“We’re Indians from Hastinapur”: I’m ready for Nolan’s Mahabharata
I finally watched The Odyssey. Nolan erased the Greeks and greatness itself.
“We are Greeks from Ithaca,” proudly declared actor Himesh Patel in a thick Californian accent, dressed in Greek armour in Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey.
Patel’s parents were born in Zambia and Kenya, though they hail from India, while Patel was born in Cambridgeshire. He grew up speaking Gujarati.
In The Odyssey, he plays Eurylochus, Odysseus’s second-in-command from an island near Ithaca called Same.
Now I ask you to imagine the following scene.
The camera pans down on two Irishmen, pale as ghosts, their bright ginger hair complementing the colourful Indian clothes they are wearing. Playing Arjuna and Yudhishthira in a Bollywood epic of the Mahabharata, they turn to a local villager.
“We’re Indians from Hastinapur,” one tells him in a strong Belfast twang.
Or how about this?
Deep in the Ghanaian interior, a Swede and a Lithuanian, their blonde hair spilling from beneath colourful kente headdresses, play Ananse and Nyame in a Hollywood adaptation of an ancient Ghanaian folklore.
Turning to a local villager, one proudly declares with unmistakably Swedish intonation: “We’re Ghanaians from Kumasi.”
Such scenes would be not only absurd but insulting. They would drag the viewer out of the story, leaving them wondering why a cast of northern Europeans were playing Indian princes or African legends.
Indian Eurylochus is the most prominent example of Nolan “race-swapping” Western characters, though it has been talked about the least. Perhaps if Patel had offered an extraordinary performance, his casting could be forgiven, but he didn’t, and it cannot.
Zendaya’s portrayal of an imagined Athena was flat, dreary and empty. In other words, Zendaya played Zendaya.
Nolan cast Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, and various other African-American actors played Greek warriors or poets. The film opens with Travis Scott, a rapper, playing a bard. Korean-American Will Yun Lee plays Anchialus, another of Odysseus’s crew.
This multicultural cast of “Greeks” looked more like a Halloween party in LA than anything resembling the Bronze Age.
For Nolan, Western canon must be for everyone. It is universal, of no place or people. Our culture, the most sophisticated and extraordinary any civilisation has produced, cannot be credited to Western peoples. That, you see, would be racist and against the principle of equality, which is sacred to Nolan as we shall see.
The erasure of the Greeks from The Odyssey is one of many problems with the film.
