Linus Roache and Rahul Bose in Before The Rains Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

Before the Rains opens with vistas of blue mountaintops that plunge into deep gorges and wisps of clouds coiling around their peaks. This is Kerala, South India, in 1937. An English plantation owner, Henry Moores (Linus Roache) and his Indian foreman T.K. (Rahul Bose) hike through lush forest jungle to reach a hill's pinnacle. T.K. warns that the road they are planning to build through the jungle will have to change course again. "This is going to be the damndest, crookedest road in the Crown," Moores smiles. His foreman agrees but comments that the road will remain after the monsoon rains, as a straight road would be easily swept away. "I will name this road after you," says the Englishman wryly. As they absorb the beauty of the landscape, together the two friends contemplate the future that the road could bring and dream of crops of tea, cinnamon and pepper. It is an idyll that will not last.

Moores — whose name is an echo of E. M. Forster's Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India — is "in love with India," says Roache of his character. "He is that adventurer that has left behind his own land, his own world, and has fallen in love with this new one and it doesn't really fit. It is not his, [but] he is trying to take it. This guy is trying to have his cake and eat it. And it all falls apart." According to Roache, Moores represents the decline of the British Empire, its failing arrogance, ambition and destruction. Roache, renowned for his television work in Law and Order and RFK as well as films such as Priest and The Wings of the Dove, found inspiration for Henry Moores in former British Empire colonists that he had met during his childhood. "I grew up in the south of England and my mum had friends who were ex-Raj. Long dead now but I remember this one character in particular who I kind of remembered and held as an image of who Henry Moores was. There was a confidence and bluster and a bit of tenacity and a pioneering spirit [about him]. There is a lot of courage there to go out into an unknown territory. It's ambitious but it's also selfish."

Rahul Bose and Linus Roache in Before The Rains Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

The friendship between Moores and T.K. is put to the test when Moores begins a furtive relationship with his domestic servant, Sanjani (Nandita Das). T.K. is compelled to help his friend and boss keep the relationship under wraps upon the arrival of Moore's wife (Jennifer Ehle) and young son from England. And when Sanjani's body is found in a shallow pool in a nearby forested area and suspicion falls on both men, T.K. is confronted with the moral dilemma of choosing between betraying the English friend who gave him a job and a future, or being accused of a crime of which he is innocent. Rahul Bose, who is described by many as "the Sean Penn of contemporary Indian cinema," says Before the Rains is "a man's journey, finding himself torn between two worlds. There is a world of friendship and there is a world of principles. And all of us sacrifice our principles a little bit to keep a friendship. We don't mind entering a morally grey area to keep a friendship. But when does grey become black? And at that point, do you say: 'Listen, fuck the friendship. I have to stand up for what I believe in'?"

Before the Rains does not, argues Bose, fall neatly into the literary and cinematic tradition of post-colonial discourse explored by films like A Passage to India, Heat and Dust or Ghandi. "It is a different take on the colonizer/colonized relationship. They are friends. My boss doesn't even belong to the British military administrative service. He is just a Brit entrepreneur. He is working there to make money. Even he doesn't quite belong to the elite colonial Raj set-up. There is no smell of the Raj in terms of the way it is directed and the relationship between these two people." Roache agrees and sees Raul's character T.K. as someone stepping into the two worlds: "He is trying to move out of one and into the other but he is uneasy."