Filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray's crime-solving, yoga-following, six-foot creation Pradosh Chandra Mitter is back. Only this time, he's headed for the hilly locales of Darjeeling and Kathmandu. Will the private eye, known for prioritising brain over brawn, manage to win the hearts of readers?
Filmmaker and writer Satyajit Ray's crime-solving, yoga-following, six-foot creation Pradosh Chandra Mitter is back. Only this time, he's headed for the hilly locales of Darjeeling and Kathmandu. Will the private eye, known for prioritising brain over brawn, manage to win the hearts of readers?
He's still good-looking, only younger, and he's headed for Darjeeling and Kathmandu in the latest adventures in the comic book series published by the Penguin Group.
In Danger in Darjeeling, Lalmohan Ganguli, who writes under the pseudonym Jatayu, is invited on location for a Bollywood film that's based on one of his novels.
By extension, Feluda and his cousin Topshe are also invited. Once there, things take a turn for the worse, and the trio are called on to solve not just one, but two murders.
In A Killer in Kathmandu, Feluda must confront his greatest adversary, Maganlal Meghraj, in the capital of Nepal, while investigating a murder, and is accompanied by Topshe and Lalmohan.
Back to the drawing board
For Subhadra Sen Gupta, the scriptwriter for the series, the challenges of adapting the popular stories and novels into comic-book form were numerous. "People think that all we do is take dialogues from the book and put them in balloons, but it doesn't work that way," says Subhadra, over the phone from Delhi.
"My job is to turn the action in a story into dialogue, using a maximum of 25 words.
At times (in the original) when the characters are just sitting and talking or drinking coffee, I have to bring in the action, visualising the frames as I go along," she explains.
It's easy then to see how the creative restraints of the form make fleshing out the characters such a challenge.
"Writing a comic strip is tougher than writing a story," says Subhadra. Considering she's done both -- written stories (she has over 25 books to her credit) and created a comic strip, Time Travellers, which ran in the '90s in a national newspaper -- she would know.
Inspiration: Tintin
Delhi-based Tapas Guha, who has done the illustrations for the series, and who has worked with Subhadra for almost two decades, says that the similarities to Belgian artist Georges R ufffdmi's The Adventures of Tintin is not mere coincidence. "I grew up with Tintin, so I guess it crept into my subconscious," he quips, adding, "I like to keep my illustrations clean and neat, which is essential to comic illustrations.
Besides, Ray was also a fan of Tintin."When asked about the similarities in appearance between Jatayu and the Thompson twins of the Tintin series, Tapas responds, "The character is based on Santosh Dutta (the Bengali character-actor, who immortalised the role of Jatayu in Ray's Feluda movies). He actually looked like that."
Unfit role model?
But the private eye, who emphasised the use of 'magajastra' or 'brain-weapon' over brawn, and influenced generations of readers growing up in the '70s, might be considered an unfit role model today, given his habit for smoking. "Political correctness didn't matter at the time. Ray was not trying to create role models, he was just telling a story," responds Subhadra, adding that the smoking has been kept to a minimum in the series.
Asked whether adapting Satyajit Ray's work made the task more daunting, Tapas responds, "I try not to think about people's expectations. I do my best, and then keep my fingers crossed." For Subhadra, though, things were not as simple. She says, "In the beginning, I was very scared. Here was a character that I had grown up reading, someone I had idolised... But my hope is that kids will read these books, and then go buy the novels written by Ray, because those are the real thing."
Satyajit Ray's Feluda Mysteries; Puffin Books; Rs 99 (each). Available at leading bookstores.
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