Feluda
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Satyajit Ray, who is famous for movies like the Apu trilogy, was also a prolific writer in the Bengali language.
His most famous written works were the exploits of Feluda, a Kolkata based Bengali detective. Feluda, whose real name was Pradosh Chander Mitter, was often accompanied in his exploits by his assistant Topshe (his cousin), and Lalmohan Ganguly, or Lalmohan Babu (commonly called Jatayu), a bumbling writer of crime fiction.
Satyajit Ray wrote thirty-five Feluda stories, most of which were extremely popular among Bengali children. Action interspersed with humour was an important aspect of the Feluda adventures. Some of the more famous ones include Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) partly set in the desert fortress of Jaisalmer in Rajasthan, and Joi Baba Felunath which was set in Varanasi. These adventures were made into movies in Bengali starring actor Soumitra Chatterjee (who had previously appeared in several of Ray's films) as Feluda. A more recent film is Bombaiyer Bombete (released Dec 2003), which stars a new set of actors, Sabyasachi Chakraborty as Feluda, Paramabrata as Topshe and Bivu Bhattacharya as Jatayu; directed by Ray's son Sandip Ray (also a film-maker), this film continued in the box office in West Bengal and Kolkata for three months. Ray Jr. has remade Satyajit Ray's Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress) with a new cast of actors.
Indeed Feluda typifies the middle class Bengali mindset's return to a somewhat eremite-type innocence by symbolizing a detective hero who is, like the Bengali middle class, a socially non-conformist and underpaid male youth, forever unemployed and perennially ineffectual in his relationships with ladies. Though Feluda upholds no doctrinaire or radical views on politics or society, his adventures and observations offer an interesting objectively inclined canvas of the post-independence India, and Naxalite and post-Naxalite Bengal.
Feluda's adventures offer an interesting commentary on socio-ethical change, and the deep psychological and sociological transformation in eastern India during the later half of the 20th century. Through Feluda, its creator Satyajit Ray captured the diverse cross-segments of the Indian (and more specifically Kolkata) society, in a dispassionate manner, while remaining firmly rooted in middle class intellectual idealism and thereby subconsciously maintaining a discreet distance from the social substratum of the malefactor.
Trivia
During the late 1980s, the detective Feluda also appeared on Indian television with actor Shashi Kapoor starring as Feluda.