Okay, now this has probably been mentioned before, but I love the idea of James Potter’s family being Bengali.
The UK has a large Indian community, particularly in and around London, Birmingham, and Manchester. However, a lot of people who moved from India to the UK changed their names to sound more “British”, so that they wouldn’t be as discriminated. So it would be totally legitimate for the Poddar family of Kolkata to have moved to London and changed their surname to Potter.
Imagine how wonderful it would have been for Sirius to have gone from this very strict, white, traditional family, the kind that eats at opposite ends of long tables, with many different sets of fine silver cutlery, to the Potters’ loud, colourful house, where Mrs Potter would be singing along to Hum Tum Ek Kamre and Inhi Logo Ne while making chor chori. He would get to eat it with his hands, and sit close enough to everyone to talk and laugh. And how wonderful would it be the first time Sirius celebrates Holi and Diwali with them. They would even take him to Kolkata with them for Durga Puja, where they’d go pandal hopping, and Sirius would think it was more magical than anything his pureblood family had ever shown him.
The longer he lived with them, the more Sirius gets why James loves the Gryffindor colours so much. Red is prosperity, the eternal colour, gold is good fortune, a symbol of Lakshmi. Being a Gryffindor, for James, was a sign of good things to come. And you can just imagine how he would feel seeing the girl he has a crush on wearing red and gold … totally ignoring the fact that every other Gryffindor girl would also be wearing red and gold, he would declare it to Sirius as a sign that they were meant to be.
“James, mate…”
“She’s already wearing wedding colours, Pads! It’s fate!”
“Mate.”
And the reason Vernon hated James so much was that he was horrifically racist. Not believing that a brownie could get a decent job. He used racial slurs and referenced “the colonies” during that fateful dinner, and James wouldn’t have been as used to the racial abuse due to the prejudices in the Wizarding world being different, so nearly hexed him when he dared insult his heritage, and that was the reason they never tried having dinner again.
“James Potter is a good English name. He is not English.”
“Actually, I’m from Hounslow.”
Then, after James and Lily’s deaths Sirius would wear nothing but white, and refused to let anyone help carry their bodies out. He was the one who washed and dressed James, as the only real family he had left, and made sure he was cremated properly, and his ashes scattered appropriately.
This is why my James headcanon is always Indian. It just makes sense. I also feel like the Potters not being white would be a reason for why the other pureblood families would look down on them a bit.
My only objection to this is that he wouldn’t be a Bengali. Poddar is typically a Marwari name. He could still be a Calcuttan!! Kolkata has a huge Marwari population, and typically big/middle businesses tend to be run by Marwaris so that might be one more reason why other purebloods would look askance at the Potters, because they made their money from business and trade and weren’t respectably unemployed.
Yo! Thanks for that correction, I had no idea!
That’s a really cool facet though, and one very in keeping with British traditional prejudices, i.e. Old Money versus New Money. Even if race wasn’t a thing, the New Money Potters would definitely be disdained by the other Old Money Purebloods. Working for a living? How dare they!
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