Saralakkha Holmes

[Max Magee]

I received news of a very interesting Bengali adaptation of Sherlock Holmes' canonical tale (among one of my favorites from The Canon), The Hound of the Baskervilles.

https://www.thedailystar.net/entertainment/tv-film/news/sherlock-holmes-tollywood-heres-what-you-need-know-3153736

The makers took to social media to unveil the first look teaser of the film on Tuesday and wrote that nothing escapes the eyes of Saralakkha, let's begin with the monster of Baskervilles. The high on action film will unfold with Saralakkha, who was brought up in Kolkata but now settled in London and gets into an investigation with his friend, to be played by Arna Mukhopadhyay.

 

Note, this is a Bengali Tollywood film (Bengali is a dialect spoken in West Bengal region of India and Bangladesh) production, so it is not from Bollywood—which makes Hindi-language films and whose name came from combining Bombay and Hollywood, which makes even less sense now that Bombay is officially known by its renamed/re-branded name, Mumbai. Tollywood, here, means this is being produced in West Bengal, in the Tollygunge area of Kolkata. (Even more confusingly, there is another Tollywood film industry that produces Telugu-language films.)

If this film is successful, I would be pleased if they continued the series and remade Sign of Four with attention given to the perspectives and voice to the motivations of the Southeast Asian characters whose characters were impugned ("two hundred thousand black devils let loose, and the country was a perfect hell", "swarming with fanatics and fierce devil-worshippers," and accusations of civilians being murdered) in the original book. Although, to be fair, other than in a story being told second-hand by a known criminal, double-crosser, and thief (Johnathan Small), it's the Britishers who come out looking most villainous in that tale. He says it himself, "Maybe you gentlemen think that I am just making out a case for myself, but I give you my word..."

Of course, as in nearly any war, there were atrocities aplenty committed before, and during the rebellion, and by all major parties involved. In the novel The Sign of [the] Four, though, it appears the brutal, disturbing version of the Siege of Agra in the narrative (of a civilian massacre) was essentially created from whole-cloth as a plot-point, 30 years after the fact, to sell books.

Anyway, I'm not trying to start a fight defending/attacking the Sign of Four, but I think it's a wonderful thing that there are voices interpreting and exploring these stories from different angles.

Max

Max "Magic Jezail Bullet" Magee

"I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and the jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign, throbbed with dull persistency."