here is a lot riding on A Suitable Boy (BBC One), which is a fate that befalls pioneering and overdue series such as this. It is the BBC’s first period drama – in more than half a century of forays into the past in horse and carriage, from where you get a rather restricted view of history – with an entirely south Asian cast and no white characters. No, not even one cantankerous dame protecting her fortune from her deathbed. So, this six-episode distillation of Vikram Seth’s 1,300-page panorama of post-partition India has to do everything, at once, in multiple territories. It is a tall order, especially when some were unhappy with aspects of the adaptation before the opening credits rolled. Does A Suitable Boy succeed? Could anything on such challenging terms? “When India became independent in 1947, it was partitioned into two countries,” begins Andrew Davies’s staunchly traditional adaptation, which is directed by Mira Nair and was filmed on location in north India. “India was free, but the land and the people were divided for ever.” Succinct – and, appallingly, never more true than now. That is the power of this genre, one that my Indian family has gobbled up since my parents first fell for The Barchester Chronicles. Great period drama speaks to the times. A Suitable Boy, interestingly, speaks more to the times in which it was written. But I will come back to that. There is a lot to get through in the first episode. Four large families, the birth of Hindu nationalism, an upcoming general election, the requisite music and dancing and first and foremost – this is India, and a Davies adaptation, after all – a wedding. Lata, a spirited university student, is preparing for her sister’s arranged marriage as her mother warns her that she, too, “will marry a boy I choose”. Some people were not happy with the choice of Davies – who is not just a white British writer, but the white British monarch of the period adaptation – to tell this vast story of newly independent India. But in many ways Davies is the most suitable boy. It does not get more Pride and Prejudice than a girl being chivvied into marriage by her mum. And Davies, who would find an elegant way in adapting the dictionary to reduce it to its dirty words, is masterly at weaving the small thread into the big picture. Take the scene in which Lata argues with her English professor about why TS Eliot – “He’s American, isn’t he?” – is on the syllabus of “British Masters of the 20th Century”, but James Joyce is not. A brief interaction that says so much about colonialism, 50s India, patriarchy and Lata herself. By the end of episode one, Lata (played by the newcomer Tanya Maniktala) has met a thoroughly unsuitable boy: a Muslim. A temple is built next to a centuries-old mosque and the police open fire and kill peaceful protesters. Naughty boy Maan (played by the Bollywood lead Ishaan Khatter) embarrasses his father, a high-ranking politician, by throwing the home minister into a fountain during Holi festival, then pursuing a ghazal singer, Saeeda, played by the legendary Indian actor Tabu. This may be the first Indian period drama of its kind in British TV history, but it remains an India that a British audience is used to seeing. The cast mostly speaks English, with a smattering of Urdu and Hindi, and in India there has been some scoffing at the accents. These are the oddities of the genre: no one spoke Russian in Davies’s War and Peace, either. It is just that in the midst of our cultural reckoning, the old ways are starting to look downright weird. Nair has jokily called A Suitable Boy “The Crown in brown”. The production values are high, the performances poised and the locations stunning, from the dusty markets of Calcutta to the fictional university town of Brahmpur. But The Crown is permitted to move at a stately pace. A Suitable Boy has to run to keep up. It deserved at least 12 episodes. After all, Seth’s sprawling and deeply humane novel is one of the longest books in English. It was published in 1993, when the west seemed to wake up to India’s great literary tradition. Suddenly, everyone had a copy of A Suitable Boy, Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance or Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things busting out of their bag. (Then Gregory David Roberts’ Shantaram came out and was obsessed over by white crusties on their gap years, so it all went sour.) It was a different time, and in spirit and tone A Suitable Boy is like a period drama from then. Except – and I guess this is the point – it would never have been made 20 years ago.