Filming was completed in India last December and Nair took a break in March from editing the show in London with a visit home to New York. Then international borders closed because of the coronavirus. In the video interview, Nair demonstrated how she toggled between multiple screens to edit with her team across the world. Even the music was scored remotely, with a full orchestra in Budapest and her composers, Alex Heffes and the sitarist Anoushka Shankar, in Los Angeles and London.
When the show premiered in Britain, it was widely praised in the mainstream press as a milestone in representation on the BBC. South Asian critics were less kind, focusing on the mannered English dialogue and overly enunciated accents, with particular focus on why an 84-year-old Welsh writer had adapted this iconic story about the birth of modern India and a young womans romantic awakening.
As social media criticism built, Vikram Seth broke his public silence to defend his choice of Davies, saying race should have nothing to do with it in The Telegraph.
Its a balance between getting someone very, very Indian to write it or someone very, very experienced at adapting long books, Davies explained from his home in the British Midlands. (His other TV adaptations include Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice.) I feel a little prickly and needing to defend my territory and not have it taken away from me as a writer. I would claim the right to put myself in the mind of people who are different from me.
Nair, who was raised in a secular Hindu family, pushed to return more of the novels political themes back into the screenplay.
Politics was front and center for me, and that was one of the biggest things that I could do was to re-shift the balance of the story, she said. Less from will she or wont she marry Pride and Prejudice and Mrs. Bennet, that trope to really making Lata feel like the making of India.read more
‘A Suitable Boy’ Finally Finds Its Perfect Match: Mira Nair
