Ray silently digested the insult and redid the shot, keeping the angry sarkari babu in focus. Yet again, after the shot was done, the man wanted to see the final take. Clearly he had little faith in the director’s ability. This time round, the babu was satisfied and finally left, delaying the crew by over two hours. It was money and time wasted, and more importantly, the momentum had been broken. ‘I am sure the gentleman must have seen the film and must be thinking we have let him down. To be honest there was little we could do. Had he behaved with a bit of dignity and poise, I would surely have kept him in the shot. But to ask to be the centre of attraction … That would mean a serious disservice to the film itself,’ says Ray.
Civil servants are hardly the only ones that wield their petty power with ill grace. In Lucknow, Ray and his team had a run-in with a certain ‘law enforcement’ machinery as well. They had all the requisite permissions to shoot inside the Bhulbhulaiya in the Bara Imambara. One of Lucknow’s central tourist attractions, the Bhulbhulaiya is a central presence in Badshahi Angti, because Feluda uses it as a safe place to protect the ring from miscreants.
Ray’s unit was in Lucknow just three months before the 2014 parliamentary elections and there was political tension brewing in and around the Imambara at the time. Some political groups, in an attempt to polarize the local electorate, declared that shooting inside the Bhulbhulaiya would be ‘haram’. By doing so, Ray would be violating the sanctity of the place. This was a strange declaration given that every tourist visiting the site takes photographs and videos of the place. Ray, failing to reason things out with this bigoted moral police, sought help from the local authorities who had been instrumental in facilitating permissions for the shoot. Alarmingly, they said, ‘We will do everything we can to help with the shoot outside the Imambara. Inside, however, it is a different world.’
Ray was annoyed. ‘We decided to take one final chance by trying to shoot early in the morning. The Imambara opens at 6 a.m. and the entire unit was there by 5.45, waiting for the gates to open. The plan was to go in and finish things off as quickly as possible. Our local guide and line producers were all there, and all of the unit members were keen to get going with the plan. However, seeing us assemble outside, the staff looked unhappy. We could sense a brewing unease among a section of them. None of them said anything to us directly, but some of them were seen making calls to friends, trying to apprise them of what was going on. Soon our guide came up to me and said trying to shoot inside would be a serious risk, for the men who had warned us the day before wouldn’t hesitate to cause us bodily harm. There was a risk that the equipment could be targeted. Local youth from around the area had been summoned and it wasn’t working out well. We were there to shoot Feluda and not a political documentary. It wasn’t worth the effort, and I was unwilling to put the entire unit at risk. There is no question I was disappointed. Everyone was. We decided to cancel the shoot and I asked Shirsha to come back at a later time and take a few shots of the place. With what is available on the web, and with what Shirsha managed to get, we created the set in Kolkata on our return and filmed the sequence. Also, in the book, Feluda and Topshe meet Mahavir Seth inside the Imambara. I had wanted to film this sequence on the terrace of the Imambara looking out over Lucknow. It offered a spectacular view, and would have added much to the film. However, it wasn’t to be, and eventually the meeting took place just outside the Imambara on the street where Mahavir is seen getting off his car. It wasn’t the best for the film but there was little else we could do,’ Ray says matter-of-factly.
If the Imambara was a disappointment, the travel from Haridwar to Lakshman Jhoola was an eye opener. In Satyajit Ray’s original, the area is described as a hilly terrain with dense jungles, which is exactly as it was close to half a century earlier. Since then, however, things have changed – and how! Trying to find a location to film the climax, Sandip Ray and his team drove from Haridwar to Lakshman Jhoola. Today, there are no jungles there. Clusters of houses have come up across this entire stretch. ‘I asked the driver if this was the only route from Haridwar to Lakshman Jhoola and was told that this was the shortest route. There was another more roundabout route. I wanted to explore if that was any better. It wasn’t. While there were some spots of uninhabited land, there was nothing in the area where I could film the climax. Yet again, the only option was to film the scene somewhere else. That’s why I chose Jhargram. I knew I could control things in West Bengal better, and Jhargram offered us a very similar location to what Baba has described in Badshahi Angti. The wooden house would look apt if recreated in the middle of the tall trees. And the roads too were decent enough to go ahead with the plan. While this added to the expense and to the time taken to complete the project, it did get the film closer to the original story, which is so very essential in a Feluda film. The feedback I got about the location of the climax was good and that’s what matters in the end.’
But the Story Moves On
At the end of all of these stories, the only question I ask Sandip Ray is, ‘Is it still worth the effort?’ Does he ever feel demotivated because of these trials and tribulations?
‘Let me be totally honest with you. I had never imagined Feluda would become the cult that he has. I can assure you Baba would have agreed with me. From Feludar Goendagiri to today, it has been an incredible journey. With each novel, the cult has grown and now with each film, the demand is for more. As a film director, I am also an entertainer. And in trying to entertain millions of Feluda fans, I am willing to undertake any level of stress. When I see fans queue up to watch Feluda and thereafter see them come out smiling, it seems to me that every effort is worth it. Each of my unit members, who are more family than anything else, feels the same. And while you may ask how I could possibly keep my composure in these situations, you must remember I am never alone. First, I have learnt it from Baba. And now there are close to eighty of us together at any given point. That’s a huge strength. We face every situation as a team. We travel and dine together, discuss plans and seek out solutions. That’s the challenge that every project brings in its wake and that’s how things are and always will be. Finally, we have Feluda with us. He will inevitably find a way, however tight a spot he may be in. Using his magajastro, he will come up trumps in the end. It has been the case since 1973 when Sonar Kella was filmed. Good things always happen to good people.’
Part Two
Felu Mittir: Between Bhadrolok and Chhotolok
Indrajit Hazra
In the summer of 1965, a character who would go on to become a cult classic for Bengali youngsters – and subsequently for Bengali adults nostalgic for both their formative years as well as for the 1960s–80s – was born.
He was a barrel-chested youngster with a boyish face, always seen in a pair of proto-lycra black shorts (‘half-pant’) and sleeveless orange vest (‘genji’). He was the affable neighbourhood dada who, instead of being the local bully, got things sorted out, especially when it came to the two deviously wicked kids who were forever his adversaries. In fact, this strongman youngster with his ninety-six-inch chest was what the archetypal Bengali young man was not: muscular and ‘un-intellectual’.
Illustrator Narayan Debnath created this cartoon character, Bantul ‘the Great’, as a visual slapstick comic strip aimed at the readers of the children’s magazine, Shuktara. Unlike its more illustrious and literary counterpart, Sandesh, Shuktara was racy – and more popular. I recall gorging on the weekly through the 1970s and ’80s, with Bantul on the cover announcing my life’s weekly cycle.
Bantul arrived quietly, and suddenly burst on the scene only a few months later during the 1965 India–Pakistan war when Narayan depicted him whirling Pakistani tanks by their nozzles Incredible Hulk–style. The Shuktara’s young readers wouldn’t have realized it then, but this Bengali neighbourhood strongman was really a literal, cartoon riposte to Lord Macaulay’s withering description of (Hindu upper and middle class) Bengali men having a ‘feeble constitution’ and being ‘effete, ef
feminate, vaporous, swooning’.
That Bantul of the comic is, at best, simple and, at worst, downright stupid is obvious from Debnath’s simple narrative and unsophisticated lines. Tom and Jerry appeal to kids until a certain age – after which they become fodder for the nostalgia machine.
Which is perhaps why it was left to another character to simultaneously be a counter and a counterpart to this anomalous no-brain and all-brawn Bengali pop icon. Only a few months after Bantul was single-handedly pulverizing Pakistani tanks, there appeared on the pages of Sandesh, a sharp young man not averse to action – Prodosh C. Mitter, or Felu, or as his cousin-cum-sidekick would immortalize him: Feluda.
Satyajit Ray is today more popular among Bengalis for his Feluda stories – and cinematic adaptations of two of them – than his films. During his lifetime, Ray certainly earned far more from his books than his movies, and his Feluda catalogue remains a bestseller to this day. The franchise continues to release one adventure after another every year before Durga Pujo or Christmas, courtesy Ray’s film-maker son, Sandip.
But even before December 1965, when the first instalment of Feludar Goendagiri was published in Sandesh, the character was already formed in Ray’s head, not necessarily as the twenty-seven-year-old strictly amateur detective, but 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.
Feluda’s origins can be found in the run-up to his delivery into the world in the winter of 1965. In May 1965, Ray released the dual-story film Kapurush-o-Mahapurush (The Coward and the Holy Man). The first film, based on the writer and poet Premendra Mitra’s short story ‘Jonoiko Kapurusher Kahini’ (A Certain Coward’s Story), highlighted a particular kind of cowardice that afflicted the middle-class protagonist – one that Ray is happy to skewer.
Mitra’s story starts with a woman bringing the narrator a cup of tea. Within a few paragraphs, the reader recognizes two things: it is a middle-class Bengali setting, with the two characters maintaining an enforced air of politeness. We quickly realize that the two were once lovers. Some years before, Koruna, the woman, had urged him that they elope before her family packs her off to Patna. He had made comforting noises but then did nothing. This time, things are much more ambiguous, as the protagonist asks Koruna to leave her husband – who provides him with an overnight stay while his car is being repaired in the garage – and go away with him.
Whether he does so flippantly, neither the reader nor Koruna knows – until the end when Koruna does appear at the station platform. Again, he takes no action. But this time round, the woman tells the protagonist (and us) that she was actually joking and that she had actually come to the station to retrieve the sleeping pills she had given him the night before. Mitra ends the story with the page crackling with dissimulation and disappointment, and a strange aftertaste of something almost comic.
In the film adaptation, Ray makes this tragi-comic tone the pivot of the story. He starts linearly enough, with the actor Soumitra Chatterjee as the protagonist, a screenwriter travelling around in his car in north Bengal to ‘research’ his next screenplay. But Ray heightens certain features to highlight his ultimate cowardice. When offered a whisky by his host, Koruna’s tea-estate husband, he declines and nurses his sherry suspiciously through the evening as the other man gets progressively intoxicated in a tea-estate burra saheb way. Ray is keen to underline the hero’s effeteness, as he shows him pleading with his old flame, when they are alone, to come away with him.
It is worthwhile to know Ray’s own antipathy towards ‘naekami’, that untranslatable Bengali word that suggests affectation and pretension laced with syrupy melodrama. He recalled his unwillingness to join Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan as a student because he had heard the boys there were naeka. The Coward in Kapurush is infused with this dreaded and dreadful naekami.
Is it too much of a leap to believe that a few months after making Kapurush, Ray would invent a detective character that was Un-Kapurush, not only in the sense of being fearless, but also in terms of being unblemished by that singularly Bengali virus of naekami? Thus, Feluda’s fetish for reason, deduction, facts and sarcasm. Arguably, he is one of the least talkative mystery solvers in the genre, his trusted and in-awe sidekick Topshe noticing long bouts of silence.
But if Kapurush set up a template of what Feluda would not be, indeed be the opposite of – and an apples-to-apples comparison could be easily made once Soumitra Chatterjee makes his first appearance as Feluda in Sonar Kella, nine years after his role in Kapurush-o-Mahapurush perhaps injects a chief ingredient of what would be the warp and woof of Feluda stories: uncovering mysteries and exposing villains.
Mahapurush is based on the 1929 satirical short story ‘Birinchi Baba’ by Rajshekhar Bose, under his nom de guerre Parashuram, where a god-man descends on a neighbourhood and has everyone eating off his palm. (Bose’s brother, incidentally, was the family doctor in the Ray household and a friend of Sigmund Freud.)
Ray sticks to the structure of Bose’s story. But he puts his own indelible stamp – and of his notion of the typical middle- and upper-class psyche of contemporary Kolkata which goes beyond ‘the Bengali’ – in that he comes down less strongly on the god-man, the Mahapurush, than on the people ready and willing to be duped by him.
In fact, one of the characters raring to expose the charlatan admits in the film, ‘The man is talented. He’s a top-class actor, understands mass psychology, is knowledgeable, has an amazing memory, has imagination, has presence of mind and has guts. What else does one need?’ How much of Birinchi Baba did Ray still retain in the character of Machhli Baba in the Feluda story Joi Baba Felunath? Certainly, Varanasi’s smuggler-charlatan Machhli Baba is far more vicious and less fascinating than Bose–Ray’s god-man. But what’s material here is the trope of exposing what is hidden or fake through the genre of a detective series – which in a way is what Mahapurush/Birinchi Baba is if one takes away the whiplash of social satire.
Whether it’s the fake Dr Hazra (as opposed to the real Dr Hajra) in the 1971 Feluda novel, Sonar Kella or the fake Rudrashekhar in the 1982 novel Tintorettor Jishu, or even fake objects, such as the bejewelled Ganesha idol in Joi Baba Felunath, imposters abound in Feluda’s universe.
The fake, the imposter, the charlatan hold a special appeal for the detective/mystery genre writers and their heroes. Ray and Feluda are no exception. But the special appeal for exposing them through stories and a hero that mirrors Ray’s own ambivalent relationship with the Bengali middle-class psyche needs a proper Feluda-esque investigation.
Feluda is my maternal cousin.1 I am fourteen, and he is twenty-seven. Some call him half-insane, some eccentric, and some others call him lazy. But I know that at his age, there are few as intelligent as Feluda. And if he gets a job that’s worth his while, there are very few people who can work as hard as he does. Apart from that, he plays good cricket, knows almost a hundred-odd indoor games, knows card tricks, knows a little hypnotism, and can write with both his left and right hands. And when he used to go to school, his memory was so good that by reading ‘Debotar Gras’ [a poem by Rabindranath Tagore] twice he could memorize it.
Topshe’s description of his cousin in Badshahi Angti is that of no-holds-barred hero worship. For a teenage boy in mid-1960s Kolkata, having a brother who tells him how the word ‘horrendous’ is not a real word but an English neologism that mixes ‘horrible’ with ‘tremendous’ is impressive enough. But to have him actually crack cases that older adults, which quickly include police officers, start seeking him out for was exceptional for both the teenage narrator as well as his mostly teenage readers.
When Feluda makes his appearance in 1965–66, he is twenty-seven, making his year of birth 1939. Topshe, on the other hand, is a post-Independence boy. When Feluda was Topshe’s age, in circa 1953, Byomkesh Bakshi was already an established detective hero in Bengali households and had just cracked his latest ca
se, documented by his creator Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay in Chiriakhana (The Zoo), which Ray would adapt to film in 1967, making his first foray into the detective genre as a film-maker.
In 1948–49, when Felu Mittir (transliterated into anglicized Bengali as ‘Mitter’) was ten, and Bandyopadhyay had ‘retired’ Byomkesh by marrying him off (he would revive him sixteen years later on ‘popular demand’), the twenty-eight-year-old Ray had two life-changing events: one, when he met Jean Renoir who was visiting Kolkata in search of locations and actors for his film The River; and two, when he got married. Bijoya Ray née Das and Ray were, like Topshe and Feluda, maternal cousins. It is no coincidence that Feluda was let out into the world at large by Ray when the young deducer of facts had reached the age when Manik-da, too found his firm footing in the world.
Kolkata in 1965 was in social and political churn – yet to explode as it would when the Naxalite movement finally came down from the hills of north Bengal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Facing food shortage in the state, West Bengal chief minister Prafulla Chandra Sen had, a year before, introduced foodgrain rationing and imposed a heavy tax on rice mills. In one stroke, he had invoked the ire of Congress-supporting mill owners as well as the communists, who in 1964 had split, with the breakaway CPI(M) forming the more left contingent than the rump CPI. Economist and former CPI(M) finance minister Ashok Mitra describes those days in his 2003 memoirs Apila-Chapila (translated in English as ‘A Prattler’s Tale’ by Sipra Bhattacharya):
… a major section of the Bengali middle class was, going by external evidence, itching for a social revolution. Developments in the international political situation were equally of considerable import. The Americans were still angry with India, and we were getting arms and economic aid mostly from the socialist countries. … In Calcutta the reins seemed to be completely in the grip of the CPI(M). The state government had almost ceased to function. There were strikes, and more strikes, every week: in support of the demand of food, of higher wages, or for the reopening of closed factories. The strikes literally shut down Calcutta. Never before this had the great city taken on such an appearance of total stillness, and never was the phenomenon to be repeated.
Feluda @ 50 Page 4