The Bengali Sherlock Holmes
The funerals of cultural icons always lean towards Grand Guignol rather than mere street theatre. Ray's cremation was no exception. One of the fallouts was the sacking of the Calcutta police commissioner who was publicly exposed as "the elder brother" of cremation ground hoodlums. But, more pertinently from the point of view of the cultural historian, the three-hour procession route was lined with children who held up their copies of Sandesh and the "Feluda/Professor Shonku" opus and wept unashamedly.
For, cultural icon and Oscar-winner for lifetime achievement he may have been, but Satyajit Ray made his bread and butter as a writer. His plots and themes were derivative, but they were derived from the most enduring and popular themes of English genre literature. He also filled a niche in Bengali fiction which had never truly been addressed before.
He drew his inspiration directly from his own childhood when he devoured Holmes and Challenger. He also used that fabled eye for intimate detail to adapt his characters and plots to the Bengali Bhadralok ethos. Sadly for his peers, he also wrote idiosyncratic Bengali -- simple, unadorned, and so close to the style of the Calcutta streets.
Through something like three decades, his Feluda stories were serialised in his family magazine "Sandesh". They were also compiled and sold as stand-alones. Several of them were picturised with great success -- there is a very strong case for rating "Sonar Kella" as the most perfect movie Ray made.
The Feluda stories have a simple structure. There is Prodosh Mitter aka Feluda the tall, hawk-nosed, Charminar-smoking private detective with his preternatural powers of observation and deduction. There is his admiring young cousin and assistant Tapesh who plays Watson to his Holmes. After Sonar Kellah, there was also the magnificently successful and original character of pot-boiler writer, Lalmohan Ganguly alias Jatayu, who tagged along and often financed their trips to standard Bengali tourist locales. There is also a scattering of police officers playing variations on Lestrade and Gregson, who either cooperate with, or occasionally sneer at, Feluda.
One of two things would happen to the three musketeers as Jatayu called them. Either someone would come with a strange story to Feluda's residence and the plot would thereafter thicken. Or else, they would push off on holiday to some spot much-beloved of the Bengali tourist such as Darjeeling, Jaisalmer, Hardwar, Kathmandu, Benaras etc. There something peculiar would occur, and the trip would degenerate into a busman's holiday. While the denouement would be entirely predictable, the attention to detail and the little touches of Bengaliana were major redeeming features. So were the throwaway touches that revealed Ray's extraordinary knowledge about art, music, history, antiques, science and film.
Three out of these six stories are set in Calcutta and its suburban environs, the other three in Puri, Kedarnath and Darjeeling. The title story deals with a scam involving rare manuscripts from an eccentric's collection, `Napoleon's letter' involves the murder of another eccentric art collector and `the disappearance of Ambar Sen' is a kidnapping gone sour. `Crime in Kedarnath' is the story of a Sadhu who owns a fabulous piece of jewellery. `The Acharya murder case' and `Murder in the mountains' are both murders with the usual tangle of suspects and motives. They were written between 1979 and 1986 with Calcutta reeling from power-cuts and `fabulously wealthy' movie script writers being paid Rs 20,000.
Unfortunately the Feluda stories suffered heavily in translation. Sadly, the completely bilingual Ray never bothered to undertake this exercise himself. Neither Chitrita Banerjee who did an earlier collection, nor Gopa Majumder who translated this set, ever come close to the author's easy, yet fast-flowing, style which mirrors the mind of a bright adolescent. Instead, the language comes through as somewhat laboured and pedestrian - but then, Bengali translates abysmally into English anyway. So much so that it's always been a source of wonder how Tagore got the Nobel on the basis of his translated work.
More indictable are the abysmal editing standards of this book. When "son"' transmutes into "soon" and "won" become "worn" and "Mrs" becomes "Mr" in mid-sentence with montonous regularity, it becomes rather tedious. Given that Penguin isn't exactly a bucket-shop imprimature, and Ray wasn't exactly an unknown first-timer, one does expect a little better for two hundred rupees.
However, for children who haven't ever accessed Ray in the original, or Conan-Doyle in any great detail, the collection is passably entertaining. It also gives an insight into the Bengali Bhadralok ethos which may soon be a thing of the past. The House of Death and Other Feluda Stories
Satyajit Ray Penguin (India) Rs 200/412 pages