Vikram Seth begun his tome with a couple of Voltaire quotes. The first went: “The superfluous, that very necessary thing….”, which was duly followed by: “The secret of being a bore is to say everything”.
In his 1500-page tome, Vikram Seth produced the magic trick of saying everything and yet managing to stay interesting (to say the least!). Widening his hoop to turn the superfluous beautiful, even proving it necessary to capture a nation and its people in all their glory. Blending the idiosyncrasies with the fundamentals of characters to flesh them out.
The tragedy of the 2020 adaptation of this wonderful work into a six-hour miniseries is that it has contrived to achieve exactly the opposite. In abandoning the superfluous for the sake of brevity, the creators have ended up sacrificing depth and nuances of the rich storyline populated by a wide cast of characters. With a lesser name to helm the project, the sense of a missed opportunity would not have been felt so strongly. Only, ever since I had heard about this miniseries, I was waiting with anticipation to savor Vikram Seth’s magnum opus all over again, this time on the screen. The cast of actors was promising, the production value all throughout turned out to be pleasing, the outdoor scenes were well-appointed. But, alas, while it got the mega scenes (e.g., riots and stampedes) right, it’s in the intimacy of emotions that A Suitable Boy (2020) was found wanting.
Apart from Savita and Saeeda Bai (and maybe – to an extent – Lata), most of the other characters suffer by varying degrees – from being sidelined at best, to being reduced to caricatures at worst. Of those who were reduced to sideshows are Mahesh Kapoor and the Nawab of Baitar. The thoughts driving their actions hardly find time to make their presence felt. Justice Chaterji hardly gets screen time, wasting the brilliant Dhritiman Chatterjee who seemed otherwise a terrific choice for the role. Some of the minor characters like Rasheed suffer similar fates too.
Of the characters who are caricatured, Lata’s mother Rupa Mehra tops the list. Her sentiments are turned into a comic relief, her actions viewed through a reductionist lens to that of her daughter’s prospective groom-hunting mother. Ishan Khatter as Maan Kapoor is sincere, but Maan of the book was way more layered than the sort of man-boy he is diminished to here.
One actor who manages to rise above the straitjacketing with his character is Namit Das, who brings Haresh to life in an excellent turn. Danesh Razvi as Kabir Durrani also does justice to Kabir Durrani, with the Lata-Kabir boat ride brought to life beautifully on screen.
Summary
A Suitable Boy (2020) is a sad tale of a missed opportunity, because while it is technically sound and brings together a strong cast of skillful actors, it fails to capture the soul of the syncretic India that Vikram Seth had so lovingly assembled in a complex yet beautiful fabric in his landmark work. While I had felt a sense of loss and void as I had completed the book after a six-month long marathon read, it is unlikely one would have similar feelings on watching the train leave the platform at the end of the sixth episode. Seth’s opus deserved a way more suitable match.
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