Harry Potter, are you Hari puttar after all
No one told me that Harry Potter had gone all Ramayana on us. I never read the last book. But as I started watching part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I had a creeping sense of déjà vu.
The film opens with Harry’s friends taking on his physical persona to elude the Death Catchers. It’s a great scene — all those Harrys streaking through the night sky, battling evil forces that swoop down on them.
And then a white owl rises gamely to try and save Harry. “Oh! What a Jatayu moment,” I tell myself. Of course, Harry was not being kidnapped a la Sita. But just as in the Ramayana, the valiant bird toppled to earth. “What a funny coincidence,” I thought.
Then Harry, Ron and Hermione are exiled from their Hogwarts kingdom. Well, self-exiled. But exiled nonetheless and all alone in the forest surrounded by monsters and evil spirits. There is no Lakshman Rekha drawn on the ground but a magic bubble of invisibility surrounds them.
Meanwhile jungle fever gets to our intrepid trio. Ron thinks Hermione has a secret thing for his brother-in-arms Harry. Harry protests his innocence. Hermione is aghast. Sounds familiar?
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Oh wait, there’s a deer, a magical deer that just cantered across the screen.
What next? A Shrieking Surpanakha? Well, there was Moaning Myrtle.
I know Indians have this annoying habit of claiming everything as their own. Zero — we invented it. It was our boy, Aryabhatta. The Arabs just spread it around.
Chess — everyone knows shatranj was derived from the Sanskrit word chaturang.
Cockfighting, hookahs, plastic surgery — us, us, us. And did you know they had private toilets in the Indus valley civilisation?
The British sitcom Goodness Gracious Me spoofed our cultural tendency to claim “we did it first” about everything.
But it is also true that our epics and folk tales have always been happy hunting grounds for foreign explorers. (Remember those blue-skinned extra terrestrials in Avatar?) East is East and West is West and when the twain meet, West packages East and sells it back to us. Once, the British came and destroyed all of our industry and made us produce cotton and indigo that went to factories in Lancaster to be turned into cloth that was sold back to us. Now Rice-Tec, an American company, nabs a patent for Basmati rice. Sure Bollywood has ripped off its share of Hollywood films, but in the larger scheme of things, Bruce Almighty ‘inspiring’ God Tussi Great Ho is just a karmic drop in the bucket for all those indigo blues.
I am not saying J K Rowling took a quick passage to India. Rowling is surely much too sensitive about copyright issues. After all, Warner Brothers sued the producer of a film whose main character sounded too close to Harry Potter. And her lawyers forced the withdrawal of Harry Potter in Kolkata where the boy wonder met luminaries of Bengali literature.
I had always thought if Harry Potter had been inspired by anyone it was the ghost of all those Enid Blyton books that have fallen foul of political correctness now. Hogwarts is a darker copy of her Mallory Towers and St Clare’s boarding school series. If you added to it the actual dangerous adventures of the Famous Five as they tackled smugglers and pirates, you are getting closer to Harry Potter.
My complaint, when I first saw the Harry Potter films, was that Rowling’s world seemed as lily-white and pink-cheeked as Enid Blyton’s where the only dark character were the Gollywogs. Soon a salt-and-pepper sprinkling of brown-er characters appeared like the Patil sisters but in the films they remained little more than a United Nations backdrop for the white kids that save the day. By the time the Deathly Hallows rolled around, much of that window dressing was gone too.
Now I think Hogwarts might be a lot more multicultural than I had reckoned. Harry Potter, are you Hari Puttar after all?
(Sandip Roy hosts a radio show, New America Now, in San Francisco)