I’ve always enjoyed Jules Verne, and must have read 20,000 Leagues under the Sea a dozen times over the years. Yesterday, I was browsing through the afterword in a recent copy (at a great little lunch place) when I made an astonishing discovery: Captain Nemo, the stern inventor and captain of the Nautilus was… Indian!
Captain Nemo reveals his origins in a sequel titled Mysterious Island. Our great modern omniscient text Wikipedia has this to say on the matter:
In the initial draft of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Nemo was a Polish noble vengeful because of the murder of his family during the Russian repression of the Polish insurrection of 1863-1864. Verne’s editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel feared a book ban in the Russian market and offending a French ally, the Russian Empire. He made Verne obscure Nemo’s motivation in the first book. It’s in the sequel (Mysterious Island), where Nemo presents himself as prince Dakkar, the Hindu son of an Indian rajah and nephew of Tippoo Sahib, having a deep hatred of the British conquest of India. After the Sepoy mutiny, he devotes himself to scientific research and develops an advanced electric submarine, the Nautilus. [link]
Tippoo Sahib of course, is Tipu Sultan, the francophile ruler of Mysore.
If I’d kept up with my tacky Hollywood movies, I would have known that Captain Nemo is also a character in the critically acclaimed(!) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. He is played by that great thespian of our time Naseeruddin Shah.
Is this stuff well-known? How come nobody ever told me?
