OTT | Reimagining Holmes

Created by director Srijit Mukherji and writer Aniruddha Guha, JioCinema's Shekhar Home is a desi take on Sherlock Holmes—with a twist

ISSUE DATE: Sep 30, 2024

InNeil Gaiman’s award-winning short story A Study in Emerald (2003), the reader is made to believe they are following the adventures of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes, until the duo is revealed to be Holmes’s archnemesis Moriarty and his ally. A similar sort of mindboggling subversion occurs in the JioCinema series Shekhar Home, created by director Srijit Mukherji and writer Aniruddha Guha. The Hindi-language series gives an adventurous and irreverent spin on Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical Holmes stories.

Set in the fictional sleepy small town of Lonepur in Bengal in 1992, Shekhar Home follows the titular master detective (Kay Kay Menon) lounging in a guesthouse, where he is joined by doctor Jayavrat Sahni. Over six episodes, based on six Holmes stories, beginning with A Study in Scarlet, Home and Sahni team up and solve mysteries until they meet the primary villain M.

Shekhar Home was born in Mukherji’s mind when he initially tried to film Satyajit Ray’s Feluda detective stories in Hindi. “Kay Kay Menon has sharp features, is lean and tall, and I naturally imagined him as my Feluda,” says Mukherji. “When that project didn’t take off, I thought of casting him as a Bengali Sherlock Holmes in a Hindi adaptation.”

Home is, indeed, a Bengali surname. Mukherji found the inspiration from Bengali satirist and short story writer Rajshekhar Basu’s Sherlock Holmes spoof Shawrolakkho Home. The early 1990s setting and the quaint charm of Santiniketan, where the series has been shot, lend Shekhar Home an old-world quality straight out of the Holmes stories, as opposed to the more contemporary and kinetic energy of recent Holmes adaptations, such as the ones featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr.

Menon plays Home with the character’s signature unpredictability, but with a welcoming warmth and a peculiar high-pitched giggle whenever he makes a breakthrough in a case. Among the series’ inspired casting choices is gifted Bengali actor Rudranil Ghosh playing Inspector Laha, that is, the bumbling policeman Lestrade. That was a choice, Mukherji says, he had to fight for. Rasika Dugal plays Iraboti, based on Irene Adler. Kaushik Sen plays Mrinmoy, based on Mycroft Holmes.

Wikipedia lists Kirti Kulhari’s character Mumtaz as inspired by Moriarty, but therein lies the twist in Guha and Mukherji’s adaptation, which takes their version of Holmes to extraordinarily inventive territory. “I wanted to upend the entire mythos,” says Guha. “So that ardent Sherlock fans would approach the series with trepidation and pessimism, sure, but then we would win them over with something totally unexpected.”

The gamble has worked. Shekhar Home has drawn positive reviews, including a thumbs up from most self-confessed Holmes fans, Guha points out. “The filmmaking industry is obsessed with outcomes—box office, reviews,” he adds. “The idea is to have fun with the process. Otherwise, what’s the point of creating?” Most elementary.