On Chandra, colonialism, and race

Hi Mark,

Please feel free to pass this letter on to the creative team if you get the chance.

I’ve been a player for a very long time, starting in the Dark/Revised, taking a break around weatherlight, and then back from Innistraad, and I have to say Magic is currently the best it’s ever been. The story is cohesive, the cards play amazingly well, there are a host of formats, and obviously an epic sized player base.

More importantly, Magic has been incredible in expanding inclusivity, with your equal representations of genders and races and age groups in your game. Hell, you even have diversity of faiths, though having my favorite planeswalker Ajani being an iconoclastic Atheist Jesus does make me wince a little =)

So this renewed focus on making mtg as accessible as possible is why i’m writing this letter. A bit of background- I’m of Indian Hindu descent, and my culture, as you might guess, isn’t particularly well represented in western pop media. As a lifelong nerd, it’s been a little frustrating and saddening to have no one to related to except for crude caricatures like Apu on the Simpsons or something. And ever since i first discovered Arabian Nights, I’ve hoped MtG would set its sights on South Asia, and give me a chance to explore my culture through my favorite game.

I’ve played D&D for a long time as well, and it’s been spectacularly awful at handling indian stuff, from the remarkably tone deaf way it gave Hindu gods stats in Dieties and Demigods to the cat-headed backwards hands rakshasas, which god knows where they got em from. I hoped MtG would be different.

On Wednesday this week, you guys put out the backstory of Chandra Nalaar, and set her in a Steampunk plane based on apparently Punjab in India. At first I was incredibly excited, because woo, India! However, the more i thought about it, the unhappier I became.

For one, Chandra (whose name is the Moon god) is about as Irish looking as they come. ((aside- what’s with all the great female Red legends having indian names? Jaya and Radha? It’s not particularly cool to take Radha, one of the most beloved goddesses of Hinduism, and have her as some bloodthirsty elf lady, but that ship has long sailed))

Now, that’s perfectly fine! Chandra’s character has been established for many years now, and there’s nothing wrong there. However, she’s in a town called Ghirapur, which is obviously Indic, and her mom’s name is Kiran, which is a very common north indian (mainly punjabi) name. This doesn’t jive with the art, which has pretty obvious europeans hanging around.

And then there’s the issue of the Akhara, which you guys use as a Colosseum. I get how you came up with it- someone during one of your design meetings googled for how to say arena or training center or something and came up with that from wikipedia, but i think you guys stumbled here. Akhara isn’t just a gym or dojo. It’s a holy structure for hindus, a place sacred to various gods, where monks go and study physical arts. Yeah, that sounds completely D&D, but they all function as temples as well, to Hanuman, or Vishnu or Shiva. Plus, the largest groups of Sadhu-saints in india are organized in Akharas. They’re effectively huge denominations of Hindu thought and philosophy, and have guided the faith (in a general sense, as Hinduism is a pretty decentralized religion) for centuries.

But fine. Let’s just accept that you guys use Indian names and stuff for your setting and art. By the time i’ve seen it, it’s well past too late to do anything anyway. But the issue that bothers me more is the blending of Steampunk and India, which is a much thornier issue.

So Steampunk is basically an offshoot of the works of folks like Jules Verne, taking Victorian era feelings of exploration, invention and discovery to the nth degree. Gears everywhere, top hats and coal and wire rimmed glasses, you get it. God, acting as if i know more about art aesthetics than the magic team!

Where the issue comes from is the other half of steampunk- the thing being explored and discovered and enlightened. Steampunk, and pulp adventure before it, are predicated on the idea that there is a civilized (read-white,european,christian) elite going to the wild unknown (brown, african/indian, pagan) to bring enlightenment to the ‘other’. If you go back and reread Around the World in 80 Days, you’ll be astounded at how absolutely condescendingly racist that book is when it comes to describing other cultures that Fogg encounters. His trip to India is especially egregious.

Now, i totally love the steampunk aesthetic, but it’s really hard to separate that from the aspects of colonialism and othering that go along with it. And then add that to the fact that you’ve basically got all pale white people in the art that came with Chandra’s story, and that everyone has Indian names and onion domes and it’s all very Disneyfied Mughal India, and you start to get the feeling of erasure. Or at least I do. Here it is, my dream setting, an Indian plane in MtG with awesome gears and steam and the whole thing, and indian names and indian cultural references….and no indians. And the plane is full of engineers!!

Mark, it hurts.

Finally after all these years, everything about my culture is ok for magic except me? I still have no one that i can identify with, except for these seeming interlopers who have come and replaced me in my home. And yes, i fully admit that this sounds a little overwrought, but i *love* magic. I’ve played it for 2/3rds of my life. It’s my favorite thing in the world behind my culture and my wife and son.

So this one hits a little close to home. Khans block had Naga and Rakshasas, but fine, i could just chalk that up to generic D&D monsters. Chandra, though…Mark, My aunt is named Kiran. Her hair is very much not red, and while she is an engineer, there aren’t many gears in her life. Chandra was one of the names I was considering giving my son. (I settled on Aakash. Instead of the moon, we went with the sky).

I understand how business works, and how the magic development schedule works. The fact that i know her plane’s name at all means that this is all basically unchangeable and locked in stone for pretty much the rest of the game’s life. But I don’t think I could have lived with myself if I didn’t at least share my feelings about this, my favorite game.

Thank you for reading, and thank you for Magic.