Capt. Ronald Merrick (played by Tim Pigott-Smith): “Are you one of those people who think that if you teach an Indian the rules of cricket he'll become an English gentleman?”
Guy Perron (played by Charles Dance): “Hardly sir. I know quite a few English gentlemen who play cricket brilliantly but are absolute bastards.”—The Jewel in the Crown (1984), written by Ken Taylor, adapted from Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet, directed by Ken O’Brien and Christopher Morahan
At times in its 40-year history, Masterpiece Theatre has been “Just-Okay Theatre.” But it reached one of its peaks with The Jewel in the Crown, which premiered on U.S. screens on this date in 1984.
For those viewers who find PBS to be hopelessly Anglophilic at times, Jewel provided a nice compromise: yes, there was a British cast and a British subject, but the script explored, with acute psychological insight and telling dramatic impact, the story of the messy end of imperial rule in India, the so-called “Jewel” of the title, in the 1940s.
Because both works dealt with the legal and social consequences that sprang from an accusation of rape involving a white woman by an Indian, critics have invariably compared Scott’s tetralogy with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published more than four decades earlier.
The resemblances between the two were reinforced in 1984, as director David Lean’s adaptation of Forster’s novel opened in New York only two days before Jewel began its run on the small screen. (Reinforcing the perceived similarities: both adaptations featured Dame Peggy Ashcroft as a compassionate elderly expatriate. Sometimes she must have wished she could have used the same dialogue and not worry about memorizing a whole new set of lines.)
For all of the skill Lean displayed in his last completed film, A Passage to India compromised the novel's ending on the parting of ways between colonial rulers and their subjects.
At times in its 40-year history, Masterpiece Theatre has been “Just-Okay Theatre.” But it reached one of its peaks with The Jewel in the Crown, which premiered on U.S. screens on this date in 1984.
For those viewers who find PBS to be hopelessly Anglophilic at times, Jewel provided a nice compromise: yes, there was a British cast and a British subject, but the script explored, with acute psychological insight and telling dramatic impact, the story of the messy end of imperial rule in India, the so-called “Jewel” of the title, in the 1940s.
Because both works dealt with the legal and social consequences that sprang from an accusation of rape involving a white woman by an Indian, critics have invariably compared Scott’s tetralogy with E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, published more than four decades earlier.
The resemblances between the two were reinforced in 1984, as director David Lean’s adaptation of Forster’s novel opened in New York only two days before Jewel began its run on the small screen. (Reinforcing the perceived similarities: both adaptations featured Dame Peggy Ashcroft as a compassionate elderly expatriate. Sometimes she must have wished she could have used the same dialogue and not worry about memorizing a whole new set of lines.)
For all of the skill Lean displayed in his last completed film, A Passage to India compromised the novel's ending on the parting of ways between colonial rulers and their subjects.
No such concession to audience taste was made in Jewel, which used every minute of its 14 hours to show how tangled and anguished the whole “imperial embrace” had become. The epic scope that TV provided, in that window of time, allowed the mini-series to stay largely true to Scott’s plot.
The quote above gives a sense of the incisive character development and ironies that carried over from novels to mini-series. The villain of the series, Ronald Merrick, becomes an emblem of the imperial corruption of power, as he brutalizes during interrogation the half-Indian, half-white Indian lover of the young white woman, Daphne Manners, who dared to reach out across the subcontinent’s color line.
Yet Merrick is not one-dimensional, even here. The grown-up scholarship boy is bristling with double resentment—at the Indians who would usurp his place of authority in this rapidly changing colony-cum-nation, and at the white liberals who dare to think that manners are culturally, not genetically, inherited.
At the same time, Merrick is tragically unaware that the code of the “English gentleman” has little if anything to do with morals, let alone manners—particularly for those members of the ruling class he aspires to join.
The quote above gives a sense of the incisive character development and ironies that carried over from novels to mini-series. The villain of the series, Ronald Merrick, becomes an emblem of the imperial corruption of power, as he brutalizes during interrogation the half-Indian, half-white Indian lover of the young white woman, Daphne Manners, who dared to reach out across the subcontinent’s color line.
Yet Merrick is not one-dimensional, even here. The grown-up scholarship boy is bristling with double resentment—at the Indians who would usurp his place of authority in this rapidly changing colony-cum-nation, and at the white liberals who dare to think that manners are culturally, not genetically, inherited.
At the same time, Merrick is tragically unaware that the code of the “English gentleman” has little if anything to do with morals, let alone manners—particularly for those members of the ruling class he aspires to join.
And, for all the tremendous damage he causes to one man’s life, he is ready to risk his own for the code that binds him to the natives he can’t understand. “I am your father and your mother,” he tells one, enunciating the paternalistic principle of Man-Bap—then falls victim to a devastating attack it takes him months to overcome. In the end, he is as much a casualty as those victimized by his sadomasochistic abuse of power.
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