Chandrabhan Prasad, a Dalit writer, spoke at length on the plight of the Dalits at the launch of Sagarika Ghose's The Gin Drinkers (HarperCollins) and the way they were treated by the privileged classes, and those among their own castes who had succeeded in life. His challenging question to the gathering as to whether any of them ever had a meal in a Dalit household might be politically correct but a trifle ill-placed as caste in that context would be interpreted differently, equated with power and money perhaps. The Dalit perspective which finds a strong voice in regional literature, especially Marathi, is still to gain a foothold in Indian English writing. In that sense, The Gin Drinkers is a trendsetter as it considers the Dalit as the true inheritor of the knowledge that the brown sahibs, the gin drinkers of the novel, have acquired. To quote from a recent article in a newspaper, "A Dalit hero in the India of a new millennium is what may, after all, be known as the true representative of the`mainstream'." What is needed in the given circumstances is a body of good translation of the work of Dalit writers like Daya Pawar, Namdeo Dhasal and others in Maharashtra.

Talking of translation brings one to Satyajit Ray's The Complete Adventures of Feluda (Penguin) in two volumes, translated into English by Gopal Majumdar and Chitrita Banerji. To those who are not familiar with Sandesh, the children's magazine, that was started by Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray's father, revived by him and now is being brought out by his son Sandip Ray, it may be mentioned that it is the most readable children's magazine. In her foreword to the book, Bijoya Ray recalls how Ray wanted to experiment with detective stories and was conscious that he would have to avoid sex and violence, "the backbone of crime thrillers", since Sandesh was a magazine meant for children and adolescents. As the stories came out in Sandesh and sometimes in special Puja issues of well-known Bengali magazines, they became an instant success and where published in book form.

Bijoya Ray says, "After finishing each story, he would throw up his hands and say, `I have run out of plots. How can one possibly go on writing detective stories without even a bit of sex and hardly any violence to speak of?'... at the same time, I knew he would never give up...This is exactly what he did. He never stopped and went on writing till the end of his days."

In her Introduction, Gopa Majumdar, one of the translators, attempts to put Ray's detective stories in their context and give an idea of their popularity among young Bengali language readers. Why did Feluda attain instant fame? In Majumdar's words, "In spite of all his accomplishments, Feluda did not emerge as a larger-than-life superman whom one would venerate and admire from afar, but never got close to. On the contrary, Topshe's charming narration described him as so utterly normal and human that it was not difficult at all to see him almost as a member of one's own family." So every child who read these stories related to Topshe, and through him, to Feluda.

This reviewer found the stories as readable in English as in their source language. The credit goes to the translators. One of them Gopa Majumdar, who has translated many of Ray's stories, his memoirs and works by other Bengali writers, considers it a `deeply fulfilling experience'. The same can be said of the experience of someone who has read the stories in Bangla and now reads them in English. The English language reader knows of Satyajit Ray primarily as a film maker. While it is impossible to give a complete idea of Ray's multifaceted talents, these stories in translation convey to the reader what a great writer he was.