Little wonder that Ray chose the peace of Darjeeling for a ‘criminal’ rupture to be made in Feluda’s first adventure. The first line of the first story, ‘I see Rajen-babu come to the Mall every afternoon’, conjured up crisp walks and grand views far removed from the storm and stress of a Kolkata under siege and in turmoil. To have situated a mystery in the cauldron of contemporary Kolkata would have drowned out the chaos of the mysterious threatening letters that arrive.
But Feluda’s adventures, by themselves, were escape routes by which Ray could stay firmly out of the turmoil and chaos that he found himself surrounded by – not only in his real life in Kolkata but also in his ‘serious’ movies. Writing children’s stories with a detective hero and set in exotic locations, perforce, kept the swirling, disturbances of the world at bay.
Even in the novel, Gorosthane Sabdhan, set in Kolkata and written in four days in 1977, a month after the Left Front government headed by Jyoti Basu surged into power and stayed there for the next thirty-four years, Ray has Feluda say, ‘But just think of it, Topshe – an Englishman sitting beside the Ganga, on the edge of a huge wasteland inhabited only by mosquitoes, snakes and frogs, thinks that he will set up business here. And lo and behold, the wilderness is cleared, houses are built, roads are laid out and lighted by rows of gas lights; horses and palanquins start travelling and before a hundred years pass, there grows a city in that place that came to be known as the City of Palaces. The present disgraceful conditions of the city is not the point. I am talking about history’ (italics added).
Even in his trademark transmission of historical and geographical facts in all Feluda stories, Ray can’t help but let out a snort of disgust. It seems like for a brief moment, in that single sentence, Ray had looked out of the window of his airy study at 1/1 Bishop Lefroy Road, and allowed himself to be contaminated by the ‘adult’ upheavals underway outside.
In this, Ray was more aware of Feluda’s young adult readership that allowed him the luxury of maintaining a clinical, even an antiseptic, distance from contemporary happenings – something that even his favourite sociopathic sleuth Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be allowed by Arthur Conan Doyle in anarchist-ridden, cocaine-peddling, industrial revolutionary Victorian London. Little wonder that, compared to Feluda, Byomkesh seemed dated to the 1960s–80s reader; he was far more anchored to 1940s–50s Kolkata.
Herge’s Tintin, another fictional crime-buster Ray greatly admired, and who is closer to Feluda (and Topshe closer to Snowy) than generally recognized, was more in sync with the real world of Chicago mobsters (Tintin in America), Latin American dictators (Tintin and the Picaros) and post-colonial and pre–World War II oil supplies (Land of Black Gold). But it is this atemporality that also allows Feluda mysteries to remain far more ‘contemporary’ – as evidenced by its continued popularity – than the more noir and violent crime stories of Byomkesh Bakshi for older readers.
But Ray’s antipathy towards having Feluda drawn into contemporary political and social settings has a deeper root: he didn’t like what he saw happening around him. This bhadrolok abhorred the breakdown of reason, the flood of chaos, unthinking violence and unintelligent criminal acts – even if he had separate problems with middle-class hypocrisy and behaviour. But there was an ambiguity, as is evident in Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy – the films Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Seemabaddha (Company Limited, 1971) and Jana Aranya (The Middleman, 1975) – and in his late film, Ganashatru (Enemy of the People, 1989), where Ray does let the political and social muck in.
At the time of writing Gangtoke Gondogol and Sonar Kella in 1970–71, he wrote to his biographer and friend Marie Seton describing Calcutta as a ‘nightmare city’ and toying with the idea of leaving it. There was a compelling reason why Ray found the chaos outside the world of films and books distasteful: it was personal.
As he told Andrew Robinson (in Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye), ‘I might have understood more the young peoples’ minds if my son had taken to that movement. But he was a victim. Sandip was surrounded and threatened with a dagger when he turned up for his BA exams. They told him, “You are the son of Satyajit Ray. We’ll see how you can pass this examination.”’ But there was another reason for Ray’s desire to remain an ‘apolitical’ film-maker and writer. He found getting artistically involved unaesthetic.
Which brings us to the nub of the matter: Feluda was the crystallization of Ray’s unease with Bengali middle-class straitjacketing and delusional self-imaging, as well as with his natural distaste for the populist, the garish, that somewhere in his mind, slid down to the all-too-visible lumpen. Felu Mittir holds the key to maintaining an equal distance from the ossified bhadrolok (cultured man) and the rampaging chhotolok (lumpen).
Ray’s bilingual genius applies not only to his mastery over the languages of Bengali and English, or over his equally vast and deep knowledge in matters Indian and ‘Western’, but also to his ease with Bengali high and popular culture. Consistently, in his Feluda books, Ray simultaneously tapped and displayed his closeness and fondness for the demotic, his natural affinity towards middle-class colloquialisms.
The early, younger Feluda is particularly comfortable playing the foil, rather than adversary, to Debnath’s Bantul the Great or other pop-cultural icons in the Bengali universe. We hear him snap playfully at Topshe with a ‘Pakami korishne’ (Don’t act smart). He is equally at ease displaying his irritation with lazy reasoning as he is with bad taste. Such as when we meet him in the opening pages of Gorosthane Sabdhan, berating Lalmohan ‘Jatayu’ Ganguly for the second-hand Mark 2 Ambassador he has bought.
‘Until you change that grotesque horn of yours and get a civilized one instead, that car is forbidden to enter Rajani Sen Road [where Feluda and Topshe live with Topshe’s parents].’
Jatayu looked apologetic.
‘I knew I was taking a big risk,’ he said, ‘but you know the salesman was demonstrating – somehow I couldn’t resist the temptation. It’s Japanese, you know.’
‘It’s ear-splitting and nerve-wracking,’ said Feluda. ‘I could never have believed that Hindi films would influence you so soon. And that colour – equally unbearable. Just like what you see in Madras films.’
In the 1979 novel, Chhinnamastar Abhishap, a quieter, more ironic Felu again takes on Lalmohan, the title of whose new thriller, Vancouverer Vampire – in keeping with his proto–Karan Johar alliterative titles – he finds deeply problematic.
Topshe narrates, ‘He had said that Vancouver is a very modern city, and for vampires to stay there is impossible. To which Lalmohan-babu replied that after he had scoured through Horniman’s geography book, he figured that would be the best title.’
These make for comic situations before the actual adventure begins, or in between situations that call for seriousness. But at some fundamental level, Jatayu is the representative of the Bengali middle-class middle-aged man whom Ray wants to befriend and educate at the same time through Feluda. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Feluda’s raison d’être is as much to try and inculcate the likes of Lalmohan Ganguly with the right kind of reasoning (and, by some miracle, the right kind of taste) as it is to solve mysteries.
Which brings us back to the binary Bengali universe of the bhadrolok and chhotolok. The figure of the bhadrolok is quite well established even outside the immediate domain of Bengali cultural politics.
In terms of class, the bhadralok (the female equivalent is bhadromohila, but doesn’t quite transfer the same qualities) can range from the archetypal rich, upper-middle-class Bengali gentleman to the middle-class Bengali gentleman whose relative lack of wealth is compensated for by his ability to stand out with dignity in a crowd. Amartya Sen is a bhadrolok. Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and much of the old guard of the Bengali Left leadership are considered bhadrolok. Lalmohan Ganguly, by dint of his affable nature and jolly spirit, just about makes it into the fold. Satyajit Ray himself was a bhadrolok, however critical of his own tribe he may have been.
The chhotolok (literally ‘small man’) is a more tricky archetype to bottle. At its most basic, the chhotolok is crass, uncultured, a specimen to be equally feared and be repelled by. Usually he shows signs of drunkenness and lewd behaviour, uses foul language and is terribly devoid of capital C-ed Culture. He would be the one who, if getting his hands on some money, will go out and buy a garish green car with a loud horn. And above everything, he is loud – and is sated by what Feluda disparagingly calls ‘Hindi films’.
In the world of criminals and imposters that both Feluda’s stories and the world we live in share, the chhotolok has sinister, antisocial overtones. In Feluda’s moral universe, he is the vicious villain. Take the two villainous kidnappers in Sonar Kella: Bhabananda aka Amiyanath Barman, alias the Great Barman – Wizard of the East, who pretends to be the parapsychologist Dr Hemanga Hajra, and his partner in crime Mandar Bose. While Barman, the leader of the duo, comes across as the criminal mastermind that he is – ‘This man seemed too shrewd. Besides, he was much too tall and formidable-looking. Not at all what we think of when we say, “Dr”’ – Mandar Bose is a cut-throat and fits the bill. The talentless ruffian is Ray’s chhotolok.
The most obvious ‘chhotolok’ in the Feluda pantheon of villains, however, is Maganlal Meghraj. Ray via Topshe describes him: ‘The eyes that regarded us solemnly were sunk in, set under thick, bushy eyebrows. A blunt nose, thick lips and a pointed chin completed the picture. He too was wearing a kurta-pyjama. The buttons on his kurta might well have been diamonds. Besides these, on eight of his ten fingers flashed other stones of every possible colour.’
Ray’s disdain for flashiness – what in present parlance would be ‘bling’ – immediately sets the oily Maganlal up as a chhotolok villain. To drive the point further home, Ray has the Benarasi Sethji throw Feluda a wad of currency notes as a bribe to stop meddling in the case. ‘There is three thousand here, Mr Mittir. Take it. Take it and relax, enjoy yourself with your cousin and uncle.’
In Satyajit Ray: Portrait of a Director, Marie Seton points to Ray’s very Bengali middle-class bhadrolok attitude towards money. ‘Wealth, which once was little respected in comparison to wisdom, now wields more power over the imagination than it ever did before in India. Satyajit, who counted the pennies throughout his youth, seems to have equated wealth with impecuniosity of spirit, if not active evil, in all his films.’ The same holds in Ray’s depiction of villains in Feluda stories, where the prime motive for villainy is almost always to possess unlawfully what is not that person’s property or object of value.
In a note to a Feluda collection, Ray had written in 1988, ‘To write a whodunit while keeping in mind a young readership is not an easy task, because the stories have to be kept “clean”. No illicit love, no crime of passion, and only a modicum of violence. I hope adult readers will bear this in mind when reading these stories.’ Reading this in conjunction with the knowledge that Ray refused to visit brothels for background research in his 1970 film Pratidwandi, it seems that Ray found writing ‘clean’ detective stories for kids a relief. It was also where the usual traits of the chhotolok that he couldn’t bear could be conflated in the vice of greed and terrible taste. And it was Feluda who would strike the right balance between the bhadrolok in his bubble and the chhotolok in his den.
Bengali popular literature for young adults has the trinity of ‘da-s’: Ghanada, Tenida and Feluda.
Ghanashyam Das aka Ghanada is the eldest of the lot, appearing first in the short story ‘Mosha’ (Mosquito) in 1945. His creator was Premendra Mitra, who had written the comic, supremely satiric short story on which Ray had based his aforementioned film on a god-man, ‘Mahapurush’. Ghanada is a teller of tall tales, which he narrates to his all-male younger fellow residents of a mess house. Mitra’s hero is a flamboyant bachelor, a sharper, more wicked version perhaps of Feluda’s friend Lalmohan Ganguly. His acerbic comments, coupled with his fantastical shaggy dog tales – where he saves the world using a nail, or goes to Mars, or saves the world from a gigantic tidal wave, or points out in a matter-of-fact way that Robinson Crusoe was actually a young woman – make him the mad Socrates of Bengali literature.
Feluda, with his addiction to reason and truth seeking, would have obsessively picked holes in Ghanada’s stories, not realizing that the modern mythologist would not have cared. The fact that there is some sort of revival in Ghanada’s cult status of late points to the sheer power of the man’s ability to conjure up time- and space-neutral fabrications.
Bhojohari Mukhopadhyay aka Tenida is the least known among the three ‘da-s’, and not only in the non-Bengali-reading world any more. This rather nutty character first appeared in Narayan Gangopdhyay’s children’s novel Chaar Murti (Four Characters) in 1957 as a serialization. Tenida, like Ghanada, is also surrounded by three hench-boys, and acts out his particular form of hyper-absurdity. Among the ‘da-s’, Gangopadhyay’s Groucho Marx–like character is the youngest, although his years of trying to graduate from school doesn’t confirm this possibility.
If Feluda is the atypically rational young Bengali man ready to go off anywhere to solve a mystery, and if Ghanada is the atypically imaginative older Bengali man ready to go nowhere but only talk about ‘past journeys criss-crossing the world and beyond’, Teni is the typical Bengali youngster, exaggerated only that much. His lust for any kind of food and his signature exclamation, ‘De la Grande Mephistopheles’ – which is then completed with equal aplomb by his three sidekicks with ‘Yuk!’ – place him in the neighbourhood of all-brawns Bantul. Except that Tenida’s maniacal behaviour is genuinely cartoon-funny.
His world and Feluda’s will never cross. And while both Feluda and Ghanada manage to leave a ticker tape of genuine, exciting facts about the real world behind after readers have read about their adventures, Tenida is the odd one out, in that his loud, neighbourhood-based world is practically extinct.
Satyajit Ray was surely aware of these two cult figures in Bengali popular literature, especially Ghanada, about whom he must have read before he turned to the likes of Conan Doyle and those mysteries for grown-ups by English and American writers. That, unlike Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi, Ray’s Prodosh Mitter would become a ‘da’ was a smart move by Ray aka Manik-da. Topshe would have had to be invented if he didn’t exist – if for nothing else but to be the only person who actually calls Felu ‘Feluda’. We should know; all of us are Topshes.
Feluda’s final adventure, Robertsoner Ruby, took place in 1991, which helps new readers avoid seeing Ray’s hero through sepia tones. Also immensely helpful is the steady supply of the annual cinematic adaptations of Feluda stories, whose thirty-five adventures are ever updatable and ever relatable.
Even as we notice the evolution of Feluda down the years from 1965 to 1991 – made most palpable in Ray’s own illustrations – as a proto-man who is a bit more fun-loving and boyish than the hard-chinned man he would grow into being, the most popular character that Ray ever created has been retrofitted to go well with the times. Not because of some reboot or reappraisal of the quite incongruous traits of an intelligent Bengali who is also a man of action. But because Felu Mittir has changed our perception of the Bengali bhadrolok.
Would it be so far-fetched to believe that there is a bit of Feluda in, say, Sourav Ganguly? Or in all those who shared that ‘seditious’ Facebook post by Ambikesh Mahapatra, the Jadavpur University chemistry professor, depicting West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and fellow Trinamool leader Mukul Roy with those immortal lines: ‘Dekhte pachchho, Mukul? Sonar kella’ (Can you see, Mukul, the Golden Fortress), followed by an image of then Union railways minister and out-of-favour TMC leader Dinesh Trivedi with the speech baloon, ‘Dushtu lok, vanish!’ (Wicked man vanished!). Or that Lalmohan Ganguly’s pitch-perfect comic phrases and moments have become memes of their own.
In a 1996 ‘Feluda 30’ special issue of the Sandesh magazine, where Felu Mittir’s exploits first appeared in a serialized form, Ray’s son had written abou
t how his father, after taking over as the editor of the revived Sandesh in 1961, would keep hardcover exercise books in which he scribbled notes. From 1961 to 1964, there was not a word or scratch about any Feluda. ‘Then suddenly, in 1965, in the exercise book’s third page, he started Feludar Goendagiri. On the first page, there’s just father’s signature and year in English. Before a new character is created, normally a writer makes some introductory notes. He hadn’t done any of that. Like the other stories he had written over the last four years, he had simply started [with Feluda] right there and then.’
It would be quite romantic to believe that the spirit of Felu Mittir had descended on Manik-da one day in very late 1965. But as Feluda would have said with perfect reason and logic, ‘Apply your head, Topshe! Think. That doesn’t make any sense. That doesn’t make any sense at all.’
* * *
Indrajit Hazra is the author of the novels The Burnt Forehead of Max Saul, The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Bioscope Man. His non-fiction includes Grand Delusions: A Short Biography of Kolkata. He works as a journalist and lives in New Delhi.
Modus Operandi: Two or Three Things I Know About Feluda
Sovan Tarafder
1.
‘See how the card has come up!’
Feluda flashed a visiting card off his moneybag and asked me to have a look. Just a few words: Prodosh C. Mitter, Private Investigator. The message, however, is clear. Now he wants to flaunt his investigating acumen…
Feluda @ 50 Page 5
