In The Mysterious Island, Verne states it plainly. Captain Nemo is Prince Dakkar, son of the Raja of Bundelkhand, who lost his family and his kingdom in the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and turned the rest of his life into a war on the British Empire.
Then the films arrived.
Allen Holubar, 1916. Lionel Barrymore in 1929, playing him as Count Andre Dakkar, which keeps the name and promotes him to the European aristocracy. Leonard Penn in 1951. Thomas Mitchell in 1952. James Mason for Disney in 1954, which is the version most people carry in their heads. Herbert Lom, Prague-born, in 1961. Robert Ryan in 1969. Vladislav Dvorzhetsky for Soviet television in 1975. Michael Caine. Patrick Stewart.
Robert Newton and Gregory Peck were both considered for the 1961 role.
One reference work puts it as neutrally as it can be put: in most subsequent adaptations Nemo is depicted as a European, in deviation from Verne’s novels.
Omar Sharif played him in 1973. Faran Tahir played him on television in 2016. Those are the exceptions across a hundred years.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Name Is Odysseus’s, and It Is Also a Joke About a Deletion
Nemo is Latin for no one.
That is not a general observation about mystery. It is a specific allusion, and Verne’s readers would have caught it. Nemo is the Latin of Outis, the name Odysseus gives the Cyclops so that when Polyphemus cries out for help and says Nobody has hurt him, the other giants leave him to it.
Odysseus uses the name to escape a monster. Nemo has it because his identity was taken off him by his publisher.
And the character knows. In The Mysterious Island, addressed as Captain Nemo, he answers: I have no name.
Which is the best line in either book, and it is doing two jobs at once. Inside the story it is a man who has renounced the world refusing the last thing tying him to it. Outside the story it is an author’s note about what happened to his manuscript.
Who made him take it out, and what Verne wrote back, is told in full on my Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea page. The novel that gives him the second past, and the translation that cut his politics, is covered on my Mysterious Island page.
The Two Origins Do Not Fit Together
Nemo appears in two novels and gets two incompatible pasts.
In Twenty Thousand Leagues, 1870, he has none at all. Professor Aronnax spends the whole voyage aboard his submarine and comes away knowing neither his birthplace nor his quarrel. The warship destroyed at the close flies a flag Verne declines to identify.
In The Mysterious Island, 1875, he is Prince Dakkar, he is Indian, his enemy is Britain, and he is dying in a grotto on a Pacific island.
These are not two halves of one biography. The second account contradicts the first and contradicts Verne’s own letters, and it exists because his publisher wanted the character back and wanted a different enemy.
Even his age will not line up. In the first novel he is taken to be somewhere between thirty-five and fifty. In the second he is a white-bearded man in his late sixties, and the two books are supposed to be sixteen years apart.
So a reader taking them in order is reading one man with two lives, and there is no reconciliation available. Verne did not write one.
What the Novels Actually Give Him
Setting aside the origins, the characterization is consistent and more interesting than the adaptations suggest.
Nemo had a European education and says he spent his youth studying and traveling there. He built the Nautilus in pieces, ordered from suppliers all over the world and shipped to him, so that nobody would know what was being assembled.
He attacks British warships and slave ships.
His library is real and so is the organ. He reads scientific literature and plays Weber, Rossini and Mozart to himself underwater.
And he is not a monster, which the film versions mostly lose. He is wracked by remorse over the deaths of his own crew, and Verne gives him remorse over the deaths of enemy sailors too.
He tries to project stern control and does not manage it.
Alan Moore Corrected the Casting Problem and Created a New One
In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill made Nemo Indian, as Verne had.
They said why. The element had been overlooked by most adaptations, and they wanted Verne’s character, who in their words actually looked nothing like James Mason.
Which is right, and the fix has its own problem.
The journalist Shreya Ila Anasuya has pointed out that Moore’s Nemo is nebulously drawn as a Kali-worshipping man in a turban and is never self-consciously Sikh, which blurs two distinct identities into a generic one.
The objection lands harder once you go back to the text. Verne’s Dakkar is the son of a Hindu raja. Moore’s is neither clearly that nor clearly anything else.
So the century of European Nemos was replaced by an Indian Nemo assembled out of imprecise signifiers, and that is worth knowing rather than treating the comic as a straightforward correction.
Moore then passes the name on. In the Nemo trilogy the title goes to Prince Dakkar’s daughter, Janni Dakkar, which is the most interesting thing anybody has done with the character since Verne.
And One Thing Disney Invented That Everybody Remembers
In the 1954 film the Nautilus runs on a nuclear reactor.
Verne’s submarine does not. It runs on electricity, which was speculative enough in 1870, and not on anything atomic.
The nuclear Nautilus arrived nine years after Hiroshima, from a studio, and it is now the thing most people believe Verne predicted.
Where to Read Him
Start with Twenty Thousand Leagues in the Naval Institute Press restored edition, in William Butcher’s Oxford, or in David Coward’s Penguin, because the Victorian English versions cut the passages that give him most of his interior life.
Then The Mysterious Island if you want the second origin, and go in knowing it will not match.
He also makes a cameo in Verne’s own stage play Journey Through the Impossible, from 1882, which almost nobody has read.
Where to Go Next
The three stages of his deletion, including the one that happened in English, are laid out on my Twenty Thousand Leagues page. The full catalog, fifty-four novels and the few translators worth paying for, is on my Jules Verne books guide, the other novel where the engineering is the plot is covered on my From the Earth to the Moon page, and the rest of the tradition lives on the French classics hub.
