New Delhi, Sept 4: Director Srijit Mukerji says he fought with producers of “Shekhar Home”, inspired by literary works of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, to set the detective series in West Bengal at a time when the Indian web space is dominated by stories from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Mukerji said the BBC had approached him to direct an Indian adaptation of one of their shows but he refused as the filmmaker is “not a fan of remakes”.
Instead, he pitched “Shekhar Home” to the British broadcaster as a potential adaptation of “Sherlock Holmes” in the Indian context.
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“I conceived ‘Shekhar Home’ around 2018-19. The BBC had pitched a series to me. Instead of doing that I pitched ‘Shekhar Home’ to them,” Mukerji told PTI in an interview.
Citing the example of “The Family Man 2”, the showrunner said if viewers can enjoy some portions of the series in the Tamil language, there’s no reason a pan Indian series can’t be set in West Bengal.
“Unfortunately, India generally is dominated by UP and parts of Bihar in the web series space. I wanted to emphasise that there is more to India. In fact, I fought a lot with the producers because they were conscious about the show becoming too Bengali.
“I said if something doesn’t look too Punjabi, UP or Bihari, and still be pan Indian, so even if it becomes too Bengali, the show can still be pan Indian because Bengal is a part of India, right?” he reasoned.
Bengali literature already boasts of popular detective figures like Satyajit Ray’s Feluda and Byomkesh Bakshi by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay which have been translated for screen across languages, ages and mediums.
So, why adapt Sherlock for India?
Mukerji — a celebrated name in Bengali cinema with films such as “Chotushkone” and “Baishe Srabon” to his credit — said he’s a childhood fan of Conan Doyle and also loved the 2010 BBC adaptation, which made Benedict Cumberbatch an international star.
What also helped was that they faced little trouble in buying the rights to the British author’s original works. “The best thing was all the Sherlock Holmes stories were in the public domain so we didn’t have to spend a lot on acquiring rights. That was another advantage,” said the National Award winner, who directed the first four episodes of the show.
Written by Aniruddha Guha and Niharika Puri with dialogues by Vaibhav Vishal, “Shekhar Home” stars Kay Kay Menon as the titular sleuth. The six-part series, streaming on JioCinema, is co-directed by Rohan Sippy.
Sippy, known for films such as “Bluffmaster” and two seasons of “Criminal Justice” Indian version, said it was fun to join the show in the second part of its journey.
“Primarily, my role was to shoot the last two episodes… Credit to the actual creators which is the BBC, Voot, and Aniruddha and Srijit, they are the ones who did the initial work… In that sense, it was just fun to take this on and find that tone where it’s Indian but the inspiration is still obviously Arthur Conan Doyle to keep it connected to both the author and to make it very natural in the Indian setting,” he added. (PTI)
