Feluda, we are often reminded, is a good-looking man. While Soumitra Chatterjee, who played the detective in the first two Feluda films, looked handsome in that role, the books do not furnish many details about his facial features. All we are told is that he is tall (over 6 feet) and quite lean. He gets deep furrows on his brow when he concentrates deeply. He played cricket in college and practices yoga daily. Sometimes his physical fitness manifests itself in the ease with which he picks up martial arts technique such as Mokkairi in Bombaiyer Bombete. He is a master of disguise who could easily pass as a hippie or a sadhu. Aside from smoking his trademark Charminar, Feluda has no other addictions. We never encounter him drinking or doing drugs. Finally, despite his multiple skills and talents, not once does Feluda come across as a figure with any sex appeal. Not once do we hear anyone cajole him to get married. He has no love interest. While the world he inhabits is hetero-normative, the books describe a homosocial, emphatically male space from which women are absent as agents.
Feluda is accompanied in most of his adventures by his two sidekicks, his cousin Topshe and Jatayu, the writer of impossibly themed blockbusters. While Jatayu ranks among the most memorable comic characters in Bengali fiction, Topshe who pens Feluda’s adventures is oddly under-defined. It is to the ubiquitous Topshe that I wish to turn by way of offering a provisional and subjective explanation for the female reader’s attraction to Feluda stories. My argument is that for the girl/woman reader, Topshe is our point of identification with Feluda’s adventures. Let me elaborate.
Let us first briefly consider the question of language. The Bengali author Leela Majumdar, also a relative of Ray’s, once made some significant observations about Topshe. Topshe never seems to age. Between 1965 and 1991, the time period covered by Feluda stories, his stated age increases by less than five years. He first came to us as a thirteen-year-old and never crossed the threshold of eighteen. He narrated his first-hand account of the thrilling adventures he was part of with his older and much-loved cousin Feluda and their writer-friend Jatayu – and his prose, according to Majumdar, was that of a young boy of that age group.
Here I beg to differ slightly. There is absolutely nothing in Topshe’s prose that marks it out as male. Since my teenage years overlapped roughly with Topshe’s, I know from experience that girls like myself who went to a decent English-medium city school spoke exactly like Topshe. My Bengali vocabulary, though not chaste, had more expletives in it. In Presidency College, I came across a new Bengali lingo that is the language of the teenage Bengali boy. Today, songs by bands such as Chandrabindu, novels by Nabarun Bhattacharya and Raghab Bandyopadhyay have memorialized this language for us. Girls were quick to pick up this language upon entering college. It made us feel more grown up and with it, for it was risqué and untamed by convention. As I ventured into the world, however, I outgrew it. When I encounter that vocabulary fleetingly in films by Srijit Mukherji, Suman Mukhopadhyay, or in the songs of certain Bangla bands, they bring back memories of college. I sometimes hear snatches of that language in the Bengali spoken by young Bengali graduate students who have just arrived in Chicago. But the more I listen to it, the clearer it becomes that I never owned that language as my own. I was and remain much more comfortable with Topshe’s Bangla – easy, flowing, with an occasional sprinkling of English words but never as colourful (and decidedly male) as that of Bengali college addas. Looking back, I would go so as far as to suggest that a boy who spoke like Topshe was likely to be more popular with ‘good’ girls. By no means effeminate, there wasn’t anything in Topshe’s prose that transgressed the boundaries of civility, which also served to make these books into objects that no adult ever frowned upon. It is quite possible that young adults who found Ray’s films too restrained and aesthetically sanitized when compared to his fiery, earthy and melodramatic confrère Ritwik Ghatak would outgrow Topshe’s prose. But that never happened to me.
Leela Majumdar is spot on in her observation that she found Topshe a little too restrained. She observes that he rarely displayed the unruly energy so common in boys of his age. The only exception is when he is presented with a plateful of delicious food. Then the restraint would slip away. Topshe’s comportment and mental make-up constitute my second point. While I do not wish to make this a generalization about all girls of all generations, it is certainly the case that, while I enjoyed the occasional tomboyish prank, I had much more in common with Topshe. Like him, I itched to travel. I longed for an elder such as Feluda who would be teacher, comrade and confidant all at the same time. An elder who would take me away from the rules of family into a world that was about liberty rather than licence. What Majumdar found odd about Topshe was precisely what I found comforting.
We first encounter Topshe in Feluda’s debut adventure in Darjeeling. He is thirteen-and-a-half, and initiates the adventure when he follows Rajen-babu, the elderly gentleman who was being threatened by unknown assailants, to his home in Jalpahar. Interestingly, in this first story, Topshe’s full name is Tapesh Ranjan Bose. In later works, his surname is changed to Mitra, the same as his cousin Felu. While waiting for a music band to commence their performance on a sunny Sunday morning at the Mall in Darjeeling, Topshe eavesdrops on a conversation between Rajen-babu and his tenant Tinkari-babu, where the former confides the news about the threatening letters. Topshe supplies this information to Feluda. In his own words, ‘You were seeking a mysterious occurrence. You told me that your skills of detection had become very sharp after reading a lot of detective fiction.’ We could argue that it is Topshe who gently pushes the otherwise housebound Feluda into the world of action and adventure. It is only when he tells him Rajen-babu’s story that Feluda ventures out of the hotel room in Darjeeling that he has not left once since arriving at the hill resort. In this and subsequent adventures, it is Topshe’s ardent desire to see a new place, or his fervent hope that Feluda be assigned a case, that serves as the trigger of the narrative. In this sense, there is no Feluda without Topshe. Seen thus, Topshe is always the primary agent in all Feluda stories.
Lastly, Topshe’s appeal is also because of his gift for communicating with readers. Even though Feluda often cautions Topshe that the adventures of Felu Mittir should not read like travelogues, or gives him tips about the ways in which to retain the suspense of a particular story, the narrative comes to life largely due to Topshe’s keen sense of observation. In countless stories, he reproduces for us the peculiarities of dialect and prose of the people they encounter. Ray’s filmic realism translates itself into Topshe’s fantastic ability to create a literary mise en scène. Further, facial expressions, nervous tics, sidelong glances or deadpan looks, all of these are described in Dickensian detail. They are so effective that particular characters – such as the tiger trainer Karandikar (Chhinnamastar Abhishap), or Anantalal Batra (Joto Kando Kathmandute) who claims that he has a double, or the fake fortune teller Lakshman Bhattacharya (Hatyapuri) to name a few – leap off the pages.
Topshe drinks hot chocolate at the Mall during their Darjeeling holiday, while Felu sips coffee. He is repeatedly cautioned by his father and Feluda to bundle up in sweaters and scarves lest he catch a cold. There are some restrictions on his movements because he is still considered too young. There is nothing about Topshe that marks him out as an adolescent boy. In fact, not in a single adventure following Darjeeling, where Topshe advances through his teenage years, is there even a whiff of a love interest, either towards a man or woman. As he turns fifteen, he too practises yoga with Feluda in the mornings. No identifiably male sport, such as soccer or cricket, for Topshe. The few times that he plays an active role, together with Jatayu, in helping Feluda nab a criminal, he is either tailing an imposter on foot, or chasing him on a bicycle. In other words, nothing in Ray’s delineation of Topshe’s physical prowess mark him out as male. This is not to suggest that he is effeminate or a reflection of British colonial stereotypes of Bengali effeteness. He is gender neutral – someone who could just as easily serve as a point of ide
ntification for a young boy or girl. The strictures on his movements, his joy at being allowed to eat paan, or to stay up late at night, travel with Feluda to places near and far when school is not in session is something that the ordinary, middle-class, educated Bengali girl can easily identify with. The absence of an Irene Adler–like character in Feluda’s life suggests by implication that Topshe is freed up of any residual feelings of jealousy or desire. And when the three of them, Feluda, Jatayu and Topshe, share the same bedroom, or a railway compartment, they are always depicted as sleeping on different beds and bunks, without a whiff of sexuality entering these spaces.
Why Ray may have chosen to banish sexuality from Feluda adventures calls for a completely different analysis. In his writings on cinema, he discusses his discomfort about depicting sex on screen in no uncertain terms. Eroticism is not absent from Ray’s films, but sex, even when it does appear, is not handled with great finesse. Perhaps his Brahmo upbringing had something to do with it. Be that as it may, the Feluda stories he wrote primarily for children, though he never specified the precise age group, crossed the gender divide effortlessly. Feluda is no Byomkesh. There are no parallels to Satyabati in his adventures. As a result, unlike Ajit who often teases the detective about missing his wife, or responds to the fact of his fatherhood, Topshe remains a gender-neutral storyteller. Neither Feluda nor Jatayu, the two adults in Topshe’s novel, world have any romantic or sexual dimension to them. Topshe, therefore, inhabits a zone that is full of adventure but none that holds the threat of sexual harm or charm.
It is also fascinating that Ray never chose to depict Topshe as someone who develops a close bond with the children who feature in Feluda mysteries. Whether it is Mukul in Sonar Kella or Ruku in Joi Baba Felunath, or even Bibi in Chhinnamastar Abhishap, it is left to Feluda to charm or win over the confidence of these children. Topshe, therefore, is redeemed from having to play the nurturing role that may have been off-putting to the female reader of Ray’s detective fiction. Freed from any gendered expectation, that reader quite likely identifies with Topshe – the recipient of Feluda’s knowledge, wisdom and the occasional anxiety. Jatayu too receives his share of attention, but Topshe remains special. In thus being the only claimant of the great Feluda’s undivided affection, the presumed beneficiary of the detective’s relative financial well-being, his constant companion and student, Topshe is someone that Ray rendered special in these stories. His character is understated: he is only Feluda’s ‘satellite’, not the protagonist. Nonetheless, as the chronicler of his exploits, always privy to the great man’s inner thoughts, and leading a life brimming with adventure without transgressing any social norms and boundaries, Topshe strikes a deep chord in female readers. Perhaps many of them, like myself, have often mused ‘I want to be Topshe’ and returned to Feluda books time and time again.
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Rochona Majumdar is a professor of history and South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago.
Life Lessons from Feluda
Abhijit Bhaduri
Our family ritual was to go to Calcutta every year. We would take the train from Old Delhi railway station to Howrah station with stacks of Bengali novels for company. Besides the novels, there were stacks of Desh, the weekly literary magazine. Every year, just before Durga Puja, Desh would bring out an annual compilation that brought together the best of contemporary Bengali literature and made it accessible to masses. It was my introduction to Bengali literature.
Even the weekly version of the magazine had a section on poetry, which is where I discovered Joy Goswami and Purnendu Pattrea and others. There were short stories and serialized novels, where I read the works of Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Shankar, Leela Majumdar, the very best of Bengali literature. That is where I read Pandit Ravi Shankar’s autobiography Raag Anuraag. Desh also carried a section on films and music. Satyajit Ray was often featured, and in multiple sections: in his capacity as director, for the music he composed, or the costumes he had designed. Even as a young boy, I was struck by this man, and his ability to do so many things.
My world view has been shaped in very definite terms by the books written by three generations of the Ray family. My grandparents, who lived in Calcutta, used to send me copies of Sandesh, the children’s magazine that had been started by Satyajit Ray’s grandfather Upendrakishore Roychowdhury in 1913. The very first Bengali book I had read was Tuntunir Boi that had been written and illustrated by him. My introduction to the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were through Chheleder Ramayan and Chheleder Mahabharat. I must have been ten when I read Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol – the last word in Bengali nonsense verse. Then I went on to read HaJaBaRaLa and of course the delightful stories of Pagla Dashu. From there, on to the third generation of this family: Satyajit Ray introduced me to the world of Feluda, whose influence has stayed with me over the years.
I met Feluda through the pages of Sandesh in 1965. It was his first adventure, called Feludar Goendagiri and set in Darjeeling, clearly Ray’s favourite holiday destination. His first original screenplay, Kanchanjangha, was also set there. But for Feluda fans, Darjeeling is special because it is the setting for his first story.
Fans will all reel off these details. Prodosh C. Mitter is better known as Feluda. He was twenty-seven at the time of the first adventure, Feludar Goendagiri. He is 6'2" (Satyajit Ray was 6'4") and is good at cricket (spin bowling to be precise), knows almost a hundred indoor games and several sleight-of-hand tricks using playing cards. He dabbles in hypnotism and is ambidextrous. Has an amazing memory and super-sharp observation skills. His weapon of choice is Colt .32 that is rarely fired. His martial arts training and lightning-fast reflexes come in handy when he deals with the villains. He can draw portraits. A man of few words, he takes notes in his diary and then withdraws to reflect and think through the case. Even his assistant knows better than to disturb him then.
Feluda’s first adventure is narrated through the eyes of the thirteen-year-old Tapesh Ranjan Mitra, whom Feluda affectionately calls Topshe. What stayed with me was the illustration by Ray that accompanied the story: the first time I visualized Feluda and Topshe.
I don’t know another fictional detective who has such a young narrator-cum-assistant. Young readers identify with Topshe. Feluda then becomes like a virtual mentor, teaching them about the powers of observation and deduction.
There’s more still. The novels are also virtual travel guides. Our detective duo are in a new city in every novel, and Ray brings each one to life. Feluda’s first adventure was published in 1965–66 and the last one in 1995–96, all set in different parts of India: Darjeeling, Puri, Lucknow, Varanasi, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and so on. Feluda also travelled abroad to Kathmandu, Hong Kong and London. The descriptions are compellingly vivid. Ray uses historical facts and blends them with trivia and folklore to make each destination come alive.
It is widely believed that Feluda was a stand-in for Ray himself. They certainly had shared passions, like the knowledge of typefaces. Ray created numerous new fonts in Bengali and four Roman fonts as well – Ray Roman, Ray Bizarre, Daphnis and Holiday Script.
In his debut appearance, Feluda used his knowledge of typefaces to start unravelling the mystery. Feluda tells Topshe, ‘While Bengali has ten to twelve different typefaces, English has at least two thousand. There are different categories and subcategories among the typefaces.’ He refers to the typeface on an envelope and points out that the typeface used there is Garamond. This typeface had originated in the sixteenth century in France, and was so popular in England, Germany, Switzerland and the USA that they started creating their own version of Garamond. While they all look the same to the naked eye, there are actually minor differences that show up in the different versions of the Garamond typeface, Feluda says.
Feluda looks at the letter that has been written by someone using different words taken from different publications. The threat is mentioned in no uncertain terms: ‘Be prepared to be punished for your wr
ongdoings.’ While others are worried about the threat, Feluda observes that the words have been cut using a blade and not a pair of scissors. He says that the words have been taken from different books because the paper and fonts are not consistent. He goes on to add that the words ‘punished’ and ‘prepared’ are from a newspaper.
‘Anandabazar.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. That type is only used in Anandabazar – not in other Bengali newspapers. None of the other words have been taken from any old book. Those fonts are barely fifteen or twenty years old …’
The problem with most fictional detectives is their believability. They are somehow larger than life – and not just because they solve complex crimes and mysteries. Feluda seems approachable and believable. He is the elder brother we all wish we had. Even when Feluda makes fun of his teenaged cousin’s naivety, one can see his deep affection for the boy, and how fiercely protective he is. In the debut novel, he coaches Topshe on how to make it easy for the reader to visualize a character. Feluda asks Tapesh to be precise in his descriptions:
The person who walked was 5'9", fair-skinned, aged around fifty, the hair around his ears had greyed, he had a mole on his chin and was wearing an ash-coloured safari suit. When he walked into the room, there was some hesitation in his demeanour in the way he cleared his throat, and the way he covers his mouth at that time shows some kind of Western influence.’
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