The Wizard of Ours

Eleven-year-old Harry, with an embarrassingly conspicuous lightening shaped scar on his forehead, is suffering the cliched existence of an orphan at the hands of the unimaginative Dursleys, who lock him in a cupboard and lavish their fat slob of a son with computers and candies. But one cloudy day owls andsuspicious looking robed folk appear in the neighbourhood and scoop Harry out to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, to lessons in potions and magic.

No, nothing extraordinary. So how is it that the three Harry Potter sagas are firmly ensconced at the top of the bestseller lists in India and everywhere else? How is it that Rowling’s publishers bailed out adults who were a trifle wary of burying their noses in baby books by issuing alternative volumes with plain jackets? How is it that a line in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has come so true: "Some old witch had a book that you could not stop reading. You just had to do everything one-handed."

More importantly, what does it say about adult fans? Are we merely reverting to our Billy Bunter selves or is our enchantment with wizards and trolls and with Harry’s battles against the dark forces threatening Hogwarts an optimistic message for the coming century? C.S. Lewis, who argued that a book should be judged by the reading it invitesand whose Narnia tales inspired Rowling, once offered an enduring distinction: “Lay the fairy tale side by side with the school story… we long to go through the looking glass, to reach fairyland. We also long to be the immensely popular and successful schoolboy or schoolgirl.” Tales that cater to the craving for magic, he deemed, were healthy for the spirit and for the imagination, while those that addressed the need to be labelled heroes left readers" undivinely discontented".

Perhaps it is not so much the retreat to childhood literature that draws adults to the Potter saga; perhaps it has something to do with the undivinely discontent in our fastforward lives. Lives lived in an eternal fish bowl, lives lived lurching in confusion from one time-saving gadget to another. Rowling holds millions in thrall with her meticulously mapped universe, passed in the great Narnia tradition by crashing into an invisible barrier to arrive at platform nine and three-quarters. (A curious equivalent of astrophysicists’current inquiry into the possibility of wormholes?) A universe that beats to a different, yet altogether rational, rhythm. As Potter and a varied cast of oddball characters flit to and fro between the world of muggles (non-wizard normal people, ie without imagination) and their private world, it satisfies the ubiquitous craving for solitude, defined these days as a place where satellite phones don’t ring.

It’s a quest to ensure an eternal present. If the information revolution has led to a gigantic mishmash of a cyber-archive, Potter’s popularity hints at the attendant craving for the the simultaneous existence of computers and of centuries-old mumbo-jumbo. If that sounds alarmingly irrational, it also offers a sliver of hope that the coming biotech century coupled with globalisation won’t deliver a dreaded, almost robotic sameness.

Rowling’s politically incorrect books, in fact, point to the wariness of other writers, for children and for adults, to pen what George Eliot called books "you can get thewhole world into". As they hem in their creative impulses by pandering to the nineties obsession with authenticity, as they churn out confessional narratives, Harry Potter is a timely turn-of-the-century reminder of the insatiable need for a sweeping, juicy tale, a triumph of the human imagination.