JULIE WALTERS: Series two is... well, I find it a lot more exciting.
There's a lot more drama and political intrigue.
Everything's ratcheted up
because we're getting closer to independence for India.
So yes, people are now starting to hold on, you know?
Cynthia is terrified.
This is her-- from my point of view,
from my character's point of view-- this is her life.
I mean, she hasn't known anything
for 40 years other than India,
so the thought of it coming to an end
is pretty terrifying for all of them,
but particularly for her, because she would not have
anything like the status that she has here.
She'd never have that back in England, and she knows that,
you know, so...
So that's why the drama is ratcheted up a few notches here.
It's very exciting.
HENRY LLOYD-HUGHES: I think if you followed the characters
and you followed what their ambitions are
and what they're aspiring to
and the injustices and their struggles,
this is the series whereby all of those things come to a head.
JEMIMA WEST: Well, I think we can expect to find the same characters,
but I feel like they've sort of all grown up.
I don't know if it's also because we've...
as actors, we've experienced this already
and we've come back and we're sort of more comfortable
with the story and with our characters.
So I think, you know, there's something
that's slightly more settled in the characters
that the viewers are already familiar with,
but there's a lot of action this year,
and we have quite a few great guests,
so it's enough to keep the surprises coming.
Season one is interesting to me because everybody is so asleep.
We know as an audience World War II is coming,
we know it's the end of the empire,
and yet these people just are so asleep,
and you're like, "Oh, wake up!"
You know, this very organized society, it's...
you don't realize that it's breaking down, you know?
"Wake up, white people!"
Season two, the earthquake is beginning,
so we enjoy the characters being unsettled by that.
Once you've done series one, once the audience is aware
of what's happening with series one,
series two hits the ground running.
I mean, it is just extraordinary what happens.
I think people will be surprised and entertained,
what happens to their favourite characters.
AYSHA KALA: Series two has got a lot more action packed into it
than series one, I think.
It's a lot more fast-paced,
and I think because you know the characters already
from series one, it just hits the ground running,
so you don't have that thing of getting to know everyone.
You're involved in their lives already,
so yeah, I think it'll be more exciting.
I think people can expect a lot more drama,
more secrets and lies.
ANITHA ABDUL HAMID: Sex, drama, intrigue,
deaths...
Yeah, it's exciting, and it's of course
beautifully set,
so I think lots of people will love it.
DILLON MITRA: It's going to be spectacular
because it pushes the moral dilemmas
of all the characters
and it pushes the actors out of their comfort zones,
and you do things that I didn't expect I was going to do.
But it's like a mystery, it's very fun.
PATRICK MALAHIDE: In season one, we see a situation
where Willingdon has cracked down on public dissent
and civil unrest and has imprisoned Gandhi,
which was a pretty bold thing to do.
And now having done that, he's saying,
"Okay, well, we're listening.
"We will try and introduce a measure of home rule.
Not independence, but home rule."
And of course, what happens is that it's a little...
It's probably too little, too late.
We're now coming to season two, so we've moved on.
Season one was 1932, we're now in 1935, you know,
season three will be slightly further ahead, and so on,
until eventually, there will be 50 hours of television
which tells you the story of the independence of India,
which is colossally ambitious.
ASH NAIR: India itself is becoming a lot more bolder,
a lot more angry,
and you can see that sort of bubbling of that insurgence.
They want independence, and I think
they are beginning to become a lot more sort of impatient
with the British rule.
So all that's happening, and it's quite exciting
to see how that takes place
and how it sort of plays out in a very interesting way
in terms of how the characters
connect with that backstory as well.
It's not just about the characters
and their daily lives,
but it's really getting, you know,
impacted by that as well.
NIKESH PATEL: Where Aafrin fits in
in series two very much picks up
on where he left off at the end of series one,
in that politically,
he was awakened by everything that he saw,
particularly by the treatment of Ramu Sood
and how that affected his relationship with Ralph,
but also the events around that and realizing
that he couldn't help but be
a part of the move for India to get its independence.
So that's really where it picks up, in quite...
I certainly found it quite an unexpected direction
at the start of the series, because he's made some...
In the three years between '32, when the first series was,
and '35, when this one is, he's made some quite bold decisions,
and I think the interesting thing for an audience,
and for Aafrin, I guess, is trying to decide
whether he made the right ones in that time.
WALTERS: Cynthia owns and runs the Royal Simla Club,
which is the hub of everything.
It's where everybody gathers,
it's where they celebrate whatever needs to be celebrated,
it's where they drink and eat and play sport.
It's really important, it's the social mecca.
So she has, because of that, she has quite a lot of power.
Goodness knows how she's acquired the Royal Simla Club,
but probably through underhand dealings of some sort
with her husband, the two of them.
She's now a widow.
Her husband died some years ago.
And she is quite manipulative...
Well, she's very manipulative, Machiavellian.
She's... her morals are based on what she sees as practical
rather than what is right,
and so that makes her really interesting to play.
And she has a rather unusual
and some would say unhealthy relationship
with the central character Ralph, the young man.
It's sort of a strange, warped kind of mother-son relationship
in a funny sort of way, but there's more to it.
So that also makes her really interesting.
LLOYD-HUGHES: Ralph has advanced along the career path
I suppose uninterrupted, in a way,
not derailed by the circumstances of series one.
So as we find him, he is further entrenched,
even closer to the viceroy
and even closer to power and influence, I suppose.
And the networks of power, I suppose, in many ways
still rotate around him-- Cynthia at the club.
And Aafrin, who he hasn't seen for a long time
in the gaps between the series, it's something of a reunion,
and then obviously certain things transpire that,
should we say, bring them together again
and interweave their narratives once more.
Willingdon is an interesting figure
because he's spent his entire life in imperial service.
I mean, he was governor of Madras,
he was governor of Bombay, then he went away to Canada
to be governor general of Canada,
and now he's back again,
having spent almost his entire adult life out of Britain,
and he's now viceroy of India.
But he's very keen that... he believes very strongly
that the Indians aren't actually ready for independence.
Interesting man because he clearly adores India,
loves the Indians,
but has a sort of patronizing attitude towards them,
which is that they're not quite ready for it yet.
I mean, one day perhaps, you know, bless them.
It's a sort of deeply patronizing attitude,
but at the same time,
he understands the culture, he knows the language,
he knows every little nook and cranny and fissure
within Indian society.
And it's also true to say
that the British used those fissures in Indian society
to divide and rule.
It's a trick they learned from the Romans“ divide et impera.
You know the people that you're trying to rule
very, very well
so you can play one faction off against the other,
and this is basically what Willingdon
has been trying to do.
I play a maharajah,
and I suppose the best way of describing the maharajah,
he's probably a construct of a lot of other maharajahs
that were around at the time.
My part in the story really is to confront the British Raj
with the inevitability
of what they're going to have to deal with,
which is their departure, and what the hell happens
to the princes that were left behind.
So in season two, I've come in to play the role of Sirene,
which is a completely invented name, as it sounds,
and she's a wonderful character who is Australian.
She, you know, has been a travelling governess,
so she's a kind of woman of independence,
and yet dependence.
And in the great spirit of Australians
and going to new countries, she's reinvented herself.
So she's in a society, I guess, that's very stratified,
everybody has their place about how they should be behaving,
and she just cuts through it.
She's gone from the governess for the maharajah to his lover,
which gives her a kind of status
and also permission to behave badly.
I play Madeleine Mathers, who's an American--
she was an heiress; she's no longer--
who... Ralph and myself get married
in between the two series.
So we start this series, we've had a baby girl called Vivian,
and I think basically,
the whole of the last series was sort of mainly a struggle
for Madeleine to sort of get to Ralph, essentially,
to get him to marry her, you know,
to sort of make him fall for her, essentially.
And this series seems to me more about power.
Like, they're now quite a political couple,
they deal with political issues together.
It's a sort of House of Cards kind of scenario,
but he's still quite a difficult character, Ralph.
He's still very secretive and very emotionally unavailable,
so Madeleine sort of struggles
to enter the political world, really, through him,
and their interaction is still quite difficult.
WEST: Alice is basically back in India, but this time around,
she's with her husband and her son.
This was the only way for her to keep her son,
was to have her husband come out to India with her.
It was either that or go home back to England,
but she wanted to be in India.
So she's now in 1935 in India with Charlie, her husband,
and her son Percy, and they all live together in Chotipool.
Yeah, and it's a very different relationship
and a very different turn on her story this time round
because of the direct obstacle of her husband.
So it makes things slightly trickier in regards to Aafrin,
but that conflict still remains,
and it's sort of Alice's constant struggle
as a woman who's trapped in Chotipool by her husband,
who's very keen on just keeping an eye on her constantly,
and her wanting to live a life of her own.
So it's that constant sort of battle.
NAIR: He is the head servant
in the Whelan household,
and to say that Bhupinder this year
is going through a bit of an emotional crisis
is a bit of an understatement,
from some of the things that happen in season one.
I mean, if you've watched the show,
you understand what Bhupinder does,
and as a reaction to that,
he becomes an alcoholic and becomes deeply spiritual,
and he is exorcising his demons,
and this whole season is about exploring
that sort of paradigm shift
and how his world gets completely flipped
and how it's affected his work, his professional life,
as well as his relationship with Ralph.
Well, I play Adam,
and he's introduced into season one as a child.
He's found on the railway tracks.
And in season two, he's... I think I'm playing him as 11,
so he's obviously more mature and he's physically bigger.
And he fits into the story, he's Ralph's son,
and it's quite difficult for both of them
to have a relationship without anyone knowing
because for the most part, it's kept a secret
and it's sort of in the shadows.
And he's sort of being brung into the family unit,
and he's trying to connect,
he's trying to become... have a family,
and he's sort of trying to heal because his mom obviously died,
and he's seen things that he shouldn't have.
He's been traumatized as a child, so he's healing.
It's basically about him healing and getting better.
KALA: My character is Sooni Dalal,
and you see a different side of Sooni in this season.
I think last year, she was fighting for home rule
and she wasn't quite sure what she was doing
with the fire inside of her,
and this year, she's a lot more mature
and she's taking everything in her stride,
and a lot of stuff gets thrown at her,
but I think she deals with it quite well in the end.
RABHERU: I play Shamshad Dalal,
which is Aafrin and Sooni's younger sister,
and I think in this series, she's just kind of feeling
a little bit stuck in the middle,
and I think she's beginning to kind of understand
how Aafrin and Sooni's actions
are kind of going to mess her up as well,
and I think she's feeling a bit under pressure
from Roshana and Darius
because they're trying to really get it right with her.
So yeah, I think she's definitely feeling
stuck in the middle.
LILLETE DUBEY: I play Roshana,
who's Nikesh's mother,
and she's this Parsi lady in the '30s,
so quite different from me
in the sense of an Indian lady in the '30s was quite...
I wouldn't say conservative,
but rather not very exposed to life.
So she has... her world is literally this family, you know?
Everything begins and ends with the Dalal family,
with her husband, her children.
And she's far from home
because she doesn't stay in Mumbai,
where the Parsi community came to India from Iran
when it fled many centuries ago,
so all her cousins and aunts and uncles,
all of whom she's very attached to
and whose opinion matters a lot to her,
she's constantly worried that, "What are they going to say?",
you know, about everything that happens.
And this time, in the second season,
a lot of things start going very wrong.
PATEL: What is an average production day on Indian Summers?
I would like to know the answer to that question
because I don't think an average production day exists.
LLOYD-HUGHES: It's anarchic.
I think you get...
you're tested and you get an experience
that you won't have in any other working environment.
The whole atmosphere on the set is,
for me anyway personally, very important.
If they're people
that you communicate with properly every day
and have fun with and talk to, then it's, you know, great.
One of the joys about this job
is that there aren't too many days that feel average.
What we're filming isn't that kind of material.
There's not a lot of repetition.
I'm kind of glad in a lot of ways
that there's not an average day.
Is this necessary?
This is absolutely necessary.
Right, castor oil.
One spoon each.
We'll keep it up until we have our culprit.
BRIAN CHEW: Every morning,
it is part of my job
to actually make sure the cast arrives on time.
The mornings, we typically start incredibly early,
especially if we're going up the hill.
TANMAY DHANAN IA: We shoot up the hill
I think two months out of the six months.
Cast and crew are divided on, like, what they feel about it.
The crew, it's a really hard job for them
and they have to wake up that much earlier and everything,
but the cast loves it I think mostly because it's cooler.
You come up here and it's just beautiful around here.
You get on the train and it's like a seven-minute journey.
It's really quick, and it's like 700 meters.
So we're on the train and we're going up the hill,
as you can see.
It's kind of a manic ride.
It's like a roller coaster, almost.
It is a completely different world up there
once we get up there.
It's very much cooler than down there,
and it creates a different world.
So it's kind of analogous to how Simla is, or was,
for the English in India,
where they used to try to beat the heat in Delhi
and they used to go up the hill to Simla.
The hill station where my club is, the Royal Simla Club,
I mean, that was an old, genuine thing, genuine article.
It was a hill station.
You do feel when you're in the club,
this is what it was like.
This is where they came to be cool.
DHANANIA: So we are outside the Bellevue Hotel,
which is, as it says here, the only hotel in Penang.
It's a wonderful, beautiful hotel,
and what production does is
they actually take over all the rooms here.
There's a private snake here, actually,
a pit viper which lives in the foliage right behind the hotel.
Apparently, it comes every day in the morning
and just hangs out there all day,
and at night, it goes hunting.
So now I'm going to go put my bag in my room,
and then we're going to go into makeup
and you're going to see me change from Tanmay to Khan.
We film block by block,
so we film three episodes, three episodes,
and then four episodes,
and we're basically depending on location.
One day, we'll be filming, like, scene 31 from episode 8,
but then we'll move on to scene 22 from ep 9,
so it's going from one scene to the next,
so it's important to sort of stay focused.
It's quite intense.
PATEL: How do we kill time between scenes?
Uno's still a favourite.
GRANT: Quite a bit of yoga,
and people have been doing tai chi in the mornings
at like 6:00.
A nice lunch in the garden, a monkey viewing.
We have lots of different visitors throughout the day.
Talking, gossiping.
Put my feet up, especially at the club,
you can just put your feet up, you know.
LLOYD-HUGHES: The boring parts, I try to stay incredibly still
and I sit there with a fan close to my face,
trying to not ruin my hair, makeup, and costume.
I'm in makeup now.
This is where all the magic happens.
This is Lesley.
She is going to make me into a beautiful person today.
She's worked with Omar Sharif,
and she thinks I'm more beautiful than him.
Sometimes when they're very nervous about doing a character
and then you give them the wig, the face and everything,
and they go, "Oh, yes!"
DHANANIA: Tanmay has become Khan,
so we're on the buggy and we're off to set.
RAZAQ SAHIBJAHN: In terms of transport this year,
we have the buggies and also the four-by-fours
to transport crew and cast to the set.
Pretty much challenging,
but it's fun for everyone, actually.
DHANANIA: There's a lot of challenges
to shoot in a place like this.
For the actors, it's bliss.
I mean, it's cooler, it's nicer, there's more to see.
When you're hanging out and not doing much,
you can actually sort of look around a little bit.
I think it's beautiful.
They're so used to us filming up here,
we've become part of Penang Hill now.
The tourist attraction of Penang Hill
has begun to include Indian Summers filming now.
PAUL WILMSHURST: There's a whole set of people
who are all doing specific things
to help get everything done.
The key people you really rely on most-- certainly I do--
I think are the first AD Matt and director of photography Tim.
We need one over there looking this way,
and one back there looking this way.
(several people talking at once)
If you just step onto that, just give Olivia the...
So if you're back a little bit, just to your left.
WILMSHURST: The weather changes in ten minutes.
It can go from bright sunshine, heat, humidity,
suddenly a thunderstorm could come in,
everyone could be rushing for cover.
There's this haze from deforestation
and crop burning in Indonesia.
It's not like a crazy film set,
which is what I'm more used to from India,
where everyone's running about
and tensions are flying high and stuff.
It's very relaxed.
I mean, obviously people are doing their job,
but everyone's very precise at what they do.
And when they have to do their job, they get it done,
but other than that, between takes,
we're hanging out, we're just chilling,
banter is happening.
Over this shoulder, and as she comes in,
we come around, stay on there...
DHANANIA: That's me done for the day.
It's a wrap for me.
I get changed now, and I go back down on the funicular.
DUBEY: Every time I come to Penang,
I feel like I'm in one
of Somerset Maugham's short stories.
It's booming.
There's this interesting energy that's happening here.
I've loved being in Penang.
It's a really interesting city.
VVEST: It's so lovely, it's so different
to what we're used to having back home.
It's important for those of us
that are away from our homes for six months
to be somewhere that feels like
you can make some sort of a home for yourself.
JACK SHANNAHAN: I'm one of the prop buyers,
and we are in Little India in George Town, Penang,
and this is one of the areas
where we do a lot of our prop buying for the show.
Well, obviously, the handiest thing is that it's Indian.
It's a small chunk of India here in Penang.
The locals are fantastic.
They're incredibly friendly.
The show is quite well known
in the town, so there's a lot of pride
in the town to be involved in it.
They really go out of their way
to help us come up with the goods.
It's kind of a strange mixture of Little India,
that is... for all intents and purposes looks like it.
It hasn't got cows in the street and things like that,
but it's very like India.
And then you've got a shopping plaza
that would make Westfield's
look like the Arndale Center, 1965.
DHANANIA: Just shooting up the hill, for instance,
is analogous to being in Simla
because Delhi was the hot place in the plains,
and in the summer months, people would come up the hill.
If you look out here on a clear day,
you can see all of Penang, like the island of Penang.
You can see George Town and everything.
Then you can see these two bridges,
which go across the mainland of Malaysia.
So on the mainland as well, you have Penang State,
and the city there is called Butterworth.
Like Simla, which was a summer retreat,
so is Penang Hill, which was a retreat from George Town
because down the hill, it can get really hot.
But I think the English have left two main things, I'd say:
the architecture and the English language.
There are obviously similarities between Simla and Penang
in the fact that Penang also had a sort of colonial presence,
and particularly Penang Hill, where we're shooting now,
used to be sort of the base
of where Western or English people would come.
And I think on the deeds in Penang and on Penang Hill,
currently it's some sort of hangover from the past:
you have to be English to be able to own property here.
NAIR: It's a UNESCO heritage site,
so a lot of the old buildings are maintained.
Apparently in Simla, the buildings have changed
and they've not maintained them,
so we were very lucky to be able to use Penang as old Simla.
We got letters after the first series
from a woman who actually used to spend her summers here
in the '50s, and she sent us photos,
and they look exactly like the show that we're making,
which really brings to mind the heritage that is so similar.
SHANNAHAN: This is one of the shops that we use in Little India
to buy a lot of our decorations for the sets.
And the beautiful thing about this shop and what they have is,
the nice thing about the religious traditions
of India at the time:
they really haven't changed that much over the years.
So, like, as you see around here,
there's all of the little burners for shrines.
We've got our guys over here making the garlands.
You'll have seen them up on the plantation.
You'll see a lot of the religious shrines,
they're decorated with garlands.
A lot of those will be handmade here.
One of the major differences I would say is the heat.
Like, Simla is supposed to be really cold,
so I think one of the biggest challenges for the actors
is to handle the heat.
Penang is quite a tourist destination,
primarily because of the food.
But yeah, up the hill is very touristy.
There's an old museum here, there's a couple of hotels.
If you go further up, there's spice plantations.
There's also, actually, there's a mosque
and there's a temple up here as well.
But it's just very beautiful.
You get to see a Penang that you'd never see as a tourist.
Yes, of course you can come up to Penang Hill
and have a look at it, but nobody gets to see this.
Penang's very cosmopolitan, it's very cool.
I mean, there's lots of stuff going on here.
Penang has this sort of "out there" street art scene.
It's a really interesting sort of center
for a lot of interesting work
from different parts of the world to come and show.
This is a huge mix of cultures, and strangely,
although it's Malaysia, the Malays are the minority.
The history of Penang is also very interesting
because the Malays were here, and in the 1820s,
the Chinese came with their opium dens and stuff.
There was a sort of fight between them,
and so the Malays lost,
and that's why they went back to the back of the island,
which we call Balik Pulau now.
It's got British history as well, colonial history.
Lots of the streets are named after British rulers
or captains or lieutenants.
Often, we go around the streets and I'm like,
"That's Lebuh Farquhar."
Captain Farquhar was a character in series one, you know?
So I'm always going around, "Oh, this is quite similar."
PATEL: I have a feeling
if you ask most of the crew what the big draw of Penang is,
most of the answers will concentrate on food.
DHANANIA: The food here is fantastic.
I mean, it's a cliché, but Penang food is definitely
some of the best food I've had anywhere around the world.
We do a lot of eating.
We've probably tried every restaurant there is to go to.
GRIFFITHS: I've been a food tourist in Penang.
There's not a laksa that anyone's offered me
that I haven't tried.
The food is insanely good here.
GRANT: It's a really amazing
sort of mixture of Malay, Chinese, Indian...
MALIK: One of the greatest things about being on the location,
especially where there's a large group of crew,
is the indigenous.
They're the ones who tell you
which are the best restaurants to go to.
They're the ones who tell you what you must see in Penang.
You know, it's a little gem,
I mean, almost an undiscovered gem,
which is what gives it its charm.
WEST: The rhythm of life
is definitely a world of its own.
DHANANIA: It's fantastic, I think, if you come here,
especially if you have some time
to go around Malaysia as well, it's wonderful.
It's really important
that you keep very accurate with the period.
And people do love going back in time, you know?
It's something...
Particularly in England, I think,
there's a great interest in history, and you know,
great popularity of historical productions and things.
The better you are at doing it,
the more people love that business of escaping
and enjoying being... and interest in what happened.
There is an importance in being accurate
to convey the times of the people
and the times that this was set,
especially as we are telling a story leading to partition,
which is a real story and affected real people.
I think that there is also an importance
in the costume design,
that it has a relevance to a modern audience
so we're not actually making a documentary
about the history of costume;
we're actually making a story about people.
So I really always want that the costumes relate
to a modern audience.
A lot of research goes into everything,
down to obviously the clothes that they wore,
but also the food that they would have eaten
and the games that they would have played,
toys the children would have had.
LAMONT-FISHER: I've done a lot of research, I love doing research,
so that's one of my favourite things.
So I looked at films of the period, photographs,
ordinary people, fashionable people at the time,
and did quite a lot of reading too
because it's 1935, which is the rise of fascism
and communism and the Spanish civil war
and all sorts of things going on.
But no, that's one of my favourite aspects of it.
And also, you need to know more than the actors do.
I quickly referenced some great books
that were actually illustrations done by a woman,
an English woman travelling in India through 1926,
and she had illustrated all the different peoples of India.
And that book became a really great reference
throughout all the characters,
all the indigenous characters throughout Indian Summers.
The English characters, I also referenced books,
the access to the British Library online,
and of course, because we were here already,
a lot of it was done via the internet and Google.
The main thing we've used
are the little tikkas that you put on here,
which we've managed to source here,
which is lovely, in Little India.
But they're lovely powdery things,
and that gives a lovely texture.
The biggest challenges
are really anything to do with British items, British...
Anything British is the hardest part.
With Little India, we're very lucky
because we have access to everything that we need
for the Indian side of things: all the food, the garlands,
the shrine ornaments, decorations.
There's a massive selection of that here.
On the British side, there's a real shortage,
particularly for period things, so it can be ridiculous things,
like napkins are very difficult to get,
tablecloths, cutlery knives, forks, spoons.
Yeah, so this is the powder that we use,
and I just pop it on with a little bit of Vaseline
and then pop it on here,
and it gives a lovely, lovely texture.
And they're sort of different colours, but we use red.
But that's... I always love doing that, actually.
So this was one of the books that was recommended to me
by a friend of mine who was born in Pakistan:
illustrations done by a woman
who traveled through India in 1926.
This became an invaluable kind of reference for us,
for all the different characters that we meet along our journey
are similar to the ones she met along her journey.
So it's been a challenge,
given that we've been in Malaysia in 2015,
to recreate India in 1935.
I've tried to combine real clothes of 1935
to replicate clothes of 1935.
I've worked with a local tailor who has...
I show him lots of references,
and I go to KO and get a lot of fabrics
that are similar to the linens that we use
for the Western clothing.
The tailor that I've used in Penang
has worked with me to recreate the look
and recreate the styles and the cuts of 1935.
I also brought a women's cutter with me
so that I would have someone
who understood period women's cutting.
And the local, the indigenous Indian costuming,
I've researched fabrics and researched different styles
of wearing the saris and the clothes
and tried to recreate those as much as possible,
a lot through oral history as well,
and just through textures and colour.
LAMONT-FISHER: And Madeleine I think
is a wonderful character we love doing because she's very...
She's a very chic sort of lady, so her hair is fun to do.
And Maureen, who does her, and Stevie.
That's a very nice character,
because it just helps her look elegant
and feel her character, and she's very important.
GRANT: It's sort of the rather joyous icing on the cake,
because if you imagine, half of, like, an actor's life
is really auditioning with nothing,
so you just have a sort of casting room
and you're just imagining it
and sort of creating the world for yourself in your head,
so when you actually are on set and it's all there,
it's amazing, you know?
And what's lovely is when you've sort of imagined it
very much as it appears,
it feels like quite a magical process.
It's very nice for an actor too, when you discuss characters
and you're putting facial hair on and doing things,
and it's a lovely time when they look in the mirror and say,
"I've got it!
I've got that person right."
And then you've got all of this, you know,
and then not just the costume, which of course I have a turban,
I have a mustache in this
which I'm not wearing at the moment,
but you then have these wonderful sets,
and it's all of those things that make acting so much easier,
because when you do look out
and you're looking out of a window
and you actually do see a rainforest,
when you're on a set and you're touching props,
they have something about them that says,
"This is the 1930s, this is India."
I can think of so many examples
where an incredibly intuitively designed set
just helped the drama flow completely effortlessly,
you know, and suddenly you're in a world
that feels completely appropriate
to the scene you're trying to play.
You know, when the clothes fit, when it fits right,
and you know, when your hair's the right length, just...
The crazy thing is when everything works,
you don't think about it because it's that effortless.
And that's only... that's a huge compliment to those departments,
but I always try and remember to thank the appropriate people
because they get up super, super early
and put in hours of incredibly painstaking work
putting all this stuff together, you know,
and I hope they realize how much we appreciate it.
MALIK: One of the greatest tragedies
in British education is that
as much as our children know
about the Tudors and the Victorians,
there is this one 250-year period of British Imperial rule
that they don't know as much about.
History is always important.
It illuminates our present.
It was a very important time in India's history;
it wasn't just any time.
The challenge for all of us
is to try and capture that as faithfully as possible.
GRANT: This is a very important part
of Britain and India's history.
It's also a period
that I don't feel particularly my generation is that aware of.
It will, through drama, educate.
Bhupinder, could you get that thing off the wall?
Great-Uncle Toby, memsahib?
Yes, the very same.
WALTERS: In the past, the Indian population weren't covered,
not like they are in this.
LLOYD-HUGHES: What sets it apart is that
it is both sides of the coin.
Paul Rutman has painstakingly done
an incredible amount of research,
making sure that culturally, we have been represented.
India is like Europe.
So different groups of Indians speak different languages,
they look different, they have different food.
And in a weird way,
this political struggle for freedom
actually brought India together.
I think I'm the only one on this series
that saw the last six years of British rule.
I was born while the British were still there.
I went to Simla when I was at school up in the hills,
and it was even then very grand, very grand.
The idea of setting it there
is that you get the whole expanse
of the imperial picture
condensed into this little village.
SETH: I've played at a little theatre
in Simla that the British built called the Gaiety Theatre.
It appears in the series.
It was a replica of Her Majesty's in the Haymarket.
Beautiful sort of miniaturized version of the Haymarket.
My character as well as the viceroy, played by Patrick,
we're most connected to some of the political storylines.
MALAHIDE: The political context running in the background of this
is that the viceroy and Whelan, his political secretary,
are trying to sell the idea of the Government of India Act.
The Government of India Act was introduced in 1935.
The political Indians who wanted some sort of self-governance,
they wanted India to become a dominion,
just like Canada, Australia or New Zealand.
It wasn't about independence, but they wanted self-governance.
In their other imperial possessions,
like Canada and Australia, they had governors general.
But India was a special case
because India had its own royalty.
They had maharajahs and princes.
MALIK: The maharajah is there to let us know
what the politics of that time was.
You know, the princes were people that were on a par,
but they were never quite at the same level as the viceroy.
They realized that in order to have somebody on the spot
who outranks the princes,
they had to have somebody who actually represented the king.
If India won self-governance at that time,
the princely states would suffer.
They would be stripped of their position
and there would be democracy.
What we're now experiencing
is what is going to happen to those princes.
DARIUS: Are you trying to kill your mother?
Well, then, stop all this nonsense.
CREW: Can we just hold it there for a second?
The character's a Parsi.
That's important for, I think,
audiences in England to understand.
They were very pro-British,
they got on well with the British,
the British got on very well with them.
They were basically Britain's suppliers.
When India was moving towards independence,
they found themselves in something of a cleft state.
Which way do they go?
The Parsi family in the series is in the middle, in that sense.
RABHERUI When I did this job,
I really got to know a lot more about what was going on.
It's nice that on TV now, there's something that's
from the British side
and the Indian side.
DARIUS: You will marry a Parsi
OF...
Or what?
Or you will break all our hearts.
Paul, the writer, recommended a couple of books
and sent me a couple of books to read:
Women of the Raj and Plain Tales of the Raj.
They were very illuminating.
GRIFFITHS: I did research into who was the governess class.
They had to be fluent in French, often German as well,
so they were quite well educated, raised women.
NAIR: Some research was done in terms of speaking
to my family, my old uncles and aunts,
and finding out how we used to live back in the day.
I asked my grandparents,
because they were alive around about that time.
During the partition, my granddad was about 15,
my grandma was about ten,
so I asked them a bunch of questions
and they knew everything.
WALTERS: It's interesting to see
how the British at first embraced Indian culture
when they were first out there 200 to 300 years ago.
Gradually, as they got more and more power,
they became more corrupt, more racist, arrogant.
It's an interesting time.
Women were travelling around the world independently
much more than we would imagine.
WALTERS: Now in series two, the pressure on the British
and on the Indians has been ratcheted up.
There was a realization that actually,
we can't have this huge country
as the jewel in our crown forever.
The British knew before they actually left India in 1947
that it was curtains,
that they were going to go.
They didn't let on, but the mood changed.
That, I think, is not generally discussed or known historically.
I think people will be surprised and entertained
what happens to their favourite characters.
I think they'll be delighted
with the way Paul has sort of yet again
been able to do that great breadth
of what is the end of the Raj and what happens in Simla
when the Raj comes to a place like this.