Dear SHians,

Prof. Roy has covered all bases, at least as far as my knowledge of an Indian
connection in the Adventures goes. I can't think of anything else to add.

On a tangent, however, it has been suggested by Erich von Daniken in his book
Footprints of the Gods (or was it Gold of the Gods?!) that the "promised land"
might have been, in fact, the Kashmir valley and that Jesus spent quite some
time there as a young man gaining knowledge and meditating.


Sridhar

pinaki roy <monkaroy@...> wrote:
Dear Sherlockians,
One of our more proactive members – Sumal – has put forward a very
interesting point: that Arthur Conan Doyle was given the idea of creating Doctor
John Hamish Watson by his Lucknow-based friend Dr. Mohammed Ebrahim Sufi, and
though I am trying to offer my views on this, I do not feel doing so because
inspite of my fervent requests, I am still being prefixed with a ‘Dr.’. I am
requesting you once again, this time with folded hands, not to use such
embarrassing prefixes!

The hypothesis that Doyle created the
physician-narrator for his sleuth after being suggested for it by his Indian
friend was floated in May 2006 by one of The Hindustan Times’ reporters, Joyjeet
Ghosh. The 22 May 2006 Monday-edition of the newspaper, published form New
Delhi, has created ripples among the Sherlockians all over the world, and Alexis
Barquin of ‘The Sherlock Holmes Society of France’ has already written a long
essay on it. The title of the news item was “Holmes Found Watson, thanks to a
Lakhnavi”, and in it Ghosh suggested that the Lucknow-based physician had read
the primary manuscripts of the early Sherlock Holmes narratives and sent them
back, ‘recommending’ the creation of Watson’s figure. In Ghosh’s words, Watson’s
Afghan-adventures are probably because of the eastern influence of Dr. M.E.
Sufi, and that is why Doyle has repeatedly referred to Lucknow in “The Sign of
Four.”

I beg to register my difference with this
hypothesis. The article seems not to have been researched well enough, and I am
having a suspicion that it follows the latest trend of adding an Indian context
of every major historical happening of the past, including Jesus’ journeys!
M.E.Sufi certainly does not appear in (the ninth chapter (pp. 67-80) of the
first volume of) the second edition of “The Annotated Sherlock Holmes” (New
York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967) where William S. Baring-Gould exhaustively deals
with Watson’s ‘creation’. The Lucknavi remains a shadowy figure, and his
relationship with Doyle has been more unobtrusively depicted, if at all, than
the author’s with George Edalji, Oscar Slater, and Harry Houdini. Here I beg to
cite passages from Allen Eyles’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Centenary Celebration”
(London: John Murray, 1986). Eyles has included in the 12th page of his
scholarly critical work a photocopy of one of Doyle’s diaries’ pages
where, on 8 March 1886, he noted the names – ‘Ormond Sacker’ and ‘Sherrinford
Holmes’ – which would later achieve permanence respectively as John Hamish
Watson and Sherlock Holmes. In his autobiography, “Memories and Adventures”
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924), Doyle has also explained his interest in
creating Watson: “Holmes could not tell his own exploits, so he must have a
commonplace comrade as foil – an educated man of action who could join in the
exploits and narrate them. A drab, quiet name for this unostentatious man.
Watson would do. And so I had my puppets and write my ‘Study in Scarlet’” (Eyles
11). Eyles has referred to the existence of one Doctor James Watson (who had
practised in Manchuria before retiring to Southsea) as a member of the
Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society, and has hinted that Doyle might have
been inspired to use him as the model (Eyles 11). I personally feel that Doyle
himself remains present in the Sherlock Holmes narratives as
the unintelligent narrator – identifying his own profession with Watson’s, and
his imperial interests might have led him to take Watson to Afghanistan in the
very first Holmes story. Patrick Brantlinger, in “Rule of Darkness: British
Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)
has also pointed out that in Doyle’s imperially-compatible literature, it was
necessary that either Holmes or Watson be a military figure because the armymen
were required to control and exterminate the subaltern resistors whose
resistance became the focus of most of the English writings of the later half of
the nineteenth century. Kanpur and Lucknow appear in Doyle’s novels repeatedly
identifiably because they were important British bases in colonised India, and
in context of all these, we can say that no evidence whatsoever has been found
to assert that Doyle had got the idea for creating Watson from M.E.Sufi.

I would request the other Sherlockians to post their individual views on this
issue.

Thanking you,

Yours sincerely,

(Pinaki Roy)


---------------------------------
Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates
starting at 1¢/min.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]




---------------------------------
Get your email and more, right on the new Yahoo.com

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]