Feluda @ 50
Curated and
edited by  Boria Majumdar
HarperCollins
Pp 176
R299

IN DECEMBER 1965, popular Bengali magazine Sandesh printed the first installment of Satyajit Ray’s detective stories featuring 27-year-old amateur detective Prodosh C Mitter, or Felu/Feluda, and his 13-year-old sidekick and cousin Topshe. Ray would go on to write and illustrate 35 Feluda novels and film two—Sonarkella and Joy Baba Felunath—which are still watched with great relish. As Boria Majumdar tells us, “every Bengali, young and old, is a Feluda fan”. Even after 50 years, the Felu catalogue is still a bestseller and this collection of essays tries to answer why.

In one of the essays, Decoding Feluda, Majumdar writes that Feluda is “tall and handsome, well read and well behaved, and is a man of the world—bhadro (cultured) in every sense.” In Satyajit Ray, The Inner Eye, biographer Andrew Robinson had spelled out some of the reasons why Feluda is a draw. “The good life doesn’t interest Feluda,” wrote Robinson, “nor does he drink alcohol or seek out the company of women—he is unmarried….He is a reserved, thoughtful man with inexhaustible curiosity and encyclopedic knowledge which he puts to use fighting criminals for the sake of adventure with a worthwhile goal: not money.”

In his essay, Felu Mitter: Between Bhadrolok and Chhotolok, Indrajit Hazra tells us that Ray imagined Felu as a “repository of cosmopolitan sharpness who was healthily sceptical of Bengali middle-class behaviour and thinking, while at the same time being in the thick of that middle-classness.” But then being aware of his young adult readership, Hazra says, it allowed him the “luxury of maintaining a clinical, even an antiseptic, distance from contemporary happenings”. The Sixties and Seventies weren’t the most peaceful of times in Calcutta, with the city having to face up to militant trade unionism and the Naxalite movement.

Ray, as is well documented, was a Sherlock Holmes fan, and Feluda and Topshe are descendants of Holmes and Watson. But, as Majumdar points out, Bengalis love Feluda “because he is one of us….Whether or not he is the best detective is immaterial because to most Bengalis he is much more than a sleuth”.

Going backstage with Ray’s son, director Sandip Ray, who continues to make Feluda films, we get a glimpse into his ‘special association’ with the character—Feluda was created by Ray when Sandip was a toddler. “I would eagerly wait for the Feluda illustrations, read the stories the moment they were published,… and when I turned filmmaker my first thought was to start with a Feluda film,” Sandip tells Majumdar. As it turned out, he didn’t begin his career with a Feluda film, but then realised it was his responsibility to keep Feluda alive and filmed Baksha Rahasya in 1996. Since then, he has made many Felu films despite great challenges, keeping his father’s favourite detective well entrenched in public memory.

Majumdar talks to Soumitra Chatterjee, who played Feluda in Sonarkella and Joy Baba Felunath. He also talks to the two actors who have played Felu in Sandip’s films, Sabyasachi Chakraborty and Abir Chatterjee. Soumitra tells Majumdar that while Feluda is an out-and-out entertainer, Byomkesh Bakshi (Saradhindu Mukhopadhyay’s detective hero) is not. “Felu’s constituency is universal, while Byomkesh’s is not,” he says.

For Feluda fans, this book is another reason to go back to the world of their favourite detective and to read about Lalmohan Babu, or Jatayu, surely, the most loved character in the Felu universe—the man from Garpar in north Calcutta, a writer of crime stories himself, brings the Felu world alive with his wit and resourcefulness. Played with aplomb by Santosh Dutta in Ray’s films, it’s well-known that the filmmaker refused to make another Felu film after Dutta’s death to revisit the world of his villains like Maganlal Meghraj, Dr Hazra and Mandar Bose.

Sudipta Datta is a freelancer