Why Satyajit Ray's Feluda stories are still so much fun to read

The adventures of Pradosh Chandra Mitter, pet name Felu, are narrated by his teenage cousin Tapesh/ Topshe. In most of the novel-length stories, they are joined by Lalmohan Ganguly, bestselling author of outrageous action thrillers under the pen name Jatayu.

The tales have three unique characteristics, one of them due to compulsion and the others by design. Ray was writing for adolescents, so he did not have the freedoms that all great mystery writers enjoyed. “To write a whodunit while keeping in mind a young readership is not an easy task, because the stories have to be kept ‘clean’,” he explained. “No illicit love, no crime passionel, and only a modicum of violence.” But he manoeuvred masterfully within this limited perimeter and no adult reader has ever cared about the absences.

To make the stories connect with the audience, Ray identified two common Bengali traits—a passion for travel and a thirst for knowledge. Feluda travels a lot—Darjeeling, Gangtok, Lucknow, Jaisalmer, Varanasi, Shimla, Kedarnath—and Topshe provides vivid but precise descriptions—the terrain, the spots to visit, the people, the history. So the stories give the reader much more than a standard whodunit. They evoke curiosity and trigger our visual imagination. Through Feluda and Topshe, we get a virtual tour of these faraway places which we may never be able to physically visit.

Ask any tour guide in Jaisalmer—he will freely admit that Sonar Kella put what was a sleepy hamlet till the early 1970s on the global tourism map.

The thirst for knowledge. Many of the novels begin with Feluda and Topshe just hanging around, waiting for the next case to present itself and Feluda talking about what he is currently reading. So the reader gets to know interesting stuff—the geometry of the universe, the theory that the pyramids in Egypt were built by extra-terrestrial beings, the weird similarities between the deaths of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Even after the detective work has begun in full earnest, bits of trivia keep popping up—like, who was it that discovered that the fingerprints of every human being are unique, or little-known facts about various well-known landmarks. Again, the reader gets more than he had paid for and the chance to impress his friends with his newfound erudition.

One hardly needs to be a Bengali to enjoy all this.

The stories follow the British detective fiction tradition. Feluda, like his creator, is a great admirer of Sherlock Holmes and sees the brain as Man’s most powerful weapon. Like Holmes, when figuring out a case, he often shuts himself off from the world for long periods. Holmes smoked a pipe and had a cocaine habit, at least for some time. Feluda smokes Charminar, a harsh unfiltered cigarette, to stimulate his brain cells. And like the resident of 221B Baker Street, he is often openly condescending towards his accomplices.

Ray’s cinema is deeply rooted in a moral attitude, though when asked about it by his biographer Andrew Robinson, he said: “I don’t like to be too articulate about it because it’s all there in the films. One has to see the films and read them... I think it’s the business of the critic to form his own conclusions. I don’t want to add footnotes to it. I’m very unwilling to do that.” The same is true for the Feluda stories.

Holmes and Hercule Poirot solve cases. Feluda too does that, but his prime commitment is to a simple code of justice. He often refuses a fee because he sees his work as the duty of any good man. When faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, he mutters through clenched teeth that the wicked must be caught and punished. He is a hero in the classical sense, much more than his illustrious fictional predecessors. Though he sees nothing wrong with doing something illegal if it serves his greater purpose.

Reading the stories again after three decades and with much wider exposure to the best detective fiction in the world, I found the plots quite satisfying. Of course, a few of them have gaping loopholes, but there are many with startling denouements. Some readers may even want to go back and re-read to check the clues that Ray/ Topshe had dropped casually on the way. For, as in all good detective stories, there are no details here that are not part of a complex jigsaw, whether it is a man’s poor handwriting or the way a name is spelt. Agatha Christie would have thoroughly approved.

There is an extra layer to the stories because everything is seen through the eyes of a teenager. Topshe is reasonably bright, very brave, and hero-worships Feluda. Yet it needs a lot of writing craft to maintain that tone of voice consistently in a narrative—a voice that is entirely without artifice and still full of wonder about the world and all its inhabitants. Only a jaded adult would perhaps be able to fully appreciate what Ray achieved. It is quite a feat since its essence is an innocence and optimism that must also stay inconspicuous.

But then, children have had a much more prominent role in Ray’s work than that of any other great film director. In many of his films, beginning right from the Apu Trilogy—Apu himself and later his son Kajal—to his last film Agantuk (The Stranger), children have been the touchstone to discover all that is good about the world. There is more to this. When asked how he always managed to get such perfect performances out of all his child actors, he replied that this was because he never looked down on their knowledge and understanding of life. He spoke to them just as he would to any adult actor, and they always got it, he said.

Finally, it is that profound sensibility that shines through all the Feluda stories, even as murders and other heinous crimes pile up, and makes them as enjoyable for any adult reader as for any 12-year-old. I cannot think of any other detective series which achieves this with such ease and grace, while serving up intricate puzzles to rack our brains over.