Table 1
Total Crime and Rate of Crime: India 1962–67
Year Population (million) Total cognizable crime Rate of Crime per 100,000 population
1962 453.1 674,466 148.9
1963 459.1 658,830 143.5
1964 475.2 759,013 159.6
1965 486.9 751,615 154.4
1966 498.7 794,733 159.4
1967 511.3 881,981 172.5
In 1967, the rate of crime per 100,000 population in the country was, as the table shows, 172.5. However, the figure under the same head in West Bengal was 203.8 and in Calcutta 427.5.16 If this set of data is not encouraging enough for the young Prodosh Chandra Mitter to switch his profession, there are still other things to support his decision. The following data (Figure 1) show the percentage segments of different types of total cognizable crime committed in 1967.17
Figure 1
Crime under Different Heads: India 1967
Clearly, there was an upsurge in the types of crime originally earmarked for Feluda. The graphs of those specific types of crime were quite high in West Bengal too. As the record shows:
Thefts Ordinary: Almost all the states registered significant increase in this crime. Overall increase was of the order of 14.1 per cent while the state of West Bengal indicated an increase which is as high as 29.2 per cent. UP and Bihar showed an increase of 22.7 per cent and 24.7 per cent respectively. The crime is very prominent in big cities. Barring Ahmedabad, all others (sic) cities indicated significant increase over the previous year.
Criminal breach of trust: West Bengal has reported a very sharp increase of 48.4 per cent over the previous year.
Cheating: The states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, UP and West Bengal contributed significantly to the total incidence of this crime reported in the country during the year – approximately 57.0 per cent.
Counterfeiting: This crime has indicated a very sharp increase of 115.7 per cent during the year over 1966 … Almost all the states have registered a significant increase in this crime during the year as compared to 1966.18
The data lead us to another interesting aspect that deserves to be mentioned. Along with the upsurge in the number of crime, a huge number of cases did remain unsolved as well (Table 2). Despite due investigation, more than the half (6,939) of the total true cases (13,052) in Calcutta could not be resolved. The situation was even bleaker in West Bengal. Nearly 70 per cent of the total true cases, i.e., 41,833 of 62,892 cases remained unsolved.19
Table 2
Break-up of Cases under Different Categories, 1967
West Bengal Calcutta
Cases pending investigation from previous year 12,897 600
Cases reported during the year 84,449 13,185
Cases pending investigation at the end of the year 20,264 437
Total true cases 62,892 13,052
Cases not detected 41,833 6,939
Feluda could not have asked for a better time to appear as a private investigator. The huge number of undetected cases would likely have dented people’s faith in the police and administrative system. Yet, Ray never had Feluda uttering invectives against the police, let alone making fun of them.20 On the contrary, he maintains cordial relations with the state machinery to counter the criminals. The police in return – with only a handful of exceptions – do not question his credibility and/or capability. Even if they have some doubt, they’ve allowed him to proceed in his own way. And, in a number of cases, they act just as Feluda has wanted them to.21
The state power, in this way, has been accommodated, albeit it is the non-state agency that is scheduled to come to the fore. One might venture a comparison here with Goopy Gyne and Bagha Byne – two typical non-state actors who are mutually supplementary and end up rescuing the state from a devilish plot. The simultaneous emergence of two singular forces – Feluda as a professional private investigator and Goopy–Bagha as supernaturally powered messiahs – might not be a simple coincidence.
The Last Word
The question then is, who are the people who keep appointing Feluda to reveal the truth? It’s been widely held – and with good reason – that Feluda’s clientele consists of a group of people who are aged, sceptic, at best described as ‘citizens of a past world untouched by the disquiet of the time around them’. In various stories, these patriarchs live as recluses, yet enjoy the authority in their private worlds not to opt for police in a time of crisis. For reasons ranging from lack of confidence in the capability of the police to keeping unsavoury secrets confined to the familial circle, they want a private eye to investigate the matter.
These people incarnate a certain past in their own respective ways, both in the way they dress or behave or in the manner they conduct themselves. The problem is usually an unwarranted invasion from the present. Feluda is called to put things back in order. That is to say, to reproduce the status – seeking to reclaim the past rather than to problematize it in the process.
Problematizing the past would have thrown up issues that would be hugely disturbing for these people, living a reclusive life in their respective palatial closets. And no less for the narrative, which is necessarily foreclosed since the author is committed to non-adult themes that will not unsettle the preset moral configuration of the story.
Interestingly, in Feluda stories, the space of the client and that of the criminal mostly collapse into each other. Maganlal Meghraj (Joi Baba Felunath) or Mr Gorey (Bombaiyer Bombete) are exceptions in that sense, personifying an evil extraneous to the inner space of the client. More often than not, an implosion within digs out the criminal lying hidden inside. Interestingly, the emergence of Feluda in the mid-1960s of the past century coincided with the urban rise of the class that is often termed as the lumpenproletariat.22 Despite being out there in the city space in huge numbers and being positionally vulnerable to different types of crime, Ray does not have them commit the crimes (either as perpetrator or collaborator) in his stories. This is significant, since they are perceived by the middle-class society as potential doers of the types of wrongs that Ray’s Feluda sticks to.
There is one more point to ponder. Can Feluda’s clientele be seen as a monolith? It appears they can. As was noted above, they are more aligned to the past than present continuous, ‘outside the normative code, oblivious to the prevalent civic currencies of transaction’. And, it has also been argued that it is precisely this alignment that motivates Feluda to take up their cases, even if they are mostly trite in nature.23
But can one restrict the clientele of Feluda to the people he works for in these stories? What about the trace of cases that the author prefers to be silent about? They are excluded, but do get mentioned, however briefly, thereby managing to be in the narrative in an oblique yet indelible way. There are a huge number of cases, mentioned by Topshe himself that he’s not written about.24
Hypothetically, the stories that remain unsaid might contain things the author has decided not to write about. And the fleeting mentions of such cases by the narrator are a deliberate strategy on the part of the author to construct a hyphenated discursive structure: dividing Feluda-that-is from the Feluda-that-would-have-been.
* * *
Sovan Tarafder is the editor, editoral page of Ei Samay, and has been a long-standing scholar of cinema with a degree in film studies from Jadavpur University.
I Want to Be Topshe: Feluda and the Female Reader
Rochona Majumdar
I do not have a clear recollection of when it was that I first started reading Feluda novels. What I do remember is that Sonar Kella was the first film that I was taken to watch in a movie theatre. I say taken to watch because I was a two-year-old toddler at the time. Yet, I do have some memories of Sonar Kella. I remember the musical score from the film. I recall running up and down the aisle every time the music came on – to the annoyance of other members in the audience, I am sure. I also remember being dazzled by the image of the golden fortress.
A few years later, once I had graduated from re
ading the Noddy series by Enid Blyton, my mother introduced me to Bengali comic books. At the time, my reading skills in English were vastly superior to that in Bengali. I was stuck with the Narayan Debnath comics, ‘Bantul’ and ‘Handa Bhoda’ for a long time. In retrospect, it was my mother who devised an ingenious scheme to get me started on reading Bengali prose fiction. She was and remains a voracious reader. As a child, I used to badger her to tell me the stories she was reading. While she told me some stories at bedtime, she also made it clear that they did not exhaust the entirety of everything she read. Pushed to share more, her standard response was, ‘You cannot tell a detective story, you must read them.’ She then gave me Badshahi Angti, a slim, colourful book.
I had just graduated to Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St Clare series. As a pre-teen, my world was populated by the escapades of Darrell Rivers, her best friend Sally, the irascible Gwendolyn Mary Lacey. Insofar as action and adventure were concerned, I was an avid follower of the amateur sleuth Nancy Drew. It is only much later, after I left India, that I realized that Carolyn Keene, the author of the Nancy Drew mysteries, was in fact a collective pseudonym for a host of writers put together by the publisher Edward Stratemeyer. Likewise, I learnt of Enid Blyton’s xenophobic leanings much later too. I gradually outgrew my fondness for these books. Not out of political correctness but because I had outgrown them. I still recommend them to other children with fondness. But do I ever return to them? No. Yet that slim volume my mother gave, and then a home-bound volume of Feluda novels – my personal version of ‘collected works’ as it were – that my brother gifted me when I was returning to Chicago to complete my doctoral dissertation, have been incessantly thumbed through.
My brother inscribed the bound volume with a literal translation of the pronouncements of Sidhu Jyatha, advisor to Feluda and proud owner of a magnificent library that was open to no outsider but the detective. He was the elderly uncle, representative of a character type often imagined in urban Bengali lore: someone with encyclopedic knowledge of everything under the sun. Sidhu Jyatha maintained a massive collection of bound volumes of newspaper cuttings that he pored over from time to time – much like the ideal reader imagined by M.K. Gandhi when he was editor of The Indian Opinion in South Africa, a figure that Isabel Hofmeyr has written about eloquently in her book Gandhi’s Printing Press. My brother inscribed on the book, ‘I could have done a lot of things but had I done so, many people would be out of work. So I chose not to do anything.’ Sidhu Jyatha counselled Felu to always keep the windows of his mind open so that sunlight could stream in and clear any cobwebs that might have accumulated from ignorance or sloth. My brother channelled Sidhu Jyatha as I was embarking on that last, solitary leg of completing my dissertation. I try to abide by that advice to this day.
As the years went on, Feluda and his two sidekicks (whom I will turn to in a moment) ventured to far-off places such as Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. Perhaps this fact of travelling outside Calcutta to other places in India was a charm of reading Feluda stories. In my early years of reading these books, I travelled with him to Darjeeling, Gangtok, Lucknow, Jaisalmer, Shimla, Delhi, Hazaribagh, Puri and Varanasi. There were also places closer to home such as Darjeeling and the fictive Gosainpur. Reading about their adventures, one learned an astonishing amount about these places. They were by no means a mere catalogue of sights that tourists would frequent. Feluda’s credo was that in order to truly savour a place, one had to walk around. Automobiles, though not absent, were by no means the only way to travel. So in Puri, we end up walking through long stretches of the beach, meet little boys who fish in the sea in the early mornings and collect shells to sell to tourists. In Varansi we walk around the old city after dinner and get a taste of the famous Benarasi paan; in Hazaribagh we cross the gurgling brook-like river and visit the Rajrappa and Kali temples; and wandering away from the darbar square in Kathmandu end up in pig alley and encounter LSD smugglers.
It is interesting to note in hindsight that the well-travelled detective did not venture too far south of the Vindhyas. Only two adventures, Kailashe Kelenkari and Bombaiyer Bombete, were set in Aurangabad, Ellora and Mumbai (then Bombay) respectively. Why did Feluda not venture out to the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Kerala? Surely there were crimes in these places. Interesting though it may be to find a key to this puzzle, my goal in what follows is more personal.
A key to the sites where Feluda’s mysteries were situated is found in Sandip Ray’s foreword to the collected works. He notes that most Feluda adventures took place in regions his father knew well through childhood visits and outdoor shooting for his films. For example, Darjeeling, where Feluda first makes his entry into the world as a detective in Feludar Goendagiri, was where Ray based his first colour film, Kanchanjangha. Sonar Kella was written on the basis of Ray’s intimate familiarity, acquired during the shooting of his fantasy film Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, with different places in Rajasthan. Joi Baba Felunath, the second Feluda story that Ray adapted to the screen, was inspired by Varanasi where Aparajito was filmed. Indeed Ray’s deep acquaintance with Varanasi – its ghats, by-lanes, light, smells and noises – that is so central to the unfolding of the mystery in the movie has been eloquently chronicled by him in an essay from 1957 entitled ‘Extracts from a Banaras Diary’. Recall his fascination for the ghats leading down to the Ganga. ‘Set out at 5 a.m. to explore the ghats. Half an hour to sunrise, yet more light than one would have thought, and more activity. The earliest bathers come about 4 a.m., I gather. The pigeons not active yet, but the wrestlers are. Incomparable “atmosphere” … [H]ere, if anywhere, is a truly inspiring setting.’1 No wonder the ghats featured as a critical site in Joi Baba Felunath. Our first introduction to the crook, Machhli Baba, takes place there, and it is from Assi Ghat that we get a glimpse of the magnificent barge belonging to the villain Maganlal Meghraj. In another passage in the same essay, Ray writes, ‘Explored the lanes of Bengalitola. Those of Ganesh Mohalla are perhaps the most photogenic. What makes them so? The curves in the lanes, the breaks in the facades of the houses, the pattern created by the doors, windows, railings, verandas, columns … here the light is qualitatively unvarying, and one could pass off a morning shot as an afternoon one.’2
Every one of these details is used to great effect in Joi Baba Felunath. The haunting darkness of the lane leading up to Maganlal’s mansion, the play of light and shadows when the hapless Lalmohan-babu is forced to be the target for the knife thrower who is a part of Maganlal’s retinue, the encounter with the little boy Ruku, and finally the sad death of the family artist are communicated with such impact in no small measure due to Ray’s intimate familiarity with the built environment of the city.
Ray’s films, more specifically his films on Feluda, merit a longer and more sustained analysis that is difficult to undertake in the limited space of this essay. Andrew Robinson’s wonderful biography of the film-maker refers to an anecdote in which Soumitra Chatterjee, who essayed the role of Feluda in the two films on the detective directed by Ray, asked him, ‘Manik-da, I think you have modelled Feluda on yourself?’ Apparently, Ray eventually did admit to the similarity in later years when he said, ‘I’m sure there’s a lot of me in him but I can’t tell you to what extent.’ Robinson contended that Feluda and Topshe ‘are Bengali descendants of Holmes and Watson, by way of Ray’. Notwithstanding Ray’s fondness for Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero, I have never felt entirely persuaded by the comparison. Nor have I managed to figure out the key to why these films, unlike most of Ray’s other works, failed to communicate their charms to Western audiences. Maybe there is some truth to Robinson’s claims that, used as they are to ‘hard-boiled and cynical’ thrillers, many Western viewers were likely to find Topshe too ‘goody-goody’ and ‘colourless’, or the inimitable Jatayu ‘silly instead of comic’.3
A longer genealogy of children’s literature in Bengali and Satyajit’s own literary and artistic links to his grandfather and father, Upendrakishor
e Roychowdhury and Sukumar Ray respectively, may be the key to understanding the books and their particular grounding in a deep Bengali history. But I do not wish to suggest that this claim is either comprehensive or well researched. So, for now, let me shelve the question of why Feluda did not become a global emblem of sleuthing and confine myself to an analysis of his adventure stories in Bengali.
For the remainder of this piece, what I probe in particular is why the Feluda series makes it so compelling to the female reader? Much like Sherlock Holmes, the fictional English detective whom Feluda himself proclaimed as his guru, or even the earlier Bengali detective created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, Byomkesh Bakshi, Feluda stories are equally popular among male and female readers. But why? My explanation is necessarily personal and subjective. I write as a female reader, nay fan, of Feluda. Put differently, the burden of this exercise is to explore my own fascination for these works.
It should be said at the outset that Feluda stories present a challenge to the feminist-minded reader. Not a single adventure, except for a weak later work, Shakuntalar Kanthahaar, features a noteworthy woman character. A weak exception is Nilima Devi in Chhinnamastar Abishap, who plays a small role in helping the detective unravel the mystery behind the death of the family patriarch, Mahesh Chaudhuri, by handing over to him an important piece of evidence, a tape recorder. All we are told about her is that she is a beautiful woman, has a stellar memory and is a good cook. There are a handful of grandmothers who feature in other stories such as Jahangirer Swarnamudra. But the characters of these elderly women are never as well fleshed out, as are their male counterparts. Compare, for instance, the details we have about the grandfather characters in Joi Baba Felunath, Tintorretor Jishu, or Chhinnamastar Abhishap with the grandmother in Jahangirer Swarnamudra. The men are a formidable lot whose fondness for classical music and opium, hobbies such as stamp collection, or a penchant for maintaining diary entries in the form of complex riddles constitute the backbone of the main plot. The grandmothers, by comparison, are pale characters who fade away into the background. At best we learn a thing or two about their habits – such as an addiction to paan or a dip in the Ganga at dawn. These details are not developed further, as a result of which they never emerge as real players in the mysteries.
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