{"id":261,"date":"2012-07-05T15:36:43","date_gmt":"2012-07-05T15:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landc.wpengine.com\/silhouette\/?p=261"},"modified":"2020-05-17T16:19:30","modified_gmt":"2020-05-17T10:49:30","slug":"feluda-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/feluda-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Feluda Works"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Royal<\/a>

Royal Bengal Rahasya<\/a>, a film by Sandip Ray on the Feluda Series<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cFeluda is back\u201d -the large sized cut out created the hype of an upcoming Feluda flick months before the theatrical release of Royal Bengal Rahasya<\/em> at the lobby of a posh south Kolkata cinema hall.<\/p>\n

And the romance began- the posters, talk shows, star interviews took part in making us well-informed about this would-be-released film.<\/p>\n

We waited for it like other yearly ceremonies and like many other Decembers this time too we experienced a new Feluda movie with a package of family entertainment in it. Some of us enjoyed every moment of it and some did not like it.<\/p>\n

But Feluda did not suffer for this, as he knew from the very beginning this won\u2019t harm his box office. Thanks to Satyajit Ray\u2019s legendary literary creation and Sandip Ray\u2019s film making talent that combine into this kind of yearly celebration for us, the common viewers of Bengali cinema.<\/p>\n

But is it the only reason working behind the success of each of these productions? Is it simple love for this fictitious Bengali detective, (Sandip) Ray\u2019s packaging technique or mere coincidences that each of his Feluda flicks became a super hit?<\/p>\n

I think the reason lies beyond these filmic texts and more with the idea of filming and viewing a Feluda film. I think this is a question that works beyond any liking\/ disliking.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not denying that Feluda cult and his characterization acts as an obvious USP besides each of the plots and its whodunit mystery. But I feel that Feluda as a character and its cultic status perhaps generates its pleasure beyond its filmic appeal.<\/p>\n

The word ‘cult’ in popular usage refers to system of ritual practices and devotion directed toward a particular figure or object. From ancient literature to modernist cinema, from avant garde art to trendy computer gaming – the term ‘cult’, has multiple overlapping and contradictory meanings in both scholarly and popular usage.<\/p>\n

Umberto Eco defines ‘cult’ as something that would provide a private world to its fans so that they can quote characters and episodes from it, can make up quizzes, play games and have pleasures in sharing each others\u2019 knowledge and expertise. Does Feluda really provide that world or corresponds to that kind of eccentric obsessive fan following that a cult text is generally associated with? I doubt this.<\/p>\n

Let us look back a bit earlier towards the birth of \u2018Feluda cult\u2019 in Bengal\u2019s cultural history. Feluda first appeared in Sandesh<\/em> in 1965 in Satyajit Ray\u2019s novel Feludar Goyendagiri<\/em> followed by a series of Feluda stories in next two decades.<\/p>\n

\"Satyajit

Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella, the first of the two films he made on the Feluda series<\/p><\/div>\n

And later Ray himself extends the fantasy in its filmic avatar with Sonar Kella<\/em> and Joy Baba Felunath<\/em> in the 1980s. That was more of corresponding to a popular literary character in a different medium.<\/p>\n

But we also need to be aware of the 1980s\u2019 scenario in the Bengali film history. The 1980s is an interesting juncture in the Bengali film history when the film practice in general responded with multiple generic formulations and their popularity. The 1980s offers a gamut of trial and error methods across the Bengali film industry when a diverse range of Bengali films released with their makers and producers coming from different backgrounds, and dissimilar perspectives.<\/p>\n

Children\u2019s film became an important film genre with Feluda and some other works mainly because of the use of colour film technology that became the dominant mode of Bengali film making practice in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

But along with that these films also provided an easy solution of the crisis of bhadralok<\/em> literary filmic practice. In this period the popular mode of bhadralok<\/em> Bengali cinema neither finds a shelter in a Dakhal<\/em> or a Grihajuddha<\/em> of the Bengali New Wave filmmakers nor could claim Anjan Chowdhury\u2019s films as its own.<\/p>\n

Beyond cinema and cinematic practice this is also a period when the bhadra<\/em> elite class of Bengal was facing a crisis of their literary selves\u00a0and the newspapers and journals in this period largely discussed this crisis. Midst of this crisis of Bengali literary self of the bhadralok class<\/em>, Feluda and some other literary adaptations started responding.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, when the global aspiration led the Bombay cinema towards a brand name Bollywood and its branding strategies, the domain of Bengali cinema increasingly confined itself in a binary of southern film remakes and an alternative \u2018arty\u2019 variety of some bhadralok<\/em> relationship films (in popular parlance \u201csamparker chhobi\u201d<\/em>).<\/p>\n

In this decade the crisis with the literary self continued and it functioned as a nostalgia for a self lost in contemporary reality. This nostalgic desire led to an attempt to reclaim that \u2018lost\u2019 glory of bhadralok<\/em> literary culture and its literary cinema. In media discourses this memorializing gesture and the idea of a \u2018glorious past\u2019 became an important factor to construct and highlight the idea of bhadralok<\/em> self.<\/p>\n

In case of bhadralok<\/em> cinema discourses of the 1990s the narrative that got constructed took the form that \u2018our\u2019 (Bengali literary) cinema that was \u2018lost\u2019 from film viewing practice for more than a decade started getting reclaimed through the \u2018parallel\u2019 circuit\u2019s conscious alignment to a past cinematic practice, through directorial position, film aesthetics and the pleasure generated through film texts.<\/p>\n

Some Bengali film makers who started their film making career in the mid-late 1990s experienced an industrial set up where those “good (read literary) old Bengali films” had ceased to exist. In their films they therefore revisited their cinematic upbringing and their experience of growing up in those \u2018glorious\u2019 days of Bengali cinema.<\/p>\n

So the \u2018memory\u2019 of a cinematic upbringing of not only some of the filmmakers, but also that of producers, part of the industry crew, and newspaper journalists contributed to a discourse of this cinematic practice being in its very essence a continuation of the \u2018glorious\u2019 past of \u2018meaningful\u2019 Bengali films.<\/p>\n

This discourse exceeded the personal memories of some individuals related to film making, production, marketing and the press circuit, and worked within and beyond to an \u2018illusion\u2019 of a common public memory that belonged to the imagination of the cinema of a particular class and its taste discourse. Feluda as an icon and also as an idea became crucial in that practice.<\/p>\n

When we talk of re-birth of Feluda on screen with Sandip Ray\u2019s adaptations of Satyajit Ray\u2019s Feluda<\/em> stories<\/a> we discuss the populist strategy of old wine in a new bottle largely. But this is not simply a question of old wine and new bottle strategy, because in case of Sandip Ray\u2019s films we are not buying the wine in spite of its old and used status but for this very status.<\/p>\n

\"Feluda<\/a>

The pleasure of watching the latest Feluda film comes from its nostalgic appeal.<\/p><\/div>\n

Feluda generates that nostalgic pleasure of the Anandamela<\/em> generation who has grown up with Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay novels and Tintin<\/em> comics.<\/p>\n

But the pleasure also works beyond this nostalgia mode and acts as an aspiration. The aspirational pleasure of Feluda films functions on an intersecting plane of Bengali literary world, Satyajit Ray and our desire for that literaryness.<\/p>\n

The Feluda posters, publicity hypes and even the review columns of popular daily speak of a Bengali adolescence immersed in reading Feluda stories, and novels in pujabarshiki<\/em>\u00a0(Durga Puja Special) issues of Sharodiya Desh <\/em>and Anandamela<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Satyajit

Satyajit Ray with Soumitra Chatterjee during the shooting of Joy Baba Felunath at the Kedar Ghat in Benaras
(Pic: From Internet<\/a>)<\/p><\/div>\n

Perhaps this regeneration of lost childhood pleasure in popular public sphere is less of re-generation and more of re-creation of a reality. What I mean is that here the nostalgia not only works as a desire for an unchanged lost reality of some of us that we want to rediscover but also as a text to be constructed for some other viewers. Recent memory studies have demonstrated how memory has taken part in contemporary times in shaping our cultural imagination and individual desires and theorists like Andreas Huyssen relates memory\u2019s contemporary resurgence in the post modern context to a \u2018crisis\u2019 in the ideologies of progress and the idea of modernization and the loss of faith in technological advancement.<\/p>\n

Memory simply seen as the recording of \u2018what happened\u2019 has been further problematized and the general belief regarding memory that it is unchanging and only its value changes in different periods has been questioned in memory studies.<\/p>\n

Nicola King\u2019s account shows how memory can work as a \u2018text to be deciphered\u2019 and not always an (unchanged) \u2018lost reality to be rediscovered\u2019. Hence our the nostalgic drive always is not in built in our past realities but longed in our desires to construct a memory.<\/p>\n

Similarly the nostalgic appeal of Feluda films might partly comes from an attempt to regain some of its viewers\u2019 lost childhood days, but largely corresponds to a constructed memory. That desired childhood and adolescence days few of us might have spent but most of us are just motivated to desire.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more like an aspiration of having and losing a literary self of us that we never had actually. It\u2019s nostalgia for a make belief world of past that we did not have but what we would love to reclaim. Perhaps the popularity of Feluda films is a story more about a response to this cultural crisis of a class and less of its own journey.<\/p>\n

It is not only a Feluda film that offers this dual model of aspiration and nostalgia. The occasions of many other films\u2019 release offer similar opportunities to bhadralok Bengali self to recreate nostalgia for its literary base and the aspiration for it.<\/p>\n

But Feluda is a special case indeed. We just love to be in this make-belief world that we as Bengalis are still spontaneously more inclined towards our literature and carry a literary base in our daily existence, to that extreme that even a nostalgia or past experience we are not part of appeared to be our very own.<\/p>\n

With Feluda we even can create a new childhood of us lost in reality TV\u00a0shows and video game narratives. The Feluda cut out that I referred in the beginning promises that aspirational journey in every Decembers and we know from our experiences that it can never be a false promise. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we talk of re-birth of Feluda on screen with Sandip Ray\u2019s adaptations of Satyajit Ray\u2019s Feluda stories we discuss the populist strategy of old wine in a new bottle largely. But this is not simply a question of old wine and new bottle strategy, because in case of Sandip Ray\u2019s films we are not buying the wine in spite of its old and used status but for this very status.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":592,"featured_media":262,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,792,2277,23],"tags":[148,152,150,151,149,153,154,155,156],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique","category-critique-on-films","category-ray100","category-volume-10-1","tag-feluda","tag-feluda-30","tag-feluda-by-satyajit-ray","tag-feluda-movies","tag-feluda-series","tag-feluda-stories","tag-films-on-feluda","tag-sandip-ray","tag-sandip-rays-feluda-series"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/592"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}