Amitabh Bachchan's first look as Khudabaksh from Thugs Of Hindostan was released yesterday, topping trend almost instantly. Also intriguing was how obviously his look as the 'biggest thug of all,' as co-star Aamir Khan put it, was modelled not on Amrish Puri as Mola Ram in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom - perhaps the best-known, if somewhat exaggerated, representation in film of the Thuggee cult - but along the lines of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen's version of Captain Nemo, played in the 2003 big screen adaptation by Naseeruddin Shah. Here's a look at Amitabh Bachchan as Khudabaksh:
The one & only master of Thugs is here! @SrBachchan as#Khudabaksh#ThugsOfHindostan| @aamir_khan | #KatrinaKaif | @fattysanashaikh | @TOHTheFilm | #VijayKrishnaAcharya pic.twitter.com/4bk2pccpC7
— Yash Raj Films (@yrf) September 18, 2018
Clearly, Big B's character is a seafaring man, like Nemo. Nemo, in the graphic novels and the film, is also a Thuggee - in the film, this is alluded to in a single scene where Alan Quatermain, played by Sean Connery, briefly glimpses Naseeruddin Shah as Nemo worshipping a Kali idol. Here's Naseeruddin Shah as Nemo:
Naseeruddin Shah in A League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (Images courtesy YouTube)
The film of The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen faithfully depicts Nemo as his portrayed in the graphic novels, with turban, beard, and an embellished and armoured costume. As Khudabaksh, Amitabh Bachchan's get-up takes Nemo's look further, approaching vaguely Shahenshah-ish territory.
Nemo, created by French author Jules Verne, is an eccentric scientific genius who navigates the seas in his super submarine Nautilus in 1870 sci-fi adventure 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and subsequent novels. In Alan Moore's graphic novel series The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Nemo, one of several fictional characters recruited into a crime-fighting team, is presented as a Thuggee - in the original Verne novels, he is simply an Indian of royal birth.
Thugs Of Hindostan, also starring Aamir Khan, Katrina Kaif and Fatima Sana Shaikh, is the first Bollywood film to tackle the Thuggee cult, a subject that has fascinated Hollywood for decades. Apart from the crazed Mola Ram - Temple Of Doom, which showed Indians eating monkey brains and eyeballs among other things, was banned in India for being racist - the Thuggees have been made the villains in films such as Gunga Din, starring Cary Grant, and The Deceivers, in which Pierce Brosnan goes undercover in brownface and which also starred Shashi Kapoor and Saeed Jaffrey. In most films made earlier, Thuggees were presented as wearing simple turban and dhoti outfits.
Thugs Of Hindostan is a fantasy adventure but based on a bestselling 1839 novel about the Thuggee cult. Directed by Dhoom: 3's Vijay Krishna Acharya, the film will release on November 8.
The first look of Fatima Sana Shaikh as Zafira was released today:
Similar introductions for Katrina and Aamir are expected to follow.
