Word: jeweller
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...JEWEL IN THE CROWN, PBS, Sundays through March...
...aside are the conventions of TV drama. There is no 21-gun pageantry here, no coffee-table scenery. Most of the characters, and there are more than 100, keep their secrets to themselves. When, after 14 episodes, all the subplots converge, none of them ends up resolved. Nonetheless, The Jewel in the Crown, which comes to the U.S. after conquering viewers and reviewers throughout Britain, delivers a sovereign account of the decline and fall of the British Empire. Slowly, painstakingly tracking its protagonists through a labyrinth of troubles, the show builds up a panoramic portrait of British India that...
...singular complexity, Jewel is diligently faithful to its source, the late Paul Scott's magisterial four-volume novel known as the Raj Quartet. Like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Scott's story circles around charges of rape and the trials, both personal and legal, that ensue. Like Forster, Scott asks how Britain, in some ways the smallest of small worlds, managed to govern India, one of the hugest and most heterogeneous of countries. But Scott's book is set about two decades later than Forster's, in the final five years of British...
...around every corner hovers Count Bro-nowsky (Eric Porter). In a world where British cliques and clans are mixed with Hindu castes and classes, Bronowsky-a Russian emigre, an aristocrat and a confirmed bachelor-does not fit on any score. But neither does Merrick or the Muslim Kasim. Indeed, Jewel presents a teeming society of outcasts-spinsters, exiles, maiden aunts and homosexuals for whom the Empire was a kind of straitjacket. As the end of an era approaches and the series wends its way through breakdowns both civil and nervous, one character after another implodes, goes mad, turns mute...
Connoisseurs of tales of the raj will recognize in Jewel most of the pukka props that have become the stuff of imperial legend: rusty colonels and their horsy daughters, schoolmarmy missionaries and pip-pipping young officers. Awful duffers are forever bashing off for a gin-and-tonic at the club, while social gaffers natter on about their rotten luck. India seems, on the surface at least, to be the ultimate British public school, an extended expatriate cocktail party...