Posted by: @oldmanofarchenland

Digory is British. If Digory is no longer British, he will be another boy, because a person's ethnicity is a fundamental aspect of his/her being... Do not steal a people's stories from them.

FWIW, I'm American and I've always felt like Digory's story was mine as much anyone else's. (Also, FWIW, kids learn about non-Hollywood-ized history in school. They have no choice but to do that.) 

Posted by: @oldmanofarchenland

I would view such a change in The Magician's Nephew as part of this trend. A people's/nation's/ethnicity's stories, historical or fictional, are very important to their identity and self-esteem. A false past is being created, and our minds are being narrowed. Young people who know no better may become confused about what the past really was like, about who they are and where they come from. Do not steal a people's stories from them.

With respect @oldmanofarchenland, I can understand why you are passionately against the notion of Aslan being altered in such a way as having been discussed in this and other threads due to the recent talks of potential casting... however, I would suggest that there is very little said about Digory's ethnicity or skin colour in the books.  We know what Uncle Andrew says of the Ketterley family to Jadis, but we are not told much about Digory's father's side of the family apart from (1) he is in India for most of the story and (2) He inherits the big house in the country at the end of the book.  Sure it may not have been common to have mixed-race marriages in the era in which MN is set, but it seems to me there is enough room within what is written and what is not written to potentially portray Digory as mixed Indian-British decent without being seen as part of a trend or changing of the past or narrowing our minds.  I'm all for a faithful adaptation of MN, and would be sad if it is strays too far from the source material, but for me personally, Digory's ethnicity doesn't appear to have a major impact on the faithfulness to the story and the source material.

Posted by: @oldmanofarchenland

 

Digory is British. If Digory is no longer British, he will be another boy, because a person's ethnicity is a fundamental aspect of his/her being. While it is possible that there could be a story about an Anglo-Indian boy in Victorian London, while it is plausible such a thing could be done and handled well, The Magician's Nephew is not that story. It already exists. Let Lewis show us a vision of an all white England, let him show us that different world that once existed not very long ago. While such a version of The Magician's Nephew that you describe could be historically plausible, there is a trend of rewriting stories and history of the past in the image of these times. I think of shows like Bridgerton, and other portrayals of British and European history which are historically impossible. I would view such a change in The Magician's Nephew as part of this trend. A people's/nation's/ethnicity's stories, historical or fictional, are very important to their identity and self-esteem. A false past is being created, and our minds are being narrowed. Young people who know no better may become confused about what the past really was like, about who they are and where they come from. Do not steal a people's stories from them.

Now this was something I did a lot of research on since the casting call. Once the Victorian era came about there was a lot of migrating happening in England. There were numbers of POC that intermingled with largely aristocrat whites. Digory's race is the least of my worries, I'm just hoping we get good news about a non gender swapped Aslan as we wait for further news.

Digory can be Indian/white and British all the same.

Wasn’t the character of Digory based on one of Lewis’s own professors? As I remember that Professor was British and taught in the English schools and was unusually good for the poorly run schools of the time. By the time of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe he was an old professor, but he may not have been as stern as the one that Lewis had. I think that Lewis liked the real Professor because he questioned many things and was the no nonsense type.  But the Digory Kirke in the Narnia books was perhaps more permissive (“that old chap will let us do anything we like”) and I think Lewis made him more appealing to children for the story. He is one of the most likable characters in the books (even as a child in The Magician’s Nephew). Lewis added much sensitivity with Digory grieving over his mother’s illness. I hope that any movie based on the book will preserve his character.

I haven't posted here yet, so here's my two pence 🙂 :

I don't find that I have a problem with the casting if Digory is half-English, half-Indian. I don't believe it's too consequential to the plot. It allows there to be a bit of diversity which doesn't feel forced. The Aslan matter is still the real controversial one for me!

@oldmanofarchenland This is literally why I hate race/ethnicity-swapping. Thanks for explaining everything in a clear manner.

Hello all! I'm of mixed Indian descent myself, so I thought I'd share my perspective on this potential casting decision for Digory.

I'd be super excited to see Digory be of mixed Indian descent, because I think this actually makes a lot of sense with the thematic content of TMN. I've come up with 3 points, some of which have already been touched on previously in this thread 🙂

1. As mentioned previously by others, having Digory be of mixed descent might intensify the clear loneliness and alienation he feels living in London, away from his previous life. Moreover, one of the overarching themes of the Chronicles of Narnia is feeling that you don't belong in the world you're in, and yearning for another world, one where you do truly belong. This resonates pretty deeply with the experience of being mixed, as mixed people often struggle with feelings of unbelonging. Having Digory be mixed might add an additional layer of poignancy to this theme of belonging in these new film adaptations of the Chronicles. 

2. If Digory is of mixed Indian descent, it opens up the possibility that he has spent some of his early childhood in India and/or has been exposed to an Indian culture and language on top of the British culture he would have been exposed to through his mother. This would mean that Digory has been navigating being part of different cultural worlds from an early age, which would lend further credence to his characterization as a boy comfortable with and eager to explore other worlds. Digory is deeply curious and open to intriguing possibilities about the world around him, and his mixed cultural background could tie directly into that.

3. A concept that often comes up for mixed people is "betweenness", or feeling caught between cultural worlds. And of course, betweenness as a human experience is conceptually baked into TMN through the setting of The Wood Between Worlds. Having Digory be mixed might mean that we get to explore that setting more deeply, and that we get more of a direct window into the very human experience of feeling in-between, and the general abstractness of The Wood Between Worlds itself. For example, you might have a scene where Polly and Digory discuss their experience of being in The Wood Between Worlds, and that discussion might naturally flow into Digory's feelings about being mixed. Of course, this does raise a potential concern that cultural betweenness will be portrayed as place where it isn't healthy place to remain (as you can't stay in The Wood Between Worlds for long) while many mixed people enjoy and are comfortable in their betweenness and prefer this to 'choosing a world' so to speak. However, as I remember the book, the Wood Between Worlds is described as a pretty liminal space, neither inherently good or bad, but rather what you make of it - which is how I like to think about cultural betweenness, at any rate 🙂 And this also raises one of the main conceits of TMN, which is going back and forth between worlds in a very literal sense. Connecting this to Digory's experiences of being mixed and having to live and move between worlds on a regular basis might open the door for some interesting thematic discussions and further exploration of betweenness as a human experience. So if the idea of going between universes is a bit abstract for some audience members, grounding this in= a concept that's a little more concrete or understandable in the here-and-now, such as experiences of cultural betweenness, might help to clarify and enrich their understanding of The Wood Between Worlds and betweenness in TMN.

@hiraeth If Digory is of mixed Indian descent, it opens up the possibility that he has spent some of his early childhood in India and/or has been exposed to an Indian culture and language on top of the British culture he would have been exposed to through his mother

I've no problems with Digory having mixed Indian/English descent, per se, when I've already said there must have been at least some generations of wealthy Anglo-Indians in the whole of UK, when the East India Company, (from 1600, to 1874, when it was wound up), was there for the lucrative trade in spices, cotton & other much needed products, in competition with the French, the Portuguese and others, especially the Dutch, who had their own VOC or East India Company. Wasn't it normal for those involved with the East India Company, or later, for soldiers of the British Army, having fulfilled their tour of duty to return to UK, to retire, accompanied by their wives, Indian or otherwise?

It was only in the late 19th century that the British Raj began to rule India directly, from 1858 to 1947, and whether or not Digory ever travelled to India, he might well have been exposed indirectly to such culture and language through a grandparent or other relative. By the time I was growing up, in the 1950's & 1960's curry dishes were commonplace whilst it seems in British homes & schools, kedgeree (whatever it is) was a standard breakfast food. The Royal family played polo, an Indian sport, whilst today, the International Cricket tests go on and on...  

Welcome to Narnia Web, and I hope you enjoy all the discussion.  

@narnian78 I think you're referring to Mr Kirkpatrick, who was a retired teacher who'd been his father's headmaster (=principal in US), and very different from the awful teacher Lewis suffered under.  This man in retirement did tutoring, helping prepare boys for their important exams and filling in gaps in their education. 

@coracle 

It is certainly understandable how a good teacher could make a favorable impression on Lewis when many teachers in the schools of his time were cruel to children.  So a good one was something special to Lewis and a model for the Professor’s character. It is like the kind principal I had in elementary school, which I fondly remember. He was quite popular with the students. One tends to remember the good teachers from childhood. 

@hiraeth Thanks so much for what you've shared above — it's so valuable and meaningful to hear from an "insider perspective", so to speak, compared to just throwing opinions around without any direct experience of what we're talking about (in this case, being of visibly mixed descent in a society where that stands out).

I hadn't thought, for example, of how the possibility of Digory having lived in India as well as Britain, and of him experiencing that "betweenness" that you describe, would also tie in very well with the theme of moving between worlds that is part of The Magician's Nephew (more so than it is with any of the other Narnia books).

Posted by: @hiraeth

Moreover, one of the overarching themes of the Chronicles of Narnia is feeling that you don't belong in the world you're in, and yearning for another world, one where you do truly belong. This resonates pretty deeply with the experience of being mixed, as mixed people often struggle with feelings of unbelonging. Having Digory be mixed might add an additional layer of poignancy to this theme of belonging in these new film adaptations of the Chronicles. 

I've been thinking along these lines too, and it's something that I hope the directors of this and (hopefully) future screen adaptations will pick up on and bring out. For starters, Narnia is a world with far greater diversity than ours — not only human beings (who, if we steer away from the unfortunately-of-its-time race-coding of heroes and villains in the books, could be of a range of skin colours and ethnicities), but also a huge range of other creatures and beings with the same level of sentience and social capabilities as humans. And yet it's a world where, for most of its history, all the various populations get along pretty well, outbreaks of violence or any kind of harmful behaviour are unusual and are understood as not right, and the implicit guiding principle is for everyone to live and let live, with a sense of kindness and decency and outright fun pervading the whole of Narnian society.

Of course it's fantasy, and even within the stories themselves, not everybody from our world who enters Narnia gets to stay there forever. (And there is the deeper plot point that the world where we truly belong is Aslan's country, of which even the best things in Narnia and our world are just a shadow.) But I just hope that a film version can bring this out — that Narnia is the sort of place that makes us wish we could live in a world like that, a world where just about anyone, whoever or whatever they are, can fit in, as long as they too are decent and kind and unselfish and respectful towards everyone else. And if we come away from that movie thinking of what we might do to make our own world even just a little bit more like Narnia... well, that is in a way fulfilling a purpose that Lewis himself said the best fantasy stories should have, that they make things in our world seem a little more enchanted as well. (I don't have the exact quote on hand, but I'm sure others here will know what I'm referring to.)

Posted by: @oldmanofarchenland

Digory is British. If Digory is no longer British, he will be another boy, because a person's ethnicity is a fundamental aspect of his/her being.

I do understand this opposite argument, and it's very fair if we're talking about real-life people and historical figures. To give some examples from the Victorian era, Queen Victoria herself, quite obviously, was white. Her secretary and close confidant in her later years, Mohammed Abdul Karim, was Indian. (There's a film about their friendship, Victoria & Abdul, starring Dame Judi Dench and Ali Fazal — I haven't seen it, but I'd like to.) Or a bit earlier in Victoria's reign, there was the noted circus owner and performer Pablo Fanque, who was of African heritage (his exact ancestry isn't clear, as he was born in poverty in Norwich, eastern England) and is the earliest known black circus proprietor in British history. (And yes, he's the chap who gets name-dropped in the Beatles' song Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!)

I'm just listing those as three examples of noteworthy people in Britain in the 19th century whose ethnicity / race / skin colour etc. definitely IS a fundamental aspect of their being, and it would have had a great influence on their life experience. To cast any of them, in a movie, as something other than the ethnicity they were, would be idiotic and misleading and more than a little insulting. I think probably most of us could agree with that.

But — here's the catch: Digory Kirke is a fictional character. He has never existed in reality at any time in history. So, while it's clear enough in the original books that he is white and Lewis wouldn't have considered making him otherwise, to change his ethnicity in a film is not insulting or misrepresenting any person who actually existed. And if it is done in a way that doesn't substantially alter his overall character or development arc, but brings out some extra depths to the same — as we've been discussing in this thread — I really cannot see a problem with it.

Let Lewis show us a vision of an all white England, let him show us that different world that once existed not very long ago.

The problem with this statement being that there never was an "all white England" that "once existed not very long ago", as the references above to such real-life people as Abdul Karim and Pablo Fanque might make clear. (Even before the Victorian era, there are more than enough historical records of people of different ethnicities and skin colours living in Britain. Not in huge numbers, but still definitely existing and being part of this country's history and heritage.)

A people's/nation's/ethnicity's stories, historical or fictional, are very important to their identity and self-esteem. A false past is being created, and our minds are being narrowed. Young people who know no better may become confused about what the past really was like, about who they are and where they come from. Do not steal a people's stories from them.

That's an interesting declaration, but just speaking from my own perspective, I'm about as white as a human can be without being albino, and yes, I am British by naturalisation. (I'm Australian by birth, and identify with both my countries equally.) And I don't feel at all that "[my] people's stories" are being "stolen" from me if an adaptation of a totally fictional work changes the lead character's ethnicity in a way that still works with the story and makes it potentially even more interesting. Or if books and films, fictional or non-fictional, acknowledge the fact that people of different ethnicities have been part of Britain and its history for centuries. I don't find that confuses me at all about who I am and where I came from, and I don't find it at all threatening to my identity and self-esteem. I'm really not sure why anyone would, honestly.

Posted by: @oldmanofarchenland

Digory is British. If Digory is no longer British, he will be another boy, because a person's ethnicity is a fundamental aspect of his/her being. While it is possible that there could be a story about an Anglo-Indian boy in Victorian London, while it is plausible such a thing could be done and handled well, The Magician's Nephew is not that story.

Could you maybe give some specific examples of character traits Digory has that are particularly British and how they impact the plot of The Magician's Nephew? 

@courtenay One thing you didn't cover is that there is no such ethnicity as "British".
I think the term is used overseas to mean someone from UK.  My passport says United Kingdom, not Britain.

In England I've seen the term 'Black British'  and 'White British', people born in UK, with ancestors from various places. I don't remember seeing 'Indian British' though; Indian or Pakistani immigrants and their families are referred to as 'Asian' (India being South Asia).

Britain, by the way, is only the big island containing Scotland, England and Wales, while UK includes Northern Ireland.

'White Anglo-Saxon' people have ancestors from western Europe and also Scandinavia and beyond. Some of those waves of immigrants had darker colouring, including some of the Celtic people. 'Caucasian' was once used to describe all white people, plus others (including Polynesians). It's worth noting that in northern India, skin colour is lighter than in the south, and historically lighter skin was considered superior.

Making a film about an earlier time period, using people with noticeably different skin tones or looks, can be deliberately misleading viewers who know little of English history, its social classes and their cultures. Or it can be attempting to made a statement about present day or about how the writers wished to improve our ancestors' record in accepting people who were different. Which makes it a bit political, so I will end here!

Posted by: @coracle

@courtenay One thing you didn't cover is that there is no such ethnicity as "British".
I think the term is used overseas to mean someone from UK.  My passport says United Kingdom, not Britain.

I did think of adding that, but felt I'd gone on long enough already!! "British" is a nationality, not an ethnicity. There's a huge diversity among people who identify as British, and probably has been for as long as that term has existed. And there are various debates over exactly what the term means and how valid or useful it is. But it's definitely not an ethnicity in itself.

I also have no idea how a person of part-Indian ancestry or other mixed heritage would have identified themselves in late Victorian London. It's just a fact of history, though, that such people did exist at that time, though not in large numbers. So while it would be totally misleading to portray London of 1900 as being anywhere near as diverse as London of 2025, it's still credible and consistent with real-life history that either Digory or another character, in a fictional story set in that time and place, could be half Indian. And if that is the angle that this adaptation is taking, I'll be intrigued to see what they do with it. 

I don't mind at all if they change the race/ethnicity for Digory or Polly as long as their general personalities remain intact.