Saturated in gin fizz and repressed emotion, The Jewel in the Crown sits alongside Brideshead Revisited as the high-water mark of 1980s British TV. Understated and hugely poignant, its 14 episodes trace the decline of the British Raj from Gandhi's inflammatory Quit India speech of 1942 to partition and the riots that followed.
Paul Scott's original Raj Quartet novels become much more navigable in Ken Taylor's elegant screenplay. Focusing on just two of the quartet's many storylines, the series, which first aired on ITV, follows the struggles of young Hari Kumar (Art Malik), an Indian raised in England who returns to find himself "too Indian for the English and too English for the Indians". Kumar's tragic affair with English girl Daphne Manners leads to conflict with racist sociopath Ronald Merrick (Tim Pigott-Smith), a policeman and later a soldier.
To supplement its spare narrative, it relies on eloquent visuals and original news footage. Sweeping panoramas – of hawkers among ruined temples, of fishermen hauling nets on a glistening lake – are set against sudden, violent action. A rape, a massacre, an English missionary burning herself alive: these events rupture the delicate narrative tapestry, refusing to be assimilated into the official history of the Raj.
The series made a star of Charles Dance (as Sergeant Guy Perron), and revelled in Susan Wooldridge's winningly maladroit Manners. Yet it is Pigott-Smith who compels. Capturing the steel-capped politeness of a man always on the defensive, as fond of Debussy as he is of masochistic homosexual encounters, Pigott-Smith conjures up a character who is both disturbing and strangely pitiable.
The Jewel in the Crown is no exercise in white-gloved nostalgia, rather a portrait of a world on the verge of collapse, and of the futile struggle to prevent it. "There's nothing we can do," says one character at the end. "After 300 years of India, we've made this whole damned, bloody, senseless mess."
