A Suitable Boy is suitable for our times

In this piece, senior journalist Kaveree Bamzai draws parallels between the India of the early 1950s as described by Vikram Seth in 'A Suitable Boy', and the India of today, where issues like negative stereotyping and polarisation continue to exist.

Hyderabad:A temple is built right next to a mosque by a small-time raja resulting in a riot in which protesting Muslims are shot dead. A mother is appalled about her daughter meeting a young Muslim student on campus because the community is "violent, cruel and lecherous". And Calcutta types, especially the women, are dubbed "flashy and dishonest", one particularly so because she melts the pure gold medals her mother in law gave her to make a pair of pear-shaped earrings for herself.

Look around, and nothing much seems to have changed from the days of 'A Suitable Boy', written by Vikram Seth in 1993, but evoking 1951 immediately after India's independence, and now a sumptuous and wholly satisfying epic recreated as a six-part mini-series by Mira Nair for BBC One.

We have just emerged from the bhoomi pujan of a temple built on the ruins of a mosque. Inter community relationships are still looked upon with a degree of fear and mistrust. And we need only be reminded of the social media chatter around Rhea Chakraborty to be reminded of the innate suspicion of Bengali women. Nair's 'A Suitable Boy' has fun with that trope, by portraying Meenakshi Chatterjee Mehra as the ultimate glamourpuss, as at home dancing a tango at the Tollygunje Club as she is getting her nails painted the Smitten Mitten colour and declaring with a flourish: This smitten kitten is about to be bitten. By no less a man than Billy Irani, whose name seems to be tailormade for a rich cad.

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Andrew Davies' recreation of 'A Suitable Boy' for BBC One has tracets of the author he is most passionate about: Jane Austen. And it is no surprise. Rupa Mehra, the mother of Lata, for whom she is seeking a suitable boy, seems to be a kindred spirit of Mrs Bennet, whose only aspiration was to ensure her daughters married well. Nair's recreation telescopes many details, as is to be expected in such a vast movel, but is pitch perfect when it comes to capturing contemporary issues. There is the "Muslim question" with the local landlord, the Nawab Sahab, a great friend of Mahesh Kapoor, the revenue minister who pilots the revolutionary Zamindari Abolition Act, choosing to stay back in India unlike much of his family. There is the issue of women empowerment, with Lata anxious to start teaching after her marriage, and not letting her education go to waste. And there is the language question. Lata's elder brother, a boxwallah in Calcutta, makes much of the language, and its necessity in a new India, even going so far as to be dismissive of the "Hindi" types.

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In Narendra Modi's India, the National Education Policy with its advocacy of instruction in the mother tongue upto Class 5 has its critics, who have inevitably been branded elitist, manages to make English a problem, yet again. There are also struggles about syllabus change, in this case in the local Brahmpur university of the undergraduate English course where James Joyce is not considered a suitable writer for young people by the establishment teachers.

I asked Rasika Dugal, who plays a prominent role in A Suitable Boy, about its aptness today, and she said it's more relevant than ever. "I don't remember society being so polarised in my lifetime. It is scary. There is a breakdown in conversation so there's nothing to learn from each other.''

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There are also the deep divisions in society which continue till today: Kucherru, the labourer who has to water the zamindar's fields and the polar opposite where Justice Chatterjee's tea means glasses of cold champagne, or "Chatterjee tea" as described by the son, who is naturally a terribly clever poet who has just come down from England. There is also a sense of a new kind of profession emerging, which is skill based rather than degree oriented in the character of Haresh Khanna, inspired no doubt by Seth's own shoemaker father. There is a distinction between a profession and a trade, Lata's elder brother says sniffily, and it will remain forever embedded in our society. Indeed it is.

Kumbh mela stampedes, early morning boat rides to escape prying eyes, superstitions around self-declared godmen, in this case, Ramjap Baba, and age-inappropriate romances that everyone scoffs at. Nothing much seems to have changed in independent India almost 70 years since the time in which the novel was set.

(Kaveree Bamzai, a recipient of the Chevening Scholarship, has formerly worked with The Times of India and The Indian Express and has been the editor of India Today. She is also a member of the CII National Committee for Women's Empowerment and Committee on Media and Entertainment)