Spreading Feluda fever

By Utpal Borpujari

It is not easy to convert a iconic fictional character into another format, especially if the original creator has himself not only written a large number of stories surrounding it but also made sketches of him and even made more than one feature film based on these stories.

But illustrator Tapas Guha and children’s author Subhadra Sen Gupta took up the gauntlet to do exactly that, in their case the subject being Satyajit Ray’s ever-popular detective character Feluda, which has long transcended regional boundaries thanks to English translations of the original Bengali stories as well as television series based on the stories in Hindi.

The result is a new series of Feluda Mysteries comic books, the first two of which hit the stands sometime back. Feluda was a character created by Ray to cater to a readership that could be in the age range of anywhere between teenagers to old people. And the way the stories have been lapped up by generations of people in Bengal and elsewhere is proof of the immense and enduring popularity of the Feluda stories. Readers decade after decade have fallen for the rakish charm of the detective as well as his companion characters – young cousin Topshe and friend Lalmohan Ganguli who writes crime stories with the pen name Jatayu.

The first time people outside the Bengali-speaking world became aware about the character when Ray made Sonar Kella (The Golden Fort), rated among one of the best children’s films to be made in India. Since then, Feluda has reached out to the outside world, thanks to English translations of the stories. And now, thanks to Guha and Sen Gupta’s effort, Feluda has entered the world of comic books too. Published by Puffin, the children’s book imprint of Penguin, the first two comic books – A Bagful of Mystery and Beware in the Graveyard – are based on the stories Baksho Rohosyo and Gorasthane Sabdhan. These will be followed by three more in the near future – Murder by the Sea, The Killers of Kathmandu and Danger in Darjeeling. 

“Daunting”, “nervous”, “panic” are the words bandied about by the Sen Gupta and Guha when one asks them about their first reaction when they were approached to do the comic strip, which first appeared in a Kolkata-based English daily five years ago. But an approval by Ray’s filmmaker son Sandip Ray of their sketches helped cool the nerves. And now that they are out with the first two comic books of the series, the illustrator-artiste duo, which has won quite a few awards jointly for their work, including the White Raven at award at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy for three consecutive years, is a bit relaxed.

As they look forward to the reaction from readers to Guha’s visual interpretation of the character as well as Sen Gupta’s script that has stuck to the original literature, the two are ready to discuss the finer nuances of the prestigious project. “It was a mix of delight and panic when the offer to do the series came. Feluda is our favourite detective and we felt very honoured but also got an attack of nerves because this was Satyajit Ray! Fortunately Sandip Ray approved of what we did as sample pages,” recalls Sen Gupta about her first reaction to the idea. “I felt pretty nervous in the beginning, but at the same time we were confidant as it was going to be our interpretation of Feluda,” she says, even as Guha says that as an artist his first thought was that it should be “clean, uncluttered, colorful story telling, and not depressing and confusing story telling”.

 

Going by the fact that Ray himself had illustrated Feluda’s character to go with his stories, the two devised their own ways to give their own touch to the idea. Guha based his drawings on Ray’s creations but did it in his own style, something he explains such, “Everyone’s style is like handwriting, it is very difficult to change or copy.” Sen Gupta, meanwhile, stuck to what Ray wrote, only occasionally – and very rarely – changing a location to make it visually more interesting. Ray, whose writing is as visually rich as his movies are, made it easier for them, as Sen Gupta found herself quite at home while visualizing the frames based on which she developed her script. “We have tried to keep the backdrops interesting, while the dialogues almost remain same as in the original stories,” she says.

 

Guha, a self-taught artist, brought in his own little touches to the presentation, by, for example, introducing a few female characters here and there – Ray’s originals are famous for not having any female character of note – without affecting the storyline. While Sen Gupta looked at the storyline through the eyes of Topshe, who is the narrator of all the Feluda stories, Guha took the biggest pleasure in illustrating the colourful character of Lalmohan / Jatayu.

 

As far as the reaction from those who have read the original stories in Bengali go, the two appear quite satisfied, particularly since the stories allow the readers to develop their own images in mind while the comic books would make the reader take in whatever the creators present.  Sen Gupta puts it this way, “So far the feedback has been very good, especially from kids. Also kids who have not read Feluda before are being introduced to him and I hope they will read the novels next.” Guha makes a practical point, “If there are a million readers, there will be a million different visual interpretations. If we start worrying about that, we won’t be able to do even a single frame.” Both of them have one wish though – to see the comic books getting translated to other languages. “It should come out in other languages too. For me, Feluda is regionless, timeless, ageless,” says Guha.

 

(Published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 13-12-2009)

 

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40th IFFI: Debutants shine in Indian Panorama

By Utpal Borpujari

The Indian Panorama section of the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) has over the years provided the cinema world a window to what is supposedly the best of Indian cinema of that year. It is through the Indian Panorama films that foreign film festival programmers have discovered many talents to be taken to the world stage. It is also the section that more or less captures the ups and downs of the filmmaking trends in the country’s myriad languages.

But over the years, Indian Panorama, despite still being the most-respected platform for Indian films seeking an international focus in an Indian festival, has slightly lost its sheen. This has more to do with several other film festivals assuming important proportions within India – Kolkata, Kerala, Mumbai (MAMI) for example – than to any diminishing of the Panorama’s importance. More pertinently, with Kolkata and MAMI happening before IFFI, quite a few of new Indian films get shown in these festivals before taking their bow at IFFI.

This year too, at the 40^th IFFI, the Indian Panorama presented a kaleidoscopic view of the country’s fiction cinema in all its riches as also warts. In fact, this year’s Panorama section presented a highly-uneven mixture of some fine cinema, some mediocre work and a few which shows up the country’s film movement in a not-so-positive light. Of course, finally it is for the jury – this time chaired by filmmaker Muzaffar Ali – to decide which films to include in the section, but then the selection also reflects on the jury itself. This year it was especially so as one member – Gautaman Bhaskaran – publicly questioned the jury’s decisions and alleged that two of his colleagues – Ali and producer Bobby Bedi – had not only remained absent during a large part of the selection screenings but also insisted on inclusion of specific films.

The best of this year’s lot comprised some gems from Marathi cinema – the industry, always in the shadow of the glamorous Hindi film industry in Mumbai, in recent years has thrown up quite a few excellent movies – along with some excellent works particularly in Konkani, Bengali and Hindi. The Panorama comprised 26 films, including five picked from a shortlist of commercial fare sent in by the Film Federation of India, a practice started since last year after the abolition of the Indian Mainstream section, though the Directorate of Film Festivals for some reason chose not to mark them out as so, unfairly for the 21 that got selected competing with about 100 others as against this “quota” for the mainstream.

The best of the lot this year, without doubt, was Laxmikant Shetgaonkar’s Konkani film Paltadcho Manis (The Man Beyond the Bridge), an almost meditative film which has proved that the young filmmaker is a major hope for Indian cinema, provided he can live up to the promise he has shown in this film. Set in the thick forests of Karnataka-Goa border, the story takes one to the life of Vinayak, a lonely forest guard and his relationship with a mentally-unsound woman. Through the story, the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC)-produced film raises questions regarding morality and ethics as practised by the society as well as its sense of responsibility towards the hapless.

If it gave the perfect start to the Indian Panorama as the opening film of the section, the package shone through several other efforts, significantly, like Shetgaonkar’s, all by first-time directors. Satish Manwar’s Gabhricha Paus (The Damned Rain) in Marathi and Atanu Ghosh’s Angshumaner Chhobi (A Film Made by Angshuman) in Bengali, both India’s entries to the IFFI’s competition section, along with Paresh Mokashi’s Harishchandrachi Factory in Marathi, were definitely the top of the lot in the section where there were works by 11 first-time directors.

Manwar’s film marks the emergence of another powerful voice in the already-shining Marathi film industry, as it uses black humour to tell the story of farmers’ suicides, the biggest tragedy to hit many parts of rural India, and more particularly of Vidarbha region in Maharashtra, in recent years. The film opens with scenes of a farmer committing suicide, followed by how the worried wife and mother of another debt-ridden farmer decides to keep an eye on him, fearing he too might end his life. A powerful portrayal of our times, it also serves up as a strong contrast to the mainstream cinema which has almost forgotten to depict rural India barring stray exceptions, and does that in a way which is neither didactic nor preachy. On the other hand, Ghosh’s film takes one into the complex world of the human mind through the story of a young filmmaker who wants to make a film with a retired actor and a recalcitrant actress despite their reluctance to come on screen. Slightly weakened by an unnecessary lengthy murder investigation subplot, the film succeeds largely to an otherwise nuanced screenplay and superb acting the thespian Soumitra Chatterjee, Indrani Haldar, Indraneil Sengupta and Tota Roychowdhury.

Mokashi’s film, on the other hand, takes one in a roller coaster ride, using comedy to recreate the story of how Dada Saheb Phalke had made India’s first film, Raja Harishchandra. The film, India’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award in 2010, effectively uses humour to tell what is perhaps the most-important story of Indian cinema’s birth. The other first timers who impressed with their work are Sona Jain, whose For Real (English), starring Sarita Choudhury of Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and Kama Sutra fame, explores how young minds are impacted by disharmony among adults at home, and Aijaz Khan, whose The White Elephant (Hindi), despite the awkwardness of using Malayalam words for the authenticity-effect, pleases one to a great extent through its a fable-like story set in Kerala and starring Tannishtha Chatterjee and Prroshanth Narayanan.

Some of the other Panorama films that impressed were Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukhthankar’s Ek Cup Chya (A Cup of Tea) (Marathi), which sets a fine example of how an activist film should be made through its story of a lowly-placed government servant’s use of the Right to Information (RTI) Act to fight the system, debutant Avantika Hari’s Land Gold Woman (English) which brings alive the social malaise of honour killings among some South Asian communities in Britain, and Nandita Das’ Firaaq (Hindi) that took a sensitive look at the scars left in individual minds by communal violence. Also impressive was Aniruddhar Roy Chowdhury’s Antaheen (The Endless Wait) (Bengali), a take on relationships in an urban backdrop uplifted by the dignified acting of Sharmila Tagore, Aparna Sen, Rahul Bose and Radhika Apte.

But the weaker links in this year’s Panorama, unfortunately came from the veterans. Be it M S Sathyu’s Ijjodu (Kannada) or Shaji N Karun’s Kutty Srank (Malayalam), viewers were left asking if they are from the same masters who gave us classics like Garam Hawa and Piravi but now have given us meandering executions of interesting premises. Comparatively, another veteran Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Janala (Window) stimulated the senses better, though he too could be charged with being repetitive with certain signature motifs of his. Rituparno Ghosh’s Shob Charitro Kalponik, starring Bipasha Basu and Projenjit, despite being quite verbose as his recent works has been, provided viewers with a world that scratches more than the surface of relationships. In contrast, a few of the mainstream “quota” entries, usually the weakest links in the package, this year provided a window to fresh ideas at work in the Hindi industry – be in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, Dibakar Banerjee’s Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye! and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey.

(Published in Deccan Herald, www.deccanherald.com, www.deccanheraldepaper.com, 13-12-2009)

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