21The film Joi Baba Felunath has a typical Bollywood-like ending, where the police are allowed to enter the scene only after the hero takes his personal revenge.
22‘While those employed in the tertiary sector formed the bulk of the urban employed middle and the lower middle class people, the horde of uneducated unemployed or under employed crowding the pavements or the slums of the cities came to form the lumpenproletariat…’ (Banerjee, Sumanta, ‘The Urban Scene’, In the Wake of Naxalbari, p. 39).
23‘Digging deeper, one can see how the regular roster of clientele would be unattractive to Feluda not because the nature of crime would be banal – after all most crimes in the entire series do not go beyond theft and murder – but because Feluda’s fondness is for an older clientele desperately seeking salvation in a world outside time. In short, it is not the nature of the crime but the profile of the clientele that draws Feluda’s attention’ (Chowdhury, Sayandeb, ‘Ageless Hero, Sexless Man’, p. 121.)
24For example, in Shakuntalar Kanthahaar, Topshe writes that Feluda is the numero uno private investigator in Calcutta, bagging seven or eight cases every month that help him earn a decent living. Going by this number, Feluda is bound to have a huge number of cases that have not been narrativized by his cousin.
I Want to Be Topshe: Feluda and the Female Reader
1Satyajit Ray, ‘Extracts from a Banaras Diary’, Our Films, Their Films, Orient Blackswan, p. 25.
2Ibid., p. 26.
3Andrew Robinson, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye, I.B. Tauris, pp. 231–34.
Life Lessons from Feluda
1http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/08/18/how-introvertsextroverts-communicate_n_7787304.html
Acknowledgements
First, thanks are due to Sandip and Lolita Ray for opening up the family collection and giving me the many illustrations and pictures that we have used in the book. Babu-da and I spent endless hours discussing Feluda and these conversations have in a large measure contributed to making Feluda@50.
Soumitra Chatterjee, Sabyasachi Chakrabarty and Abir Chatterjee, the three Feludas, were all just a call away each time I was stuck. For the many hours with Soumitra-babu at his Golf Green residence, with Benu-da at his place and with Abir over many lunches at my own, I remain grateful to each of them.
Rajatava Dutta (Roni-da), one of my favourite actors, was a delight to talk to. He remains a common chord across many Feluda films and these conversations have immensely enriched Feluda@50.
To each of my contributors – Abhijit Bhaduri, Rochona Majumdar, Indrajit Hazra, Mir and Sovan Tarafder – I remain grateful. All of us are from the same brigade, the Feluda fan club, and I had real fun talking Feluda to each of them. Each of these essays has added much to the book.
Sharmistha, whose encouragement made me undertake the project. I can say little more about her that I haven’t in the past in some of my other works. She is the driver behind most of my endeavours and I can only hope she continues to do so in the years to come.
To Aisha, my would-be two-year-old, I hope you start to admire Feluda in the very same way your father did as a child. It will add to your growing up in Kolkata.
Karthika, this is our eighth project together. Need I say more!
Finally, to the scores of Feluda fans who have helped in keeping the brand alive and will continue to do so in future.
About the Book
In 1965, Satyajit Ray, drawing from the detective tradition made popular by characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, created a character who would go on to influence Bengalis of an entire generation: Feluda. And when Soumitra Chatterjee played the dapper detective in the film Sonar Kella, a cult was born. Fifty years later, the cult endures. Every new Feluda film has the box office in a tizzy.
Feluda@50 seeks to explore the phenomenon. What makes Feluda tick? What is it that we love about this man? Why is it that every Feluda film continues to run to packed houses for weeks and months on end in an otherwise struggling Bengali film industry? What is the way forward for the franchise in the years to come? What role do Feluda’s sidekicks, Topshe and Lalmohan-babu, play? The book also delves deep into Ray’s motivations for keeping Feluda cocooned from contemporary politics and never allowing him to have a love interest.
Also including in-depth interviews with the three stars who have played Feluda onscreen, this is the quintessential fan tribute and a celebration of Feluda on the occasion of the sleuth’s fiftieth anniversary.
Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes Scholar, is a historian by training who went to St John’s College, Oxford University, to do a DPhil on the social history of Indian cricket in October 2000. His doctorate was published in India by Penguin-Viking as Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket in December 2004. He has taught at the Universities of Chicago, Toronto and La Trobe where he was first distinguished Visiting Fellow in 2005. He was also a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge in 2009. He is currently senior research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and consulting editor, Sports, at the India Today Group.
Boria is the co-author of Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography Playing it My Way, and is one of India’s leading sports scholars and journalists. Some of his other books include Olympics: The India Story, Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation and The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket.
About the Author
Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes scholar, went to the University of Oxford. His doctorate was published as Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket. He has taught at the universities of Chicago, Toronto and La Trobe, where he was the first distinguished visiting fellow in 2005. He was also a visiting fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 2009. He is currently senior research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and consulting editor, sports, at the India Today Group.
Boria is the co-author of Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography Playing It My Way, and is one of India’s leading sports scholars and journalists. Some of his other books include Olympics: The India Story, Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation and The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket.
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First published in India in 2016 by
HarperCollins Publishers India
Anthology copyright © HarperCollins Publishers India 2016
Copyright for individual essays rests with the contributors
Photographs copyright © Society for the Preservation of Satyajit Ray Archives 2016
P-ISBN for hardback edition: 978-93-5177-790-8
P-ISBN for paperback edition: 978-93-5136-578-5
Epub Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 978-93-5136-579-2
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Boria Majumdar asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work.
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