PositiveThe HinduAs an adaptation of Emma, Polite Society is faithful to the core of the original plot, but not at the expense of its own narrative requirements. Rao never strains for fidelity ... readers familiar with the original will find themselves nodding along with pleasurable recognition. Not that any of this feels stale or predictable: Rao is an exceptionally assured storyteller ... Rao’s method could not be less Austenian. While Austen typically grants psychological depth only to her protagonist, Rao changes perspective freely, with minor characters portrayed just as sympathetically as Ania is. And where the core of her narrative art is individual psychology, and the construction of reality through an individual filter, his style is coolly omniscient, and chiefly interested in the external. Austen’s fiction is notable for its relative lack of sensory detail: Polite Societyis full of vivid, specific images, sounds and smells, given to us by the omniscient narrator. Rao only fleetingly inhabits the individual characters’ minds; as for free indirect style, he abjures it altogether ... There is no broad comedy at the expense of individual characters in Polite Society. This is not, then, a straight adaptation of Emma. Nor is it a conventional account of elite Delhi society.
