Feluda @ 50 Read online

  As early as in the third of his long chain of Feluda stories and novels – Kailash Choudhuryr Pathor – Satyajit Ray suggests that the young protagonist of the story, so far moonlighting as a detective, has decided to take the plunge. The story begins with this particular piece of information.

  The card-flashing investigator, like Bengali gentry more generally, doesn’t mind being called – or even publicly known – by his nickname ‘Felu’. It is suffixed with the Bengali honorific ‘da’, used to denote a person who is considered an elder brother, either by virtue of familial relation or just non-familial reverence.1

  Although it is not clear what the job might be, in the first two stories, Feluda is described as holding a salaried job, like so many Bengalis of his background. However, in the third one, he appears to have taken up the job of a private investigator as his profession.2 In the first two stories, Feluda was in Darjeeling and Lucknow (to solve the mysteries, eventually) only because he was on leave. There is no mention of a job in the third story, Kaliash Choudhuryr Pathor. So there is the double bind of a certain objective presence (visiting card) and an informational absence (that he’d been on leave from his service) to confirm the theory. However, neither in this story nor in the entire Feluda corpus is there concrete confirmation of his resignation from that job.

  Nevertheless, the fact remains that this particular story onwards, there are direct or oblique references to his stature as a professional private detective.

  2.

  The third Feluda story was written and published in 1967. In hindsight, it is a fairly unusual year for a Bengali youth (that too based in Calcutta then) to leave an (apparently) permanent job only to pursue the uncertain career of a private investigator. It is, after all, the year that marks the formal beginning of a tumultuous phase in the history of West Bengal. Before we explore that, here’s a proposition.

  The extraordinary case of Mr Pradosh C. Mitter has, among other things, a significant non-presence of the real. This is not meant to undermine either the sleuth’s formidable powers of observation, or the author-director’s legendary eye for detail. On the contrary, these qualities construct the reality of these stories.

  Still, this determination to keep Feluda cocooned from the contemporary realities of the time is intriguing in the sense that it is both diegetic and non-diegetic. The sleuth and his sidekick live in Calcutta, and some of the action plays out there. The Calcutta (as the city was called then) of the stories – described in meticulous detail – was not the dystopic city space that people of the time actually lived in. With the complex network of roads, lanes and by-lanes consistent and accurate, the urban topography has never been misrepresented.

  Feluda has a deep veneration for history. The past is a space Ray does not tamper with. For him, as also for the sleuth he has created, history is the repository of truths that people do not adequately regard. Feluda, in one case after another, finds ways to negotiate with the past. Be it digging the physical space of a grave (Gorosthane Sabdhan) or the non-physical space of a riddle that contains a piece of semantic history (Ghurghutiyar Ghatona) or a boy who remembers his earlier incarnation (Sonar Kella), all of these stories maintain an interesting engagement with the past.

  The problem lies with the present. Rather with the representation of the present. Given the socio-politico-economic setting of the protagonists’ circumstances and times, those who people the story are quite plausibly fashioned. The class divide of the Bengali societal structure is perfectly in place. Both the detective and his clients, across rural and urban longitudes, bank on the unorganized labour force (the servant) to run the daily chores, for instance.3

  The social upheavals, however, are carefully left out. The power shortage and the traffic snarls are the only menaces that Feluda has to deal with in the city. Thus, the city-in-text turns into a cultural imaginary that readers, unaware of the goings on in West Bengal circa 1965, have hardly any problem negotiating with.

  The manner of the crimes and Feluda’s mode of investigation do not need him to engage with the larger frame of the society in the way his famous predecessor Byomkesh Bakshi used to do. The world of Feluda is unidimensional. The stories, in sync with the whodunit tradition, typically end with a congregation of all the principal characters, so that Feluda can explain his deductions step by step and identify the criminal for everyone’s benefit. The tradition of the great deductive logic allows Feluda to stage a replica of the courtroom, where the criminal is bodily located by the judiciary and a sentence is passed. In the Feluda stories, both the judiciary and the legal–administrative arm collapse on to the single body space of Feluda himself. He embodies (rather literally) both the prowess of the executive that brings the criminal to book and the ethico-legal power of the judiciary that pronounces the verdict.

  Interestingly, the deductive reasoning he deploys with the help of his magajastro (brain-as-weapon) is structurally the top-down logic in which the process of reasoning proceeds from one or more premises to arrive at a conclusion. The certainty here is logically inviolable, since the logic connects premises with conclusions. If the premises are true, the terms are clearly laid out and the rules of the (deductive) game are unerringly adhered to, the conclusion arrived at is necessarily true.

  The process is visibly a reductive one. Reaching a conclusion requires a few indispensable steps. First, applying general rules that exhaustively embrace a closed field of discourse. Second, narrowing the choice under consideration gradually until only the conclusion is left, thereby ruling out any scope for ambiguity. Feluda, however, takes this reductionism to a level where the criminal, almost abstracted from the societal fabric he lives in, is not just identified with his crime, but reduced to it.4

  This narrative mode allows the author to manoeuvre without risking negotiating the larger picture. The criminal is operating in a rather claustrophobic world exclusively inhabited by the protagonist(s) of the story. The first-person narrative of the teenage cousin narrator allows the reader only a strictly truncated version of the socio-spatial interactions that the criminal and the detective engage with. Nevertheless, with a neatly etched certainty that befits a fairy tale, the investigation nails the criminal without allowing any moment of undecidability to come into play.5 The crimes are so acrimoniously engineered and the criminal so unilaterally motivated that there can be no slippage of meaning.

  Unless the reader is voyeuristic enough to search for peephole(s) in the story – and thereby break the holy textual contract with the author, not to go beyond the lakshmanrekha – there is nothing in the text that will arouse unease with the portrayal of the city. So, once the limitations set by the author himself are duly accommodated, the non-presence of the real, one might argue, does not disturb the flow of the story.

  Now what if one foregrounded the question of time vis-à-vis the space of Calcutta? If such a thing is done, the stories of Feluda, more often than not, will be found offering an archaic amalgamation of time and space. It’s a Calcutta with certain sections of its history under erasure. History, it has been noted, has been a mainstay of Feluda series, yet it has always preferred to leave out the politico-social movements that had been contemporaneous with the years the stories were written. The narrativized reality there is often an impenetrable one, with a particular set of the insignia of the contemporary filtered out or excluded meticulously.

  The contours of the exclusion are significant, because these stories are not set in any temporal imaginary. The coordinates of time remain mostly specified. Especially the first few stories of Feluda have narratives that live the time concurrent to its writing. For example, the second one of Feluda’s adventures, Badshahi Angti, was written in 1966. The story, we gather, plays out in that year too. The villain of the story, Banbehari Chaudhury, says that he had settled down in the city of Lucknow in 1963. And Dr Srivastava, another significant character, says that Chaudhury has been in Lucknow for the past two or three years. Ascertaining the specific year of the goings on in th
e narrative is a mere calculation: 1966.6 An analysis of the plot suggests that at least the first few stories are synchronic with the time they were being written.

  The third story, Kailash Choudhuryr Pathor, written in 1967, is thus probably set in that year too. There is a fair bit of cityscape woven into its narrative – a perfectly sanitized space, with absolutely no sign of the socio-political disorder of the time.

  In more ways than one, this particular story is a microcosm of the entire oeuvre of Feluda’s exploits. The space is purged of all troubles save the crime that Feluda deals with.

  3.

  ‘By the mid-1960s the city had changed very substantially from the one in which Satyajit grew up. First there had been the effects of the war and the Famine, then riots, the loss of East Bengal to Pakistan at Partition and an influx of refugees, followed by the gradual rundown of the city as a port and industrial base…’ writes Andrew Robinson while recounting the run-up to Ray’s famous Calcutta trilogy. Further:

  By 1966 an economic crisis was ready to boil over. In March a food movement led to raids on grain shops and many deaths through police firings, followed by widespread strikes and student unrest. The Communists had already captured the students’ union at Presidency College … and the college was soon drawn into the conflict; in December, Calcutta University had to close for the first time in its 110 years of existence.7

  The hegemony of the Indian National Congress, hitherto almost unrivalled in West Bengal polity, had begun to come under threat. The Left was gaining strength, quickly ushering in a new political regime in February 1967. The first non-Congress government, named United Front – comprising the pro-Moscow Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and a breakaway faction from the Congress – was sworn into power. The months that followed led to the historic skirmish between villagers and the police in a hamlet called Naxalbari. A policeman was killed, and in retaliation, nine villagers were gunned down, triggering a wave of events that were to have a metamorphic impression on the lexicon of (armed) revolution in India. The spatial repercussion of the unrest didn’t take long to reach the capital (and virtually the only) city of West Bengal.

  The students had already been upset with the existing system. A Union home ministry review (December 1965) noted that ‘student indiscipline’ was on a steep and alarming rise. The reasons it listed are significant: (1) lack of proper academic ambience; (2) absence of respect for authority: parental, educational and governmental; (3) ideological dissatisfaction; (4) political indifference. Added to these was the severe dearth of suitable employment opportunities. Not very unexpectedly, then, incidences of student agitation jumped from 271 in 1965 to 607 in 1966, with 42 per cent of the cases taking a violent turn.8

  The city of Calcutta was far from the peaceful one chronicled in the stories of Feluda. So was the larger space of West Bengal. And Satyajit Ray was evidently there – if not in the thick of it, visibly drawn towards the vortex of unrest.

  As Andrew Robinson notes:

  Ray rarely mounted a public platform in support of a cause but in 1966 he agreed to lead a huge silent procession in protest at the Government’s imprisonment of demonstrators without trial during the food movement, when many others were afraid to speak out. ‘At every such moment you can rely on him to do the right thing, without rhetoric. This is something I find admirable. He needn’t do it,’ said Utpal Dutta … the next day the Communists set up huge hoardings with Ray’s name and appeal printed on them.9

  Around this time a rally against the Vietnam War in Calcutta saw Ray joining strides with other protesters and reading out an international appeal. Robinson has him reflecting on why he did what he did:

  I would probably have stayed at home, because I’m built differently. But there were so many of my friends involved, I said, ‘All right. I’ll come.’ I believed in what was being done. I wasn’t merely assuming an attitude. It’s not that. But it is just not me. I don’t like taking part in public rallies. I’m very much a private person.10

  The situation, however, did not allow him to remain so, since by that time the agitating public – to whom he belonged ideologically at least – had already turned him into an investment that was widely held to be having an appeal, especially to a vast section of the Bengali middle class across political standpoints. Robinson quotes Utpal Dutta saying, ‘One may say that the ruling party lost a lot of its support because Ray had decided to hit.’11

  The assembly election that followed found the Congress losing to the United Front in 1967. Ray was happy at the result and had high hopes for the new incumbent, Robinson writes, only to be shocked at how the situation had begun to unfold after just a couple of months. The election was in February and in July he wrote to Marie Seton: ‘The political situation is getting so rough here that I’m beginning to worry about any Calcutta [film] project.’12

  It is in this politico-social scenario that Prodosh Chandra Mitter decided to take up the profession of a private investigator.

  4.

  The modus operandi of detective fiction can be of two basic categories. One that serves to locate the crime (and criminality) as essentially external to the seeker of the truth, i.e., the detective. Another that returns the reader back to the originary threshold of meaning and being of the crime and manages to undercut its socially endorsed taxonomy. In other words, it seeks to undermine the distinct categorization of the criminal and the innocent. Clearly, this is not what the stories of Feluda aspire to. Nor is there what Julia Kristeva, in her detective fiction, introduces as the ‘proper inquiry’. This is the tool that Kristeva brings in to destabilize the process of othering the criminal.

  S.K. Keltner observes:

  The ‘proper inquiry’ of detective fiction … engages the subject’s identity uncertainties. The quest for meaning can simultaneously challenge and transform the spectacular ego. In this, it differs from the spectacle of detective fiction in so far as the subject comes to recognize impurity, criminality, evil not as distinct from herself or himself – that is, as the Other – but as part and parcel of one’s own untenable identity.13

  While Kristeva tries to foreground the irreducibility of the crime to specific individual/s, in Feluda stories it is perfectly reducible to the criminal detected and bodily located at the end. The technology of the self (of the detective) here is essentially constituted vis-à-vis the other (or the criminal). Jeopardizing this classificatory arrangement would have undercut the moral architecture of the story, scheduled to be published in a children’s magazine.

  Interestingly, when Feluda stories began to appear in an adult literary magazine a few years later, Ray refused to incorporate materials (and modes) that would befit a crime story meant for the consumption of the adults. He conceded that writing detective stories with things like simple thefts was a huge limitation, but maintained that Feluda stories would have no adult crime per se. In an interview given around four years before his demise to Sanjib Chattopadhyay, another celebrity litterateur, Ray is ruthlessly candid regarding the positioning of the Feluda stories:

  Satyajit Ray (hereafter SR): There is a problem, you know. Had I not been compelled to keep the teenage audience in mind, writing Feluda stories would have been a lot easier. Can’t help it, you know, I can’t wipe out the teenage readers of Feluda, and therefore need to be very careful about the content. I can’t afford to write about a wide spectrum of crime. Have to restrict myself to things like simple theft.

  Sanjib Chattopadhyay (hereafter SC): You mean something beyond curios, antics, art objects …

  SR: Like illicit affairs …

  SC: Or sexual violence?

  SR: Right. Just can’t think of having such things in Feluda. To my mind, this is a huge hindrance for a detective story writer.

  SC: A limitation …

  SR: Serious limitation, I must say. This is precisely why I’ve stopped writing Feluda in Desh (annual autumn number) every year. Now I write every alternate year.

  SC
: That is, I presume, for the sake of Sandesh.

  SR: Not at all. This is because I can’t come up with an adequate plot each year.

  SC: How about writing a detective story for the adult audience?

  SR: I’m afraid that’s going to leave my countless teenage fans utterly disappointed.

  SC: But they have something for them, don’t they?

  SR: They do, but they’re going to demand an explanation. One story a year means they’ll be left high and dry the year I write for adults. Honestly, writing more than one detective story a year is beyond my capability.

  SC: No, but the year you write a detective novel for Desh, can’t you make it an adult one?

  SR: In that case, I’m going to be blamed straightaway for not writing a Feluda instead.

  SC: Well, that’s true. We, adults, do read your Feluda stories in autumn number.

  SR: Yes, I know. Whatever I’ve written so far has been read by people across ages. Not just the children, the adults too.14

  The conversation is revelatory, making clear that the authorial gaze necessarily involves a rule of exclusion. What he can bring into the narrative is effectively guided (and censured) by what he cannot. Feluda is not permitted to deal with something beyond theft, forgery or solving a riddle. Undeniably, there can well be sexual motivations even behind all these apparently innocent crimes, but the author is determined to weave a charm that is diegetically sexless.

  5.

  Nonetheless, the crime record of 1967 shows Feluda had good reason for turning pro, since there had been an upsurge in the sort of crimes that he was destined to deal with – both in the larger space of India, and in West Bengal. A closer look at the figures can dig out some interesting facts.

  Table 1 shows the upwardly mobile trend of all types of cognizable offences in the country. As the dossier records: ‘During the year under review (1967), a total number of 881,981 cases of cognizable offences (under the Indian Penal Code) were reported in India as against 794,733 during 1966, recording an increase of 11 per cent over the previous year.’15