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.