Weaving Fiction from Facts in the Adventures of Feluda

Abstract

This paper seeks to study select adventures of Feluda (Pradosh C. Mitter), Satyajit Ray’s private detective created in 1965. For over two centuries, since the 1890 s, the popular literature of Bengal (India) has been featuring detectives in the detective story called “Goenda Kahini” in Bangla. An acclaimed Bengali litterateur and one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Ray penned 35 adventures on his detective between 1965 and 1990. Initially created for a children’s magazine “Sandesh,” these adventures along with the magazine’s transformation gradually followed a more serious tone. Written in postcolonial India, the time frame of the stories is the 1960s and the 70 s. The texts that this paper proposes to study reflect the social milieu in the aftermath of India’s independence – the latent conflicts dealing with stark reality embedded in the narratives that apparently appear innocently fictitious to the readers now. The paper attempts to study beyond the Whodunit crime-inquest-discovery pattern. It looks into aspects of the adventures that go beyond the genre of detective fiction per se. The stories are not merely about crime and criminals; they are excellent travelogues, adventure stories, a source of interesting information about a diverse range of things – history, places, nature, literature, society and culture. The paper argues that these adventures of crime draw to a large extent from the realm of truth – social stigmas and the dark underworld of dons, narcotic mafias and smugglers of the times. Further, the stories based on the actual crises of the fast-fading old-world gentility of the educated Bengali middle-class of the 1960s and the 70 s; the picture of old Calcutta, make the crime narratives of Feluda, an overwhelming metamorphic presentation of fact to fiction.