One of the world’s greatest literary sleuths, Sherlock Holmes, is Indianised, or more precisely put, converted into a Bengali detective in Aniruddha Guha and Srijit Mukherji’s series, 'Shekhar Home'. Opening in 1991, Shekhar/Snehashish (Kay Kay Menon) is introduced as a professor at the Calcutta Medical College. A ‘deduction specialist’ and a forensic expert, he inherits all the narcissism of Sherlock. His brother, the ‘Mycroft Holmes’ figure, is Mrinmoy (Kaushik Sen), who works at the intelligence bureau. On his insistence, Shekhar starts inspecting a chain of deaths. Three scientists, who worked in separate departments at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Defence Research, are found dead. Realisation that the deaths have been staged and foul play covered up arrives swiftly.
However, soon the case alludes to signs of far more massive, dangerous machinations at play. The structuring of the show is curious in many aspects. It unfurls in a macro sense, replete with national defence-level threats and transnational terror, with the investigations which Shekhar takes on gradually swerving to smaller secrecies, ultimately culminating back on the top of the ladder. You could very well switch around the order of viewing, and it wouldn’t affect your comprehension because it is all so resolutely bland.
In an overarching plot, a mysterious ‘M’ operates from the shadows, orchestrating several complex moves all at once. No one knows who M is. What’s certain is M has been a formidable arms dealer, ‘selling death’ since 1974. He/she exists as a ‘ghost, a ‘myth’. All the wangling that stems from the hunt for a deadly chemical weapon supplies most of the plot chunk for the first two episodes. Few red herrings are flung in, most of which can be seen from a mile even if you are unfamiliar with the genre tendencies.
One of the most unsalvageable limitations of the series is its patently unconvincing world-building. Given it’s set in the early 1990s with the action mostly circling a bunch of places in West Bengal, you’d imagine it allows production designers to play around and impress with the style of recreation. However, things turn out to be the opposite. 'Shekhar Home' is bafflingly unanchored from a living, palpable setting and its accompanying textures. It’s a strange, airless production, frantically jammed with multiple hops from one place to the next yet shifts in the background barely register. The fictional town of Lonpur, where the action shifts from the third episode, is etched in the broadest strokes.
There’s a reference to a tertiary strand that takes place somewhere in Thailand, concerning the exploits of an infamous arms dealer and his/her battalion. The lesser we speak of that tangent, which unfolds like a foolish school play, the wiser it is. Cross-border power kegs being stoked have rarely felt this apolitical and lifeless. This, as do the extended flashback sequences, is depicted in the tawdriest black and white, though it’s not so far off from the aesthetic rung of the show’s blanched colour palette.
An entire, crucial confrontation scene set on top of the Howrah Bridge is visually jarring because the abundantly amateurish VFX work taped into the scene coupled with laughably patchy background action distract you from the two characters putting a jigsaw into place. Even before the narrative swoops down on the bridge, the series visually nods to it umpteen times as if to reassure us of the Calcutta-centric story. There are two episodes that almost act as a guided tour of the city. Nudged by a ‘roadmap’ of a poem, ‘Holmes’/ Shekhar and ‘Watson’/ Dr Jayvrat Saini (Ranvir Shorey) skit from one corner of the city to the other in a giddying trail of clues; we move through the usual suspects of the city landmarks.
Within a cursory half-hour span, everything from the Birla Planetarium to Coffee House is dutifully checked off. How the narrative incorporates these sites will make you roll your eyes in bored amusement. After a point, you’d be compelled to ask why on earth the show even bothered to situate itself in Bengal when it seems so utterly disinterested in acknowledging or interacting with the state’s rich literary tradition of detective and crime fiction. Didn’t the opportunity of intertextually engaging with Saradindu Bandyopadhyay’s 'Byomkesh Bakshy' cross the makers’ minds? Even if the show winks to the legacy, it sticks to the surface.
A crackling detective story warrants eager viewer/reader participation. We are teased to actively collaborate in the pursuit of joining the dots, even as we are acutely aware the sleuth will always invariably be ten steps ahead and inevitably pull the rug from under our feet. 'Shekhar Home' sorely lacks the thrust of this definitive excitement. Vital pieces of the puzzle are also divulged much later in the narrative, becoming a bit of a cheat in the game.
Thankfully, the spirited chemistry between Kay Kay Menon and Ranvir Shorey helps a lot of wooden, silly scenes stay afloat though Shorey hams unbearably at a critical moment. Clad in a batik kurta, Menon’s Shekhar is also saddled with an unnecessary excess of quirks as if to buttress, as he himself puts it, he is a ‘high-functioning sociopath’, a ‘satyanweshi’ (truth-seeker). These are, of course, common parlance tied to the legacies of Sherlock Holmes and Byomkesh Bakshy, respectively. Shekhar slips regularly into socially inappropriate opinions, rarely reining in his impulse, though he’s infinitely more sociable than Holmes. The point of convergence between the original character and the refashioned one is the super-sized vanity that governs both. Shekhar fusses before leaping into a new case. What he pines to hear first is people admitting how badly they need his help.
Directed by Mukherji and Rohan Sippy, 'Shekhar Home' is stubbornly turgid despite a whole deal of action and sleuthing. Two episodes especially veer into an elaborate tangle of covert identities and their dramatic revelations, amping up the stakes. There’s double-crossing and triple-crossing packed aplenty as a key associate and partner unmasks his real identity. It’s a tad too much, keeling into a bundle of contrivances with characters busier asserting their smarts over one another than possessing the slightest dimension of genuine motivation. In a show that’s all about unearthing the bent of motivation behind crime and delivering the truth, the fact that the impetus driving the characters is dispensed with such hasty tackiness rankles the most.
The show’s writing duties are divided among Aniruddha Guha, Niharika Puri and Vaibhav Vishal. The screenplay tracks a gamut of mysteries, ranging from extortion to a string of alleged superstitious killings. Later episodes pivot from one case to the next, while always dovetailing at the last-minute back to the bigger design. What goes missing is a cohesive force, a storytelling vigour that binds together the minor strands and eventually gathers them within the ambit of the larger outline. Even none of the many cases folded within have urgency or intrigue. Painful drabness percolates long stretch of every episode.
To reiterate an earlier point about the show being removed from a tangible sense of place, the final two cases particularly grate on account of thinly rendered settings of villages torn by corruption, retribution and fallacy. Even a tantric pops up as do elements of horror. A villa in the last episode looks so pristine, set-like and terribly artificial you’ll ponder if the actors have stepped into it for the first time. The dialogues, which should have been testy, are peculiarly de-fanged. As a result, it becomes a task to invest in any of the complicated, murky family history that unravels over the course of the episode. Never does tension well up in a single episode. This lingering divorce of the characters from the spaces they inhabit shadows the entire show.
Then there’s the question of how 'Shekhar Home' treats its women. It can’t get past viewing female characters as an object of suspicion, subsequently softening the punch. Take, for example, the character Rasika Dugal plays. Essentially the ‘Irene Adler’ figure in the original Holmes stories, her Iravati initially wields a challenge Shekhar quickly sees through her schemes. Albeit Dugal does her bit in summoning the original character’s remarkable astuteness, Iravati ultimately fades to the margins, becoming instead a conduit for Shekhar to solve crimes and prove his genius as well as suggest his romantic interest. Kirti Kulhari shows up late on the scene to flex action chops and disappears into an afterthought.
'Shekhar Home' runs into six episodes. It’s slight by conventional standards of over-bloated shows yet to get through it is a real slog that tests both your patience and endurance for low-intelligence, tepid storytelling.
