Jewel in The Crown

Tweet

A 14 part Drama Series set in India around the 2nd World War. Based on Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, four novels published between 1966 and 1975, the serial focuses on the final years of the British in India. Set against the backdrop of the second world war and using the rape of an English woman as its dramatic centre, Jewel in the Crown charts a moment of crisis and change in British national history. http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/J/htmlJ/jewelinthe/jewelinthe.htm I urge you to check out this jewel in the net for more information about the beautiful locations of India, Wales and England that where used to shoot and film the Jewel in the Crown. The filming of The Jewel in the Crown television series began January, 1982, in Udaipur, India, with "an aged holy man turn[ing] up to bless the production," a ceremony without which no film in India's movie industry ever begins (10). Gasgoigne describes the fourteen-hour television saga as a story "of the love-hate relationship between Britain and India or, in terms of the traditional family themes of Indian films, a study of the final years of a forced marriage between the two countries followed by the agonies of divorce" (10-11). "Udaipur can make a strong claim to be the most beautiful city in India" (11). "A friendly group of a thousand spectators crowded in on every scene," and were exceedingly "cooperative, keeping quiet during every take and bursting into applause the moment Jim [O'Brien, who shared with Christopher Morahan the direction of the series] said 'Cut'" (13). India also worked its magic on Christopher Morahan, also "over Producer" of the series, during his first day of filming: he "felt overwhelmed by a desire to capture on film, in the service of Paul Scott's books, this extraordinarily rich, vivid, ancient culture and our [British] own alien reaction to it and influence upon it" (14-15). Later, Sir Denis Forman, who knows India and Paul Scott's novels well, who bought the rights to the Raj Quartet in 1978, and who had "long imagined each scene," reviewed the photography: "the very steps up which Daphne Manners would stumble after being raped in the Bibibhar Gardens, the Kashmiri houseboat in which her aunt [Lady Manners] would look after Daphne's baby, or the street in which Daphne's Indian lover [Hari Kumar] would live an impoverished and obscure life in contrast to his English public-school background" (15). http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng339/coursepack/makingJewel.htm "Scott's novels require four radically different Indian locations, each of them a typical part of life during the Raj" (15): filming locations were Udaipur, Mysore, Simla, Kashmir. "Udaipur...provided some of the locations for Scott's Mayapore and Pankot, two towns with a strong British presence, both military and civil" (17), supplemented by Mysore, a city further to the south and...very much hotter" (17). Filming in Indian locations acclimatized cast and crew to Eastern "[b]ias against the taking of any form of life, combined with the heat of the climate" (17). When Morahan was asked for "his least prepossessing image of India he specified, without hesitation, the ceiling fans idly blowing air down towards the vast skyscrapers of documents on any official's desk, all reduced by time and inattention to a uniform shade of brown" (20). I remember talking to an Indian patient about his home, and I longed to visit. I wonder if it is as romantic there now, as The Jewel in the Crown would have us believe. Are the buildings still magnificent.