It's fairly obvious from her painting that her recognizing him on sight is the most likely. He was clean-shaven in the painting, and would have had a beard in any literature from the era if he had been a practicing Sikh.
Wanted someone from a "warrior culture" is my guess.
I mean, I suppose the other possibility is that McGivers was just a really bad historian.
Nerys Myk just beat me to it, but I'd guess it's because of what Marla mentioned, the Sikhs' reputation as warriors.
Except that wouldn't explain why, of all the different South Asian subcultures and religions, she would've landed on Sikhishm, when nothing about Khan's appearance suggested it.
A little old lady from Leningrad invented Kahn.
My apologies, I was making Chekov joke about who invented Kahn.
It would help if you'd spell Khan's name right first...
Yeah, that's what I for not paying attention.
The Noonian-Singh Institute For Cultural Advancement.
Her doing so is precisely what suggests she wasn’t good at her job.
Makes me wonder what name they would have chosen if they had decided to make the character Mexican/Spanish/Latin after getting Montalban. In hindsight it needs to be something that sounds good in a movie title. "The Wrath of Erickson" doesn't have the same ring to it. In that sense they really lucked out picking Khan.
Brown people were one size fits all back then.
Maybe Khan's ego had him ditch the turban and beard?
The problem is Marla thinking he's a Sikh not him being a Sikh.
I mean, at that point he's no more Sikh than I am Catholic. Sikh is a religion, and if you ditch the things the religion says you must do, you're ditching the religion.
Well, kind of, but Sikhs, like Jews or Amish, are considered an ethnic community as well as a religious one. You can be a member of the community, have it as your heritage, while choosing not to practice the faith.
Similar threads
