HELLO JI!

A WORD (OR TWO HUNDRED) FROM THE EDITOR

A scene from the film The Personal History of David Copperfield. Image courtsey: YOUTUBE.COM.

A few days ago, when a non-desi friend of mine asked for my onion pakora recipe, was she appropriating my cuisine and therefore my culture? Why couldn’t she just make her perogies, instead? Does cultural appropriation work both ways?

A Caucasian actor portraying a person of colour gives rise to charges of cultural appropriation. There are enough and more actors from those ethnicities who could have played that role, it is said.

But what happens when an actor of Indian origin plays a quintessential English boy? I’ve been mulling over these questions ever since The Personal History of David Copperfield starring Dev Patel as Copperfield was released.

Patel is a fine young actor who’s been seen in a wide variety of roles. In Lion, he played a young man adopted by an Australian family who goes looking for his birth family. In Hotel Mumbai, he played an employee of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai who helped save lives during the terrorist attack. In The Man Who Knew Infinity, he is mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. In The Wedding Guest, he’s a kidnapper and hit man for hire. Oh, and in The Newsroom, one of my favourite television shows, he was the geeky IT expert. In all of the above, he plays someone of South Asian descent.

But David Copperfield? Will audiences accept him as the main character in a very English story that we all read while in school? We all have a David Copperfield in our heads and Dev Patel – who admits to not being a fan of Dickens’ work – does not match that image.

So was it cultural appropriation? Possibly, because there couldn’t have been a shortage of British actors who could have played the role just as well. But director Armando Iannucci has been quoted as saying he believed Patel was the best actor for the role.

I read that and go woo-hoo! Because that’s what good acting is about, isn’t it? To be able to portray someone one is not? To make you believe the actor is who he or she is portraying? If Dev Patel was Dev Patel in every movie, what would be the point of that?

I have my reservations about a movie based on a Dickens classic which incorporates “magic realism and whirlwind dialogue with a modern comic sensibility” as described by Julie Bloom in The New York Times, though. Leave classics alone, I say. Please do not reimagine Sherlock Holmes or Anne of Green Gables. Go write your own book! But that’s a discussion for another day. 

For now, I am looking forward to watching Patel play Copperfield. For when an actor gets into the skin of his character, the colour of his own skin ceases to matter. And when my friend comes home bearing a plate of pakoras – as I know she will any day now – we will enjoy them together over cups of masala chai and I will send her home with a plate of peanut butter fudge she taught me how to make!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Dussehra!

Happy Halloween!

Shagorika Easwar