A Suitable Boy review: Mira Nair adapts Vikram Seth’s 1993 book of the same name, with a cast led by Tabu, Ishaan Khatter, Tanya Maniktala. A Suitable Boy release date is July 26 on BBC and TBA on Netflix. Watch A Suitable Boy trailer within.
Mira Nair has been trying to make a live-action adaptation of “A Suitable Boy” — Vikram Seth’s coming-of-age magnum opus set in a newly-independent early-fifties India — ever since its publication in 1993. But for the longest time, she was unable to get her hands on the rights to the book. Instead, Nair ended up delivering a “microcosmic response” to A Suitable Boy with her 2001 Golden Lion-winning film Monsoon Wedding. No wonder then that her adaptation of A Suitable Boy — a six-part miniseries directed wholly by Nair that premières on BBC One in the UK, before hitting Netflix in India and the rest of the world — might feel like Monsoon Wedding to some. Though by the nature of its source material — it’s one of the longest novels ever — A Suitable Boy is a lot more.
Primarily, A Suitable Boy follows two rebellious young adults — Lata Mehra (Tanya Maniktala, from Flames) and Maan Kapoor (Ishaan Khatter, from Dhadak) — as they struggle to discover themselves and make choices in a society that expects them to not ruffle feathers. At the same time, it involves more than a hundred characters, many belonging to one of four extended families: the Mehras, Kapoors, Chatterjis, and Khans. You might understandably struggle to keep up with who’s related to whom. More so because writer Andrew Davies (BBC’s War & Peace) has been tasked with condensing nearly 1,500 pages into six hours — an impossible feat — which means A Suitable Boy throws a lot at you from the start, even as it must leave a lot out.
And that’s not all. Like its written counterpart, A Suitable Boy is quite politically minded as well, touching upon Hindu nationalism in a few manners. Within the first episode itself, an influential Islamophobic zamindar funds the construction of a temple next to a mosque, a police force kills Muslim protestors at the behest of the political elite, and a Muslim-hating politician calls for India to be a Hindu nation with an eye on the first democratic national election. Nair does well to draw parallels to the tragedies unfolding in India 70 years later, which shows how little the needle has moved in certain regards, and been pushed back in some cases. More importantly, for Nair, it’s about how the political affects the personal, with the Hindu–Muslim tensions changing the characters’ lives.
It’s not all heavy. Nair manages to instil some humour into the proceedings through her direction, with some help from Seth’s lines and background score from Alex Heffes (reuniting with Nair after Queen of Katwe) with Anoushka Shankar (making her series debut as a composer).
