What Is the Significance of A Suitable Boy for British Television?
What Is A Suitable Boy About?
A Suitable Boy at first seems like the sort of run-of-the-mill BBC period drama that we have come to expect from British television. It is set in 1951, and it follows a 19 year old woman under pressure from her family to find a husband. She falls for a man whose background is incompatible with her family’s, and conflict predictably ensues.
Stories of forbidden love are tales as old as time, but there has not yet been a creation quite like A Suitable Boy thus far on British television. The characters of A Suitable Boy are all played by South Asian actors, and no white actors. The setting is also post-independence and post-partition India, at a time when the country was undergoing seismic cultural changes.
Representation behind the camera is equally as important as in front of it, and A Suitable Boy delivers. The director is an Indian-American female filmmaker named Mira Nair, whose production company specialises in films about Indian society aimed at an international audience. With these credentials, Nair seems like the ideal fit to take on the project.
This television series comes at a time when the British small screen has undergone a reckoning from the public to remove racist representations of people of colour. Come Fly With Me is a prime example of this, as this programme featured Matt Lucas undertaking a tasteless portrayal of an openly sexist and dim-witted South Asian man (Taj Manzoor).
Contradistinction to these depictions of South Asian men on television, A Suitable Boy will feature South Asian actors playing the love interests. South Asian men in western television programmes tend to be relegated to comic relief and presented as romantically incompetent (think of Raj in The Big Bang Theory, played by British Indian actor Kunal Nayyar).
It is refreshing instead to see South Asian actors breaking this convention, and it should be the norm to see these sorts of characters on our screens. Within the wider context of the upheaval of racist tropes in British television, A Suitable Boy could not have come at a better time.
It also cannot be forgotten that we have the female protagonist to look forward to. Lata Mehra (played by Tanya Maniktala) is an assertive young woman who remains steadfast in her choices even as her opinionated mother and brother try to influence her. Many of us will be familiar with the tension of rejecting your family’s ideas, especially as they often want what is best for us.
On the whole, A Suitable Boy seems like it could be a breath of fresh air for the British public that is calling for representation of people of colour on our screens. Perhaps it will set a precedent for diversity on television in the programmes to come.
Who Wrote A Suitable Boy?
A Suitable Boy is based on a novel of the same name by Vikram Seth, published in 1993. It is a gargantuan book at 1,349 pages, and as such it is one of the longest novels published in the English language in one volume.
Given that this is such a long book, it makes sense for the sequence of events to be depicted as a series as opposed to a film which would only have 2 or 3 hours to cover all the details. The story follows 4 different families over the course of 18 months, which lends itself well to the pacing of a 6 part television series.
When Is A Suitable Boy Coming Out?
The first episode of A Suitable Boy is due to be aired on Sunday 26 July on BBC One.
Written by Gabrielle Cherpin
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