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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.