The steamy side of the Raj
The steamy side of the Raj
The steamy side of the Raj
Julie Walters stars in the new Channel 4 drama, Indian Summers
On a sweltering summer’s day inside a grand mansion looking out on the sweeping grandeur of the Himalayan foothills, a huge formal party is in full swing.
While the orchestra plays, the Viceroy of India is in full regal attire surrounded by men in white tie or military uniform, ladies in their finery and an army of servants in colourful traditional dress.
Tables are laden with elaborate displays of fruit, seafood platters, roasted meats, ornate candlesticks and gleaming cutlery, and as the National Anthem comes to a close the guests toast the King-Emperor back home.
But as the cocktails start to flow the civilised conversation is soon replaced by wild dancing, all sense of propriety is forgotten and people start sneaking off into quiet corners to do more than chat about the weather.
Welcome to Simla, one of the high-altitude ‘hill stations’ where in the days of the Raj the men who ran the British Empire would escape from Delhi’s oppressive heat.
It was here that they and their wives – and mistresses – would let their hair down in a whirl of social activity, alcohol and passionate affairs.
Simla is the backdrop for Channel 4’s epic new ten-part drama Indian Summers – and epic is the word.
Set in 1932, the series follows the fortunes of the ex-pats and their Indian hosts, played out against a backdrop of political tension and power struggles, sex and snobbery, family feuds and rampant racism.
There’s even an attempted murder thrown in for good measure.
The star turn comes from Julie Walters as Cynthia Coffin, the Machiavellian and outrageously non-PC schemer who runs the Royal Club at the heart of Simla’s social scene (with its sign that reads ‘No dogs or Indians’).
‘There haven’t been shows about this period on TV since the 70s and 80s, and I think viewers will see another side of what happened in the Raj – what people were really like,’ says Julie, taking a break from filming.
Craig Parkinson plays Dougie in this dramatic scene of the brand new Channel 4 series
‘I had no idea: I thought only very posh people were in India at that time.
But there were working-class and middle-class people there too. They went because they could earn more than they could at home. So this series is about the ordinary people in India, their relationships, and why the system eventually broke down. You see both sides of the story.
‘Cynthia is fabulous, she’s so multi-layered.
She wouldn’t be anything in England, she wouldn’t have this kind of power. But Simla is this tiny little world and everything revolves around that club; she’s queen of the hill. There’s nowhere else to go and everyone’s desperate to be part of it. They get p***ed a lot because what else is there to do?
Drinking and affairs were part of that life, and Cynthia knows everything about everyone – all the gossip.’
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PAID TO LOOK FOR A HUSBAND
Two of the pivotal characters in the drama are missionary Douglas Raworth and his wife Sarah, who are struggling through an unhappy marriage while he’s secretly in love with Leena Prasad, who works at the orphanage he runs.
Sarah was one of the ‘Fishing Fleet’, the name given to the women who came out to India from England to try and bag themselves a husband.
‘It was a massive phenomenon – the British Empire paid women to go out on ships and put them up for a year,’ says Fiona Glascott, who plays Sarah.
‘If they weren’t married by then they could go back, but almost all the women did end up with a husband.
It was pretty exotic and extraordinary when you think about it.
‘Sarah met a good, handsome man in Douglas and they got engaged. But I don’t think she’d thought past that, and the reality turned out very different from the way she’d hoped, with her husband out at work all day and her left on her own.
‘Sarah doesn’t really have any friends and she and Douglas aren’t a good match.
So she recreates this perfect English house, as plenty of them did, living as if they were in a very hot England. But a great many of the women were terribly lonely when the summer came to an end – thousands of miles from home and simply stuck.’
Indian Summers was created by writer Paul Rutnam – best hill stations in india known for crime drama series Vera – who spent several years in the country.
‘I fell in love with India when I went out there as a student, then I got a job teaching in a hill station in southern India and found the atmosphere and the nostalgia fascinating,’ Paul explains.
‘My wife’s Indian, so we lived there for a few years. Before we got back to the UK we went to an old hotel in Darjeeling, an old British relic. The manager opened a cupboard and a hoard of photographs came tumbling out.
‘They were all people like us, 80 years ago, having dinner, going to tea parties, surrounded by servants and living this Surrey life.
I thought about this whole world being forgotten and swept under the carpet. Simla seemed like an extraordinary untold story. The Viceroy ran the entire subcontinent from there for several months of the year. There’d be this crazy whirl of dances and social events and they clearly had a wild time.
So we’ve tried to show the fun of what it was like to be there, as well as the context.’
When it came to filming, the production crew realised Simla itself wouldn’t work as a location because it’s now quite modern. Instead they found what they were looking for 3,000 miles away in the former British colony of Penang in Malaysia.
‘The architecture in Penang is the same as Simla’s was, and it’s almost preserved in aspic,’ says Paul.
‘And back then it had a similar function to the Indian hill stations.’
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A TALE OF TWO FAMILIES
THE POSH BRITS
The series centres on two families – the Whelans and the Dalals – whose fortunes and worlds could not be more different.
Suave Ralph Whelan (played by Henry Lloyd-Hughes) is a private secretary to the Viceroy who has lived in India for years.
Charming and diplomatic, he’s destined for greatness with people in the know tipping him to take charge.
He lives in a beautiful house with his sister Alice, who fled an unhappy marriage in England.
Ralph is besotted with US heiress Madeleine Mathers, who has travelled to India to care for her sick brother Eugene.
THE POOR INDIANS
Naive Aafrin Dalal, Ralph’s clerk, is from a poor Parsee family.
He lives in the bazaar with his parents and his two sisters, Shamshad and Sooni. While Shamshad is the spoiled baby of the family, Sooni is a fiery rebel who’s joined the fight for Indian independence and disapproves of her brother’s job.
When Aafrin (Nikesh Patel) and Alice are brought together in an explosive incident at the end of episode one, the repercussions are felt throughout the whole series.
On Penang Hill the production designers found derelict old properties perfect for transforming into the ‘little England’ people created in Simla. ‘When we found the hotel and the grand house that became our locations they had trees growing inside,’ says Paul.
‘We completely renovated them and they make it very special – you have that sense of history sitting there.’
The costumes are sumptuously authentic too – hardly surprising as the man responsible for them, Nic Ede, also helped design the costumes for the late Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi.
‘I know the period very well,’ he says.
‘Working on Gandhi was a great help as it meant I had a real nose for India. Normally for something like this you’d have to hire a lot of costumes, but to my amazement we were able to make it all in Penang.
You can spend most of your budget hiring things and shipping them over, and then they’re never quite what you want or in good enough condition. But the Penang tailors can copy perfectly.
‘I had to have the shoes made and they’re one thing that can make or break a costume.
But there’s a guy called Mr Wong who has a company here – his father gave Jimmy Choo his first lesson in shoemaking. How about that? I took him illustrations of women’s shoes from 1932 and he copied them. I originally wanted a budget of a quarter of a million, but I did it for well under half that – which is unbelievable.
And Channel 4 get to keep it all, so if they do another series they’ve got some great stock.’
For anyone expecting the uptight repression of period dramas such as Downton Abbey, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, who plays Ralph Whelan, says they’re in for a surprise.
‘It’s steamy. It’s hot under the collar, it feels like all the characters are rubbing up alongside each other in this way that has some electricity to it. And it’s literally hot too, which is a great irony. Everyone went to Simla to escape the heat, but it was still bloody boiling!’
Julie Walters adds, ‘I’m very lucky because I don’t have to wear tights like some of the other poor girls.
Cynthia’s a bit of a law unto herself so she just doesn’t care. My dresses are airy, but sometimes you’ve got boiling temperatures outside and you’re filming under the heat of the lights as well. In one scene I had to sing in the bar, and there were huge lights to represent the setting sun: it was so hot.
But we’re only human and it’s fine to look a bit sweaty!’
It’s Julie’s first major TV role since she appeared in The Hollow Crown in 2012, and although it’s her name that will be the series’ major draw she’s self-effacing about her stellar 40-year career.
‘I must admit when people first started saying, “Oh, you were in that show,” I thought, “Cor, look at me!” But it didn’t take long for me to realise fame isn’t a good thing. Someone once asked Michael Caine what it was like to be rich and famous and he said, “I’d rather just be rich.” I know the feeling.’
She insists she can’t ever imagine giving up working altogether though.
‘I like being at home, but I don’t want to give it up, no. I thought at one point, when I reached 60 and I’d shaved my head to play Mo Mowlam and it grew back white, that perhaps I should retire. I didn’t do anything for a year. Then a script came from the National Theatre and I loved it.
So I’m obviously not quite ready for it yet.’
Which is handy as the plan is for Indian Summers to run to five series, right up to the partition of India and independence in 1947.
‘This is a show about the end of the Empire,’ explains Paul.
‘If we’re lucky enough to get an audience, we’ll keep pushing that forward. The dream is to plough on and tell a generational story to take us through to 1947.’
Indian Summers begins tomorrow at 9pm on Channel 4.