I was kind of debating whether or not to do this. It seemed kind of silly, but since no one else is talking about it, I figured I might as well go for it. Especially given the relevance of it at this point in time. Just a few days ago, on the 11th, it was the 15th anniversary of the release of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And before you click away, no, this is not some kind of reevaluation. I’m not arguing that this is some sort of lost classic or anything. But there is some personal significance for me.
The film came out on July 11, 2003. I was 10. I didn’t see it in theaters, but I got it as soon as it was available on DVD in December. It looked like a really cool movie, I’ve enjoyed some of the books these characters were based on (I wasn’t aware of its comic book origins until after seeing it), but one very specific thing caught my attention more than anything else about it – Captain Nemo, who is portrayed by the esteemed Indian actor, Naseeruddin Shah.
After the events of 9/11, there was a lot of relentless bullying. I was one of the very few brown kids in my school, and I was notoriously introverted, so I became an easy target. And as I mentioned in my piece on Apu not too long ago, there isn’t much in terms of representation. So, once the prevailing image of a brown person is that of a terrorist, it can lead ignorant individuals to taking that image at face value, and harm anyone that seems similar.
With Captain Nemo, it was the first time in a mainstream Hollywood movie where I got to see one of the lead characters be an Sikh man, complete with a turban, and a whole army of guys just like him who are not just competent but damn good at what they do and totally badass. Granted, I wasn’t one of those Indian kids with a patka or anything, but I had friends and family who did wear patkas and turbans. Plus, there were no jokes centered around mocking Indian accents. There was no gag about Indian food. Nothing in the film mocked any of these characters because of their background. Considering the first hate crime following 9/11 was the murder of a Sikh man, Balbir Singh Sodhi, it was glorious to see someone who looked like that kicking ass on screen, and it was something I (and maybe a lot of other kids like me) needed at that moment in time.
Though, it is too bad that the film around Nemo couldn’t quite live up to its source material, and even then, it is worth noting that the film itself took some liberties, portraying him as a Sikh (which is accurate only to Alan Moore’s graphic novel) when in the various Jules Verne novels, he is a self-proclaimed son of a Hindu maharaja, and a descendant of Tipu Sultan, a Muslim. It’s the kind of character that is obviously written by a white guy, but was still radical for its time, especially for his anti-colonialist politics. Shah also took the mantle of a character, who – up until this adaptation – was played almost exclusively by white actors, with the exceptions of Egyptian-born Omar Sharif and the Puerto Rican actor, José Ferrer. It’s also the most overtly Indian portrayal, in terms of costume design and general aesthetics, which made his presence all the more meaningful for someone like me, who was often shamed for my background.
The other unfortunate thing is Hollywood hasn’t done much else in this kind of representation, be it prestige or genre films. There aren’t many South Asians I can think of off the top of my head in the past couple years. In Ant-Man and the Wasp, there was Divian Ladwa, who played a henchman. In Deadpool 2, there was Dopinder the taxi driver, played by Karan Soni. There was also Mindy Kaling in Ocean’s 8. The closest to a South Asian-American action hero is probably Priyanka Chopra’s character in the now cancelled ABC series, Quantico. Non genre stuff certainly fares better with shows like Master of None, The Mindy Project, and films like Lion, and The Big Sick. However, South Asians rarely get to be cool, and none of these brought the same visceral thrill of seeing Shah’s Nemo in action in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Progress is slowly happening, but there is still a ways to go.