, 37, who has directed a number of documentaries and theatrical productions. In addition, the film makers decided to brave four months' shooting on location in India, an adventure that involved wrangling 300 containers of equipment past vigilant customs officers, recruiting local beggars to act as extras and running up a tab of $7 million.

The adapters' most daunting task, however, was unraveling the elaborately contrapuntal structure of Scott's novels. Scott, whose work won much of its success after his death from cancer in 1978 at age 57, was a former British army officer with three years' experience in India. Less a fluent stylist than a ferociously honest and fair-minded observer, he was determined to do justice to both sides of the equation in British India. In order to portray the Empire in the round, he told his almost 2,000-page story through a complex symphony of flashbacks, fast-forward prolepses and as many as 13 perspectives on a single incident.

But what was all encompassing on the page would have been all confusing on the screen. To the rescue came two other former soldiers from the raj, Scriptwriter Ken Taylor and Sir Denis Forman, the chairman of Granada and the project's prime mover. Their no-nonsense solution was to chop up yard-length segments of wallpaper, pin them on the walls of a large room and sort out a chronological story line by writing an outline of events on each square. In the process, they preserved nearly all the equivocal situations and ragged-edged characters that are often more eloquent than Scott's words.

Not surprisingly, the series has inherited some of the book's shortcomings. As leisurely and sinuous in its flow as the Ganges, sometimes crashing through rapids, more often meandering into tributaries, Jewel does on occasion get bogged down in its own complexities. In the middle episodes, when the action closes in on Layton and four other mem-sahibs, the show could be mistaken for a provincial soap opera, and a brackish one at that. Sometimes too it parades a kind of sincerity that teeters on melodrama. Symbols are spelled out, symmetries underlined, characters displayed with embarrassing nakedness. Merrick never tires of proclaiming his lower-class origins, and Kumar commits such lines as "I hate ... most of all myself, for being black and being English." Nevertheless, the rippling succession of slow, soft moments gathers such cumulative resonance that the series' conclusion is both shattering and ineffably moving.

In Britain earlier this year, Jewel became a fashionable rage and a national addiction. Each week it held 8 million viewers hostage; it sparked a revisionist debate in the press about imperial guilt and glory; and, in the end, it was almost unanimously acclaimed. Jewel's subject may seem more distant to American viewers. But they would be well advised to set aside their Sunday evenings for the next three months to follow this uncommonly rewarding series. There could be no truer memorial to Scott's quiet masterpiece and no grander elegy to the ambiguous power of the Empire. --By Pico Iyer