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 World War II and using the rape of an English woman as its dramatic center, The Jewel in the Crown charts a moment of crisis and change in British national history.

     The serial should be seen in the context of a cycle of film and television productions that emerged during the first half of the 1980s and that seemed to indicate Britain's growing preoccupation with India, the Empire, and a particular aspect of British cultural history. Notable examples from this cycle would include the films A Passage to India (1984) and Heat and Dust (1982), and the television drama The Far Pavilions (1984). These fictions were produced during, and in­ deed reflected, a moment of crisis and change in British life: mass unemployment and the arrival of new social and class configurations tied to emerging political and economic trends all conspired to destabilize and recast notions of national and cultural identity in the early 1980s. While often critical of Britain's past, these fictions nevertheless permitted a nostalgic gaze back to a golden age, presenting a vision of the Empire as something great and glorious. These fictions seemed to offer reassurance to the British public; as cultural fetish objects, they helped negotiate and manage a moment of social and political upheaval.

     If these fictions were ultimately reassuring for certain sections of the British public, then The Jewel in the Crown has been seen by at least one commentator, Tana Wollen, to be the least nostalgic and most troubled text in the cycle. However, this "trouble" may have less to do with the serial's overt politics and more to do with its form and style. Paul Scott's Raj Quartet are fairly unconventional novels and were not wholly suited to the demands of serial form. Their use of multiple points of view and their elliptical, collage-like narratives were not easily adapted to a form based around linear progression, continuity of action and character, and the promise of eventual narrative resolution.

     The television adaptation was necessarily a more conventional rendering of the story, the narrative now flattened out and the events subjected to a more chronological ordering. Nevertheless, The Jewel in the Crown managed to hold onto some of the formal complexity of the novels by employing voice-overs, flashbacks, and newsreel inserts-techniques that tend to arrest narrative development, giving the serial a heavy, ponderous quality. The adaptation, and Scott's novels, lacked the kind of character development and continuity that we have come to expect from the television serial. By the third episode, the serial's central character Daphne Manners is killed off and only one character spans all 14 episodes. This is the evil Ronald Merrick, who dies in episode 13 and appears in the final part only through flashback. However, The Jewel in the Crown managed to maintain continuity through a series of echoes and motifs: images of fire, the repetition of certain actions and events, and the passing down cf the lace christening gown all helped to provide these­ rial with a formal cohesion that seemed to be lacking the level of character and plot development. All in all, The Jewel in the Crown proved to be a challenging text and demanded from its audience an unusually high degree of commitment and perseverance.

     Although The Jewel in the Crown was broadcast in 1984, with a repeat screening the following year, by the late 1980s the serial still had a high public profile as it became embroiled in debates about television, quality, and the future of British broadcasting. This debate followed legislation calling for the deregulation of the British airwaves, which in turn kindled anxieties concerning the fate of public service and quality televsion. In this debate, as Charlotte Brunsdon has pointed out, The Jewel in the Crown, along with Brideshead Revisited, came to represent the "acme of British quality." Elsewhere, The Jewel in the Crown was being held up as the epitome of excellence. In 1990 the serial was screened at the National Film Theatre as part of a season called "Good-by to All This." Here The Jewel in the Crown was described as the "title everyone reaches for when asked for a definition of 'quality television."' The Jewel in the Crown came to represent what was at stake in the deregulation of the British air waves. It articulated fears over what could be lost in the transition from a regulated, public-service tradition in broadcasting to a more commercial, market-led system. Increasingly, The Jewel in the Crown was coming to represent the golden days prior to the deregulation of quality television.

     This serial, then, had originally emerged as part of a cycle of texts dealing with anxieties over national identity. At a moment of radical change in British life, these texts may have offered viewers a nostalgic vision of a glorious past. By the late 1980s, the serial was referring to a more immediate past and a cultural identity bound to a broadcasting tradition of public service and quality drama. In both cases The Jewel in the Crown articulated and represented the anxieties and the sense of loss felt by sections of the British public who were faced with the decline of a particular idea of national and cultural identity.