Homes and Watson Battle Rajput Warriors

If you've been reading this blog, then you know the story, Steampunk Holmes, is an adaptation of Sr. Author Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans", a story about the theft of submarine plans.

When I started thinking about what the submarine might look like the first thing that came to mind was the Nautilus from the 1954 Disney movie "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea", which was an adaption of a 1870 book by Jules Verne of the same title. This book is considered one of the classics in steampunk culture.

So, if we are going to have the Nautilus, then we have to have Captain Nemo in the story as the villain, right?

With this in mind we started outlining the adaptation. At the time we were figuring out the adaptation plot-line I got caught up watching this show from Spike TV (via Netflix streaming video) called, "Deadliest Warrior." The show pits historical combatants that never met in real-life against each other and asks, "Who would win?" They had shows with mock battles between Apache Indians and Roman Gladiators or a Spartan vs. Ninja. It's pretty entertaining although the way they figure out the winner (via a computer simulation) is a bit of stretch.

Rajput Armor - 18th Century

Anyway, I watched one episode where they pitted a Roman Centurion against a Rajput Warrior. What is a Rajput Warrior? They are kind of like the Samurai of India.

The Rajput weapons are very cool and their style of martial arts is very different from the Asian styles we have seen in movies and on TV. Captain Nemo, our villian, is also from India.

Well, it took me about 10 seconds to decide we needed Captain Nemo's henchmen to be Rajput warriors, and we absolutely, positively needed them to battle it out with Holmes and Watson at some point.

So now there are two scenes where the Rajput battle it out with the English. The image at top left (click to enlarge) is a scene painted by Daniel Cortes depicting a battle between some Rajput warriors and Holmes and Watson. I won't tell you how it goes but lets just say its a good thing that Mycroft is on the scene.

I love the Rajput weapons as shown on the "Deadliest Warrior". The armor, double edged long sword (Khanda), killer frisbees (Chakram), punching blades (Katar) and whip-sword (Aara) are simply too cool.

Of course, Daniel couldn't just use them straight away, he had to enhance them; so the Katar, for example, can shoot out trailing a wicked steal ribbon as shown in the image above. Daniel also steampunkified the Rajput armor. The above image shows real Rajput armor from 18th Century. The image at the top shows Daniel's steampunk Rajput armor.

When you can take a cultural artifact and recast it with googles and brass work, that's steampunk at its finest.