I started to watch this show literally just after finishing the book. There’s certain school of criticism that wants to judge adaptation on its own merit, without any connection to source material. I think more people started subscribe to it as a backlash to common attitude of book readers who see adaptation criticism only in terms of nitpicking what is different and what is missing. Maybe my review could be dismissed as such nitpicking, but I don’t think I can disentangle my impressions from what I knew about the book.
There’s more cheritable reading of such nitpicking, at least in certain cases. People who know source material can more clearly notice all the gaps and plot holes in the narrative. There’s also issue with strength of different media. Literature inherently has easier time with internal aspects. We can know what people feel and think more easily. Of course it can be argued that cinematography have techniques, like proper shot at the face and good acting, soundtrack and so on. It can give amazing results, but simply not possible to convey that way everything, especially from huge book like this.
Personally I treat this series as sort of nice illustration for the book. There’s really a lot of things cropped and without reading the book I feel that many storylines didn’t carry same weight. I don’t really want to convey that I discourage watching the series, but I recommend doing it like me, after the book and with open mind. I missed that family trees were smaller, especially Chatterjees that I enjoyed a lot. Besides what’s missing, there were things slightly, but significantly different. First thing, during short romance with Kabir, they kissed publicly so much that it threw me out of belief in the setting. As many Indians pointed out, it wouldn’t be realistic even in modern India.
I complained about this show, but in fact I really enjoyed watching it. I would recommend to watch it as companion to reading the book.