Captain Nemo: The Secret Indian
A multi-media history of Captain Nemo and his hidden Indian ancestry.
For someone whose name means no-one/nobody, Captain Nemo has had a variety of incarnations over the years. But despite Nemo’s royal Indian origins, from the roughly twenty on-screen portrayals (including those by major actors such as Lionel Barrymore, James Mason, and Michael Caine), only two of them have been from the Indian subcontinent: the Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah and the Pakistani-born actor Faran Tahir. Even then, the most Indian of the various Captains across history has not come from the screen, but from the panels of the most legendary graphic novelist of all time. And that’s still not enough.
Origins… at the End
In the earliest drafts of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne’s mysterious protagonist began as a member of the Polish szlachta nobility with an ardent quest of revenge against the Russian Empire for the murder of his family. Verne’s editor advised against harboring Russo-phobic sentiment (as the Empire was an ally of France at the time) and Verne took the advice, excising the overtly political origins while maintaining the character’s general animosity toward imperialism and general grief over the loss of his loved ones. So Nemo’s origins, along with the entirety of his character, remained shadowed in mystery for entire novel.
It wasn’t until the 1875 sequel, The Mysterious Island, when Nemo’s origins were revealed: within the grotto of Lincoln Island, the elderly Captain identified himself as Prince Dakkar. A recipient of Western education via European tours and studies, the Prince became fluent in French English, German, and Latin — the latter language being that which his moniker“Nemo” derives from. A descendent of the Sultan Fateh Ali Khan Tipu of the Kingdom of Mysore, the prince lost his family and kingdom during the famous Indian Rebellion of 1857. This spurred an anti-imperial hunger for revenge which he carried to death bed, where he uttered his final word: Freedom!
Despite his clear origins, it appears that most adaptors of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea did not read its sequel, leading to a predominantly European identity for Captain Nemo (excluding the film portrayal by Egyptian actor Omar Sharif) which ends up more aligned to Verne’s initial Polish identity for the character rather than anything like the Indian ancestry he later decided upon. That is, until another European author took a crack at it.
Moore’s Nemo(s)
The first adaptation of Jules Verne’s work to explicitly maintain the Captain’s Indian ancestry was the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series, written by the legendary Alan Moore and illustrated by loyal collaborator Kevin O’Neill. However, despite dressing like a Sikh (blue dastar and all), the religious alignment of Moore’s Nemo is never made explicitly clear. The massive, grotesque painting of the fierce destroyer goddess Kali in the Nautilus has suggested to readers either that this Nemo is syncretic in his worship, or perhaps the terror evoked by the painting matches the Captain’s own staunch and brooding ferocity. The religious ambiguity persists when Moore’s Nemo makes reference to a pantheon of gods, shouting: “Come forward! Come forward, men of England! Tell the gods that Nemo sent you!”
Captain Nemo’s joining of the titular League is an ironic and even paradoxical one: despite a firm hatred for imperialism and more than enough reason to fully distrust the British Empire, the Captain joins his Victorian counterparts for the prospects of adventure (only quitting after Britain’s use of chemical warfare against the Martians in Volume II).
The willful independence is inherited along with the Nemo name by Dakkar’s daughter, Janni, who becomes Nemo II and receives her own trilogy of graphic novels by the Moore-O’Neill duo. However, despite a perhaps tasteless reference of the painfully real India-Pakistan conflict over Kashmir by the “nuclear Sikh terrorist” Nemo III (a.k.a. Jack Dakkar) the Indian origins of the Dakkar dynasty remained massively superficial in the later League stories.
To the Future
It’s a shame. Naseeruddin Shah’s portrayal of Moore’s Captain Nemo in the 2003 film adaptation of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, directed by Stephen Norrington, was noble but subdued, an ultimately minor part of an otherwise famously terrible and soulless adaptation of the comic. Faran Tahir’s role as the Captain is only incidentally South Asian, fumbling the chance for a Nemo of the subcontinent to debut on television.
The only other instance of Nemo portrayed as an Indian comes in the form of a short film titled The Lost Memories of Captain Nemo, directed by Neeti Kejriwal & Chase Pottinger (an Indian-American duo, assumedly). Besides an oblique teaser and a handful of stills, there isn’t much more information on this film, so the authenticity of its Nemo’s ancestry is still suspect. But nevertheless it does appear to at least take place somewhere in India and sport an Indian cast. See for yourself:
Although the Indian identity of Captain Nemo emerged as something of an afterthought in the source material, seemingly applied in order to compliment and provide a source for the Captain’s temperament, the world’s continued fascination with the character alongside the precedents set by Moore & O’Neill’s efforts (and perhaps those of Kejriwal & Pottinger) will hopefully give rise to a fully authentic Indian Nemo.
