Why We Love Downton Abbey: Are We Just Embracing our British Past?
After the triumph of American TV shows over Indian audiences, are we finally returning to British English?
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(The sixth and final season of British television drama Downton Abbey will go on air in India today, February 17. The show airs on Star World and Star World HD at 9 pm.)
Happy watching!
Last Christmas, curtains came falling upon the sixth and the final season of Downton Abbey.
The show enjoys immense popularity not only on both sides of the Atlantic channel, but also in countries like India, Japan, South Korea and China. China, in fact, has such a large and loyal Downton Abbey fan base that when Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, visited the UK in 2014, David Cameron had presented him with a copy of the script of the show’s first episode, signed by Julian Fellowes, the writer of the show!
What could explain the craze for the show in these countries? I am not going to go into the staple reasons such as: absorbing storylines, engaging characters, fine performances, etc. Let’s try to look beyond them.
Does Downton Appeal to our ‘British’ Upbringing?
One reason could be the unadulterated ‘Englishness’ of the show. Viewers, who watch shows in the English language, have long been thriving on American shows. With the advent of cable TV, American shows also found their way into our drawing rooms.
Since then, the tiny fraction of Indian viewership that follows the English language happily extended its patronage to American shows such as Baywatch, Simpsons and Friends.
Then came broadband internet and we no longer had to be at the mercy of the TV to watch our favourite shows. We were now bombarded with a slew of American shows, thanks to Torrent downloaders.
The Unusual Triumph of the Brit Over American TV
The English in these shows was palpably American – and very much at odds with the British English we were taught at our schools in the light of our colonial legacy. We lived in ‘flats’, not ‘apartments’. We called our fathers ‘papa’ not ‘dad’. This new parlance was a novelty for us and we took fancy to it. We took to ‘wanna’ and ‘gonna’ as a duck takes to water. Our speech was now profusely sprinkled with ‘like’. Like, everything just got so ‘cool’ and ‘awesome’ that we conveniently forgot things could also be ‘marvellous’ and ‘splendid’.
And then came the Crawleys with their chaste Queen’s English to remind us of – as the Dowager Countess would say – the ‘English’ virtues. The exchange of sharp jibes between Martha Levinson (Cora’s American mother) and Violet Crawley was the embodiment of a cultural war. The Dowager Countess with her razor sharp wit and tongue had blown the bugle in the second episode of the first season itself by guilelessly asking what is a weekend?
The Crawleys were fond of tea. Not coffee. Like (most of) us!
Downton in a way revived our admiration and awe for all things English. And let’s face it, we were charmed. It was like returning to the arms of your first love, after having had a dalliance.
Because Downton is Different from a Lagaan-Like Coloniser
A period drama depicting the life and times of an aristocratic family lording over its fiefdom could have misfired in the second decade of the 21st century – especially in the former colonies. The Crawleys could have come to symbolise the oppression that we had been subjected to as a former colony. They were complicit in the evils of imperialism by the dint of their position in the English society!
But while we detest things that are powerful and mean, we get inspired by things that are powerful and magnanimous.
And the Crawleys weren’t mean.
In other words, Lord Grantham would seem quite out of character if he were to say, “tumhe dugna lagan dena padega...” In a scene in which the Jallianwala bagh massacre is referred to, Robert Crawley is shown condemning it, while (the snobbish) Lord Sinderby is shown approving it.
The Crawleys weren’t rude to their servants – they are shown to care a great deal for them.
Historically this isn’t true, of course. Majority of the House of Lords approved of Dyer’s ghastly “horrible, dirty duty”. Families like the Crawleys were hand in glove with the system that was producing the Dyers.
But our dear Downton Abbey is make-believe; it’s a fairly tale, sanitised of the squalor that underpinned such country houses.
And we like it thus.
We’ve Always Loved Our ‘Noble’ Men Stories
The show taps into our age-old desire of listening to the stories of men of noble birth (Ram, Hamlet, Dushyant) and noble intentions.
We’ve forever been fascinated by good men (and women) caught up in bad circumstances. It’s an ancient formula and has worked since antiquity.
The Crawleys are shown to be good people – their problems are triggered by a rapidly changing world order and they struggle to keep up with the pace.
Are you still surprised that India – nay, Asia – likes it so?
(Yash Raj Goswami is a teacher and a freelance writer.)
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