Interestingly, Gosainpur Sargaram was not to be the second Feluda film on air had it all gone to plan. Ray was keen to slot one of the smaller films, like Sheyal Debota Rahasya, before he moved on to Gosainpur. But destiny had other plans. ‘We were doing the last bit of editing for Gosainpur and I literally had Rabi-da’s face in front of me on the screen when someone came and informed us that he had passed away. All of a sudden, all hell had broken loose. We stopped working in an instant and rushed to Rabi-da’s house.’
With Rabi Ghosh no more, Ray telecast Gosainpur Sargaram – a very personal tribute to the versatile Rabi Ghosh. Gosainpur was a long film and could easily be broken into five parts, allowing Ray over a month to recast Lalmohan-babu. With Feluda 30 on air, he could no longer abandon the project and walk away. He needed a Lalmohan-babu, and quickly. That’s where Anup Kumar came in, and the Feluda 30 series continued its successful run on the small screen.
By the time Feluda 30 wound up six months later, telefilms had emerged as the new trend. There was now funding available for telefilms, and it was no surprise that Ray was approached by ETV to make a Feluda film for television. He picked Dr Munshir Diary for the project. ‘I had reconciled myself to the fact that Feluda had no takers for the big screen. Rather than cribbing and feeling frustrated about the situation, I was better off doing Feluda for television. Something was better than nothing.’
It was the success of Dr Munshir Diary that finally changed things for Sandip Ray’s Feluda ventures. The old sleuth had takers at the turn of the millennium too. Ramoji Rao, the head of ETV, was looking for a foray into the Bengali film industry and was advised by some of his close associates that Feluda might not be a bad option to start with.
‘It is interesting to think that Feluda returned to the big screen at the behest of someone who hardly knew who Prodosh Mitter was. Ramoji Rao had not read any of the Feluda mysteries. Nor had he seen Sonar Kella or Joi Baba Felunath. In the absence of anyone from Bengal coming forward, it was Rao who gave a new fillip to Feluda by agreeing to fund Bombaiyer Bombete. However, things weren’t very smooth with him either. When he first saw the film, he was crestfallen. He said as much to me on the phone and had even grieved to his associates that all his money had been wasted on this effort. He was convinced Bombete would not run. It was only when the film had run to packed houses for 100 consecutive days that I decided to call him. A delighted Ramoji Rao said to me that his respect for the discerning Bengali film audience had gone up multiple times having seen the way Bombete was received.’
The commercial success of Bombaiyer Bombete created a new buzz around Feluda. But producers are a hard lot to convince. The Bansals, who had produced Joi Baba Felunath in 1979, approached Sandip Ray to do something for them with the precondition that it would have to be something other than Feluda. Sandip agreed. ‘We had a long history with them and there was no reason for me to say no. I went ahead on the assumption that if I could make a success of the first film I could very well make Feluda as the second film as part this new association.’ The first film, Nishijapon, was a reasonable success, and Sandip soon mooted the idea of Tintorettor Jishu to the Bansals. Inspired by the success of the first project, they agreed.
But trouble was round the corner. More than halfway into the project, the producers backed off. There was no option but to stop the shoot and take stock. The film needed a producer on board if it was to have any chance of completion, and the new person would first have to deal with the Bansals to clear rights issues and other formalities. ‘It was extremely embarrassing, to say the least. Here I was planning to wrap up Tintorettor Jishu and planning its release, and all of a sudden, I was told my producer had backed off. It was not the best situation to be in. Multiple media reports added to the negativity and I needed a way out of the mess as soon as possible.’
Such was the uncertainty surrounding Tintorettor Jishu that when Mou Roychowdhury and Sumita Sarkar came forward to produce Kailashe Kelenkari, Sandip Ray had no option but to shelve the half-done movie and work on the fresh project. ‘No one knew what would happen to Tintorettor Jishu. I was keen to make Feluda and the best option was to change track and make Kailashe Kelenkari. It was the success of Kailashe Kelenkari that prompted Mou to come back and negotiate with the Bansals and resurrect Tintorettor Jishu,’ recalls Ray.
In fact, it was while returning from Aurangabad, where Kailash was filmed, that Ray was first asked if he would like to go ahead and finish Tintoretto. ‘Of course I wanted to. The project had progressed to plan and I would be foolish not to want to finish it. Also, the timing was important. Kailash was complete and would be released in a few months. If I wasn’t able to get started with Tintorettor Jishu soon enough, the project would look dated and the entire effort would be wasted.’
Mou Roychowdhury and her associates approached the Bansals and managed to buy out the rights, prompting a swift restart to the project. ‘That’s how the project was revived and thereafter there was no problem in finishing the film,’ Ray says.
Since then, in a dramatic 180-degree turnaround, everyone wanted a piece of Feluda. Unlike in the 1990s, when Ray had to go from door to door to request funding for a Feluda adventure, producers were lining up at his Bishop Lefroy Road residence, asking him to make the next Feluda. ‘Now almost everyone wants a Feluda film. Some of them are keen to sign me up for three films, provided one of them is a Feluda adventure. It is the exact opposite of what the ground reality was in the 1990s. So much so that I am often left wondering where all these people were when I was desperately looking to get some backing to bring Feluda back on the big screen,’ Ray says, the agitation evident still. ‘It goes to demonstrate the fickle nature of our industry.’
More Trouble for Feluda
The financial strife is only one part of the story. The shooting of every Feluda adventure has had its own trail of chaos. Not a single Feluda film thus far has gone according to plan. The trouble brewing in these backstage stories are on occasion no less thrilling than the adventures themselves.
It all started with the very first Feluda film, the now legendary Sonar Kella. A very young Sandip Ray, who had accompanied his father to Rajasthan at the time, remembers that the shoot was methodically planned. In an age when there was no mobile phone or computer, human efficiency served as a more-than-able replacement for these gadgets. The directorial crew had a whole railway bogey to themselves, and as soon as they disembarked in Jodhpur, there was a fleet of cars waiting to take them to the circuit house. ‘Rooms had been allocated and every little detail had been planned and implemented meticulously by our production controller, Anil Chaudhuri,’ Ray recalls. In Rajasthan in general, and Jaisalmer in particular, the unit made a number of interesting acquaintances in the course of the shoot. One such was a police officer who was posted there at the time. Fortuitously perhaps, the officer used a Colt .32, the revolver Feluda uses in the climax of the film. Satyajit Ray had spoken to the officer and he was more than delighted to provide his revolver to Soumitra Chatterjee to use in the film’s climax. But when the crew finally reached Jaisalmer to film the climax, they were told that the officer had been transferred and with him had ‘vanished’ the much-needed Colt .32! Anil Chaudhuri, not one to give up, made a number of phone calls to his contacts in Jodhpur. He then travelled to Jodhpur overnight to get Ray his much-needed prop for the climax.
Soumitra Chatterjee speaks at some length in his recollections in this book about how the entire climax for Sonar Kella was shot inside four hours on the last day of the shoot. The crew had booked the railway bogey for a particular number of days and had to board the return train the following day from Jodhpur, making it imperative for Satyajit Ray to wrap up the Jaisalmer shoot within a specified time frame. A delay meant missing the train from Jaisalmer to Jodhpur that evening, and in turn missing the train from Jodhpur to Delhi. Satyajit Ray heard what his production controller had to say and, to quote Sandip Ray, ‘set to work’.
With everything sketched out in his head,
Satyajit Ray managed to pull it off, braving the mist and fog. However, the master had missed one thing: he had not filmed Mukul crying. When the realization dawned on the child protagonist that he was finally alone, he just burst into tears, a sequence that adds tremendous potency to the film. ‘For this shot, we had to recreate the set in Kolkata, but other than that, Baba had finished everything in the little time we had left. It appears surreal to think that it had indeed been done,’ Sandip Ray says.
Joi Baba Felunath, released five years after Sonar Kella, also had its share of commotion. The hype around the film was such that, on one particular day, Satyajit Ray had to cancel the shoot because of the huge crowd that had gathered in the Bengali mohalla in Varanasi. People were peeping out of every possible vantage point, windows and verandas even, to see the shoot. Unable to control the crowd, Satyajit Ray was forced to abandon the shoot and return to his hotel. Sensing that he was miffed and could even cancel the shoot as a consequence of what had happened, a group of representatives from the local Bengali community met him in the hotel that evening and promised all cooperation, including crowd management. They requested that he go ahead with the shoot the next morning.
As Sandip Ray says, ‘None of us were convinced the promises would be honoured. How could a group of people control or manage a crowd of thousands? More significantly, how could you stop people from peeping out of their windows? The situation was such that Baba was contemplating relocating the shoot to a different location. However, when we went to the location the following morning, we were amazed to see things all calm and quiet. Not a single face was peeping out of a window and no one was standing on any balcony. It was as if there was a curfew in the area. Baba was absolutely delighted with the outcome and went ahead with the shoot without any further hassle after profusely thanking the locals for their help.’
Father to Son: The Chaos Continues
That tradition of chaos remains unbroken, the stories just as good. ‘In shooting Bombaiyer Bombete, the situation was completely mad,’ Sandip ruminates with a smile. Once again, it was the climax that caused the most trouble. Araku in Andhra Pradesh, a stronghold of producer Ramoji Rao, was identified as the site for the final shoot. It was easier to organize a difficult shoot at a place where the producer had contacts and could get things to move if the crew got stuck. Accordingly, Sandip and his 100-plus crew landed in Araku to shoot the train sequence where Victor Perumal, under instructions from Feluda, jumps into the train from his horse to help Feluda expose producer Gopinath Gorey. Sandip Ray was thrilled to see that the train had been arranged and was all set for the shoot to begin. On the morning of the shoot, Ray was told that while they had arranged for the train, they did not have permission that allowed it to move. Unless the train moved, the sequence could not be filmed. Stunned and perplexed, Ray was eventually forced to cancel the shoot and return to Kolkata, incurring significant losses as a result.
After this, it was an ordeal to convince the producer to continue to back the film, and it was a whole month before Ray got a call that he could go ahead with the project. Yet again, all plans were made, and the huge crew once again travelled to Araku to finish off the shoot. This time round, they had a new adversary to contend with: the weather. ‘It just rained and rained all night. None of us slept and were constantly looking at the skies and wondering what would happen if the rain did not stop. If the ground was muddy and slushy, it would be impossible to film the crucial final sequence. Finally at day break the rain stopped, and as luck would have it, the sun came out in all its glory, drying out the slushy area in a matter of hours. It seemed the elements were testing us.’ This time round, the train moved and Ray managed to wrap up Bombaiyer Bombete, which ran for more than a hundred days in cinema theatres across Bengal. It is considered to be one of the most successful Bengali films of recent times.
If the train was at the heart of all the trouble in Bombete, it was the airport in Tintorettor Jishu. In passing through the X-ray scanner at the airport on the way back from Hong Kong, close to three-fourths of the films reels, which included the entire Hong Kong shoot, was damaged. Sagnik Chatterjee, currently engaged in making a ninety-minute documentary film on Feluda, the release of which is round the corner, remembers the nightmare well. ‘We worked 24/7 for three-and-a-half months to digitally restore the full Hong Kong shoot. Most of the reels had base fog and it was a Herculean task to start with. It was painstaking and nerve-wracking at the same time. The entire unit was committed to doing our best and finally we managed to get it all back and finish the film.’
Ray, while showing me the Tintoretto portrait which he had commissioned for the film and which now has a pride of place in his house, says much the same. ‘It took us all a little time to come to terms with what had happened. Only after we had figured out the problem could we think of a solution. It was extremely difficult, to say the least. More so because we were anticipating a possible problem if the reels were X-rayed more than once and had even requested the security personnel to make an exception. They weren’t willing to listen and as a result we had a serious crisis on our hands…’ He tails off with his customary smile.
There is no dearth of troublesome climaxes in Feluda movies. The final scenes of Kailashe Kelenkari, many will remember, was shot inside Cave 16 at Ellora near Aurangabad. Having planned the whole shoot meticulously, Ray and his team reached Ellora only to be told that Parambrata Chatterjee, playing Topshe, had suddenly contracted measles. Sandip had two options before him: find a new Topshe in forty-eight hours or cancel the shoot. He returned to Kolkata, having cancelled the shoot. ‘It is while doing Kailashe Kelenkari that I realized the importance of a mobile phone. Had it not been for mobile technology, we would have lost huge monies with Param falling sick. A lot of the equipment was coming to Aurangabad from other cities and we would have ended up paying for it all, had we not cancelled things on time.’ Ray laughs and admits that he now uses his wife’s mobile on occasion.
That wasn’t the end of his woes, though. With Chatterjee back on his feet, Ray went back to his meticulous planning, getting the permissions in place, so they could shoot in a few months. ‘Once we reached Kailash, we were all stunned to see that the whole of Cave 16 was under scaffolding. Restoration work was on and despite having all the necessary permissions to shoot, there was little that we could do.’
Not one to give up, Ray began asking around if there was a senior Bengali public servant in the Aurangabad area, someone to whom Feluda would mean something. His search wasn’t unsuccessful. Meanwhile, Chakrabarty and Chatterjee had both set off from Aurangabad for Ellora to get started with the shoot. ‘We anticipated them midway and asked them to return to Aurangabad to meet this gentleman,’ Sandip remembers. The civil servant turned out to be a Sabyasachi fan, and his son a Parambrata fan. Having heard the problem, he told Ray that he’d open the scaffolding part by part, and that the shoot should be planned accordingly. The whole shoot had to be fundamentally reworked, and it was only at the very end that they managed to get the whole cave unhindered and without scaffolding.
Royal Bengal Rahasya brought with it a different set of challenges. Ray shot the movie in three different jungles to recreate the real feel of the story. The scene that proved to be the most difficult was the one with the snake. Ray was absolutely certain that the snake must not be hurt or harmed, and even changed the original storyline to that end. In the film, all he wanted Feluda to do was to carry the cobra – which was coiled up, guarding the Narayani roupyamudra (Narayani silver coins) – out of the temple. Chakrabarty, a wildlife fanatic himself, was happy to do the shot. In Ray’s words, ‘It could have been one of the high points of the film. Benu brought the cobra out with a smile, and all I wanted him to do was release it, so that I could film it wandering off into the jungle. However, it soon turned out that each time Benu tried to release the cobra, it would just stay put on the same spot for a few minutes before starting to move. That’s what snakes generally do is what we were told. The sequence
needed the snake to wander away into the jungle for it to have the necessary impact. When we realized that it wasn’t going to happen, we did the whole thing digitally.’ That Royal Bengal Rahasya turned out to be one of the best Feluda films is a tribute to this sort of perseverance and attention to detail.
But the Badshahi Angti shoot was to outdo all the others. It all started rather tamely. The bureaucrat who had helped in facilitating the Lucknow shoot requested Ray to allow him to be a part of the project on one of the days. Ray invited him over on the day he was filming at a Café Coffee Day. Within minutes after his arrival, it was apparent that the bureaucrat wasn’t happy just watching the shoot. He wanted to be in it. This too wasn’t a problem. Ray asked him to sit in the table behind Feluda and Topshe. His only condition was that no one in the frame should look into the camera; they should chat casually in the background. Soon after the shot, the civil servant asked Ray if he could see how it all looked. He was shown the shot in the digital monitor. The man flew into a rage, and asked Ray to retake the shot. ‘He started screaming, saying how I could keep him out of focus! It was almost as if he was questioning my ability as director. Not satisfied, he literally ordered me to do a retake with the focus firmly on him. I said to myself that if I had to keep this gentleman in focus, Feluda and Topshe would go out of the frame. Every member of the unit was livid and many came up to me to suggest I should just ask him to leave the sets. Abir was so angry that he could even have hit the fellow for shouting at me. However, having been in the profession for more than three decades now, I have learnt to keep my cool. I knew we still had two weeks of shooting left in Lucknow, and any confrontation could be counterproductive for us in the long run. If the person turned vindictive, he could make life difficult for us in the next few days. It wasn’t West Bengal where everyone knows us well and would do things to help us. I hardly knew people in Lucknow, and there was always a risk of running into unexpected roadblocks.’
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