- As an Indian woman and a twin, I expected more from Padma and Parvati Patil in “Harry Potter.”
- I ended up relating more to Hermione, the white female lead, than the actual Indian characters.
- “Harry Potter” is one of many Western-media examples of shallow sketches of South Asian characters.
Like many middle-class Indian kids, I was used to neatly reimagining my life into Western stories.
My reading habit developed on the backs of white, mainly British authors — from Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie to Charles Dickens and Jane Austen — so the series of my generation, “Harry Potter,” was a natural progression.
I thought I was finally going to get the Indian representation I longed for, because “Harry Potter” had an element my wildly Anglophone reading diet lacked: Padma and Parvati Patil, Indian, brown-skinned, identical twins, just like my twin sister and me.
I was willing to take this smidgen of representation — but I never found a way to read myself into the underdeveloped characters.
The Patil twins were part of a cultural touchstone but weren’t sketched well enough to offer real representation
On paper, the Patil twins seemed like they were in for an interesting time at Hogwarts.
Parvati was sorted into Gryffindor with Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger. Padma became a Ravenclaw prefect. In “Goblet of Fire,” Harry and Ron took the sisters to the Yule Ball, where Seamus Finnigan and Dean Thomas dubbed them the “prettiest girls in our year.” They were part of Dumbledore’s Army, and they went on to fight in the Battle of Hogwarts.
Unlike even lazier attempts at Anglicized representation, their names were also actually Indian. Padma is the shortened name my mother goes by, and their surname, Patil, is hugely common in Maharashtra, the state where I grew up.
But even with a broad canvas to deepen two of the Potterverse’s most visible characters of color, the series’ controversial author, J.K. Rowling, just … didn’t.
Representation has never been about the existence of a brown face in a crowd or a hard-to-pronounce name on a roster. It’s about reflecting reality and appreciating the tangible presence of identities often sidelined in white narratives.
Parvati’s arc in Gryffindor could’ve been sketched lovingly, like Neville’s or Luna’s, but instead she was made the archetypal giggling “silly girl” foil for Hermione.
One of the few things we know about Parvati was that she was fascinated with Divination, which is painted as superstitious, mystical mumbo jumbo. To me, this brought to mind Orientalist descriptions of India as the realm of unscientific hocus-pocus (and snake charmers) that still rankle our collective Indian soul.
Worse off, Padma essentially disappeared from the narrative.
Warner Bros.
The one moment of poetic justice that Rowling offered the twins in the books was at the Yule Ball, where Parvati “looked very pretty indeed, in robes of shocking pink, with her long dark plait braided with gold, and gold bracelets glimmering at her wrists.” Padma “was looking just as pretty as Parvati in robes of bright turquoise.”
But the movies undid the little that Rowling did.
The twins’ Yule Ball costumes spawned articles and rants on Reddit and Tumblr because no self-respecting Indian would wear those garish orange-and-pink lehengas to the biggest event of the year.
I was so disappointed in the Patils’ portrayal that I looked to Hermione for self-representation
I have to wonder if Rowling examined the British Asian experience at all when she was writing the books. After all, the Indian community is a vibrant part of the UK, making up 2.5% of the population in 2011.
It would’ve taken more than a plate of chicken tikka showing up in the Great Hall to paint meaningful representation. But peddling stereotypes and questionable sartorial choices is evidently easier than creating fully sketched characters.
I never expected book characters to look like me, because that wasn’t my experience growing up. So I was already used to choosing my heroines out of a cast of white characters based on qualities alone.
Jo March and Maggie Tulliver became kindred spirits of my youth. And when it came time to read myself into “Harry Potter,” Hermione outshone Padma and Parvati.
Warner Bros.
Hermione was a brave, whip-smart witch painted in bold strokes: an adventurer, a book-loving nerd, a fiercely loyal friend. Most importantly, she’s the reason Harry made it through seven books alive.
It was a pity, though, that I related more to Hermione than to Indian twins — a Gryffindor and a Ravenclaw, just like me and my own sister.
If I wasn’t the target demographic for these characters, who was?
Beyond ‘Harry Potter,’ there’s a gap in nuanced portrayals of South Asians in Western media
British literature never quite captured the complex life and identity of a non-Western kid for me.
Half-baked South Asian representation from white creators has largely led to cultural stereotypes in place of real narratives — evidenced by Apu’s thick Indian accent on “The Simpsons” and Raj’s social ineptitude on “The Big Bang Theory.”
But English’s colonial legacy as the lingua franca means those character tropes get read or seen more widely than our own versions.
Parvati and Padma were likely never meant to be more than harmless background characters, but their mere existence in the Potterverse made them powerful.
For once, it would’ve been nice to see a white author allow them to wield that power in a meaningful, awe-inspiring way.