The Jewel in the Crown is a 1984 British epic historical drama television serial produced by Granada Television and originally aired on the ITV network. It is an adaptation of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet of novels about the final days of the British rule in India in India during and after World War II, and is named after the first novel in the series.
The 14-part serial was directed by Jim O'Brien and Christopher Morahan, and starred an ensemble cast featuring Art Malik, Geraldine James, Saeed Jaffrey, Peggy Ashcroft, Charles Dance, Tim Pigott-Smith, Eric Porter, Susan Wooldridge, Zia Mohyeddin, Kamini Kaushal, Om Puri and Nicholas Le Prevost. The musical score was composed by George Fenton.
The serial originally aired between 9 January and 3 April 1984. It won five British Academy Television Awards in 1985, including for Best Drama Series, Best Actor (for Pigott-Smith) and Best Actress (for Ashcroft). In the United States, where it aired on PBS' Masterpiece Theater programme, it won the Golden Globe Award for Best Limited Series and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Limited Series. It has been acclaimed as "the high-water mark of 1980s British TV."
Contents
Plot
The serial opens in the midst of World War II in the fictional Indian city of Mayapore, against the backdrop of the last years of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement. Hari Kumar is a young Indian man who was educated at Chillingborough, a British public school; he identifies as English rather than Indian. The bankruptcy of his father, a formerly successful businessman, forces him to return to India to live with his aunt.
Working as a journalist, Kumar now has a lower social status in India, and lives between two worlds, British and Indian. Numerous Anglo-Indians discriminate against him, and he is held in some suspicion by Indian independence activists. During this time, violent anti-British demonstrations take place in the city. Hari becomes romantically involved with Daphne Manners, a young British woman who shows an egalitarian attitude to Indians. One night, after Hari and Daphne make love in the public Bibighar Gardens, a group of Indian men attack them. Hari is beaten and Daphne is gang-raped.
Ronald Merrick, a young middle-class Englishman, is the bigoted, hardworking local Indian Police superintendent. He once professed romantic interest in Daphne, who politely but firmly rebuffed him. He arrests Hari for her rape, holding him in the local jail. Hari is beaten and sexually humiliated. Merrick resents Hari's privileged education and disdains Daphne's preference for him. When Daphne refuses to cooperate with the investigation, the police do not prosecute Hari for rape. But Hari and other young, educated Indians are jailed without trial under the security regulations adopted to suppress the Indian independence movement. Word that the prisoners have been tortured outrages the Indian community. Merrick is transferred from Mayapore to a smaller, less important town in the province.
Daphne learns she is pregnant. She chooses to believe Hari is the father, rather than one of the rapists. She dies in childbirth. The mixed-race daughter, Parvati, is taken in by Daphne's great-aunt, Lady Manners, widow of a former provincial governor. While Lady Manners takes the infant to the resort area of Srinagar, she meets Sarah Layton, a young British woman holidaying with her mother, Mildred, and sister, Susan. Sarah's and Susan's father is the colonel of the Indian Army regiment in Pankot, a hill station near Mayapore. He is being held as a prisoner of war in Germany, after his unit was captured early in the war. Susan and their mother prefer to stay away from Lady Manners due to the scandal of her great-niece's illegitimate birth, but Sarah pays a call on Lady Manners and the two women become friendly.
Episodes
The following titles are as given on the DVD release. The first episode is double-length (105 minutes). All others are 53 minutes.
Soundtrack
The Jewel in the Crown is a soundtrack album by Anthony Randall and Orchestra performing the compositions of George Fenton that appeared in the miniseries, released in 1985. It was originally released on LP by Chrysalis Records and subsequently reissued on CD by EMI.
Track listing
All compositions by George Fenton
”Jewel in the Crown – Main Theme” – 2:32
”The Lakes” – 1:57
”The Triangle” – 3:48
”Crossing the River” – 2:22
”Imprisoned” – 2:03
”Death by Fire” – 2:35
Chillingborough School Song” – 1:47
”Butterflies Caught in a Web” – 4:25
”Daphne & Hari” – 3:44
”Mirat, Princely State” – 3:25
”Kedara and Waltz Kedara” – 6:12
”Barbie Leaves Rose Cottage/Champagne Charlie” – 2:30
”Guy Perron’s March” – 2:09
”Pankot - The Hills” – 3:02
”Jewel in the Crown – End Titles” – 1:50
Personnel
George Fenton – arranger
Anthony Randall – conductor
Gavyn Wright – leader
Clem Alford – sitar
Clive Bell – flute
Nicholas Maigrel – sarangui
Keshav Sathe – tabla
Leslie Pearson – piano on “Butterflies Caught in a Web”
Michale Jeans – Cor anglais on “Daphne & Hari”
Production
Sir Denis Forman, then chairman of Granada Productions, wrote in 1983 that the impetus for adapting the Raj Quartet was the success of Scott's novel Staying On. The decision was made to attempt to adapt the Quartet series, but first test the company's ability to successfully complete a production in India by adapting Staying On. With the success of that television film, plans proceeded for the Quartet project.
The series was shot on 16mm film, much of it on location in India. The scenes of the Nawab of Mirat's palace were filmed at Lake Palace in Udaipur. Besides all the Mirat scenes, Udaipur was also the location for Mayapore and some Pankot scenes. Mashobra was the primary location (it was filmed in Khushwant Singh's ancestral property) and many scenes were filmed in Mysore and Kashmir.
All filming not in India was at Manchester's Granada Studios. The programme was often screened from grainy prints, but was fully remastered for its 2005 DVD release and ITV3 screening, resulting in much better picture quality.
Adaptation
The series is based on the Raj Quartet novels by Paul Scott:
The Jewel in the Crown (1966)
The Day of the Scorpion (1968)
The Towers of Silence (1971)
A Division of the Spoils (1975)
While the novels are written from different characters' viewpoints and move back and forth in time, the adaptation places events in roughly chronological order.
Cast
The series made stars of Art Malik and Charles Dance. Other leading actors included Peggy Ashcroft (who won the BAFTA Best TV Actress award for her performance), Tim Pigott-Smith, Geraldine James, Judy Parfitt, Rachel Kempson, Eric Porter, Susan Wooldridge, Zohra Sehgal, Saeed Jaffrey, and Karan Kapoor. The plot's complexities ensured that no one character was at the centre of the action throughout. All four "Best TV Actress" nominations at that year's BAFTAs went to stars of the series, with Ashcroft winning over Wooldridge, James and Parfitt. Pigott-Smith won Best TV Actor.
In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes compiled by the British Film Institute in 2000 and voted by industry professionals, The Jewel in the Crown placed 22nd.
Broader context
According to the Museum of Broadcast Communications there was "a cycle of film and television productions which emerged during the first half of the 1980s, which seemed to indicate Britain's growing preoccupation with India, Empire and a particular aspect of British cultural history". In addition to The Jewel in the Crown, this cycle included Gandhi (1982), Heat and Dust (1983), The Far Pavilions (1984) and A Passage to India (1984).
Charles Dance remarked in 2011 that it has a devout following to this day. "I think that aired here in 1983, and there are people still to this day who assemble in each other’s houses and have Jewel In The Crown weekends and watch all 14 hours, mostly in America," he told Attention Deficit Delirium. "I have people stopping me in the street now saying that they watched Jewel In The Crown again a couple of months ago, and I think, 'Bloody hell, did you really?' So I’m known to that generation for a completely different type of work. The current film and television viewing audience is much younger, and the kind of things that I’m known for are these rather off-the-wall, slightly villainous characters in fantastical film and television things, but that’s okay. It’s better to be looked over than to be overlooked in my business."
Reception
In contemporary reviews, John J. O'Connor of The New York Times wrote, "the careful accumulation of marvelous detail is never less than fascinating. And once again in a British production, the performances are rarely less than extraordinary... What emerges in the end is a comprehension of India far more convincing than the posturings of a Rudyard Kipling and far deeper than the tightly focused biography of a Gandhi. The Jewel in the Crown is not only engrossing television. It is important television, a model of what the medium can do." Jeff Jarvis of People magazine called it "first-rate; the settings are stunning. It does a masterly job of making you care about its characters and what happens to them. That is what a mini-series is supposed to do, and Jewel does a spectacular job of it. It is this year’s best fictional mini." The Washington Post called the series "Ravishing, reverberant and profoundly sad" and wrote, "The inscrutability of India to outsiders is not romanticized, just contemplated, celebrated, just as its intoxicating physical beauty is."
In reviewing the box-set video in 2010, Alexandra Coghlan of The Guardian wrote that the series "sits alongside Brideshead Revisited as the high-water mark of 1980s British TV."