Review: Satyajit Ray; Feluda in the Golden Fortress

In December 2013, a few friends and I took the Corbett Park Express from Old Delhi railway station two days before Christmas. Our holiday destination was Jaisalmer, a distance of about 980km that the train covered in 20 hours. It was about 8:30 pm on Christmas Eve when the train finally reached Ramdevra, two stations before the final stop. My friends and I were eagerly waiting for this. We got off the train and started taking selfies (though this word was not yet so popular) in front of the station signage. One of my friends cried out in his heavily accented Hindi: “Pahuch gaaye Ramdevra! (We have reached Ramdevra)!”

There is no reason why this village, named, apparently, after a 14th-century Hindu ascetic, in west Rajasthan, would have any significance for tourists from Bengal. And it did not until 1974, when Satyajit Ray released his adventure film, Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress). Adapted from his eponymous novel, the film featured private detective Pradosh C Mitter, better known as Feluda. Much of the film is set in Rajasthan, where Feluda, his cousin Topshe, and his friend Lalmohan Ganguly (a crime novel writer who uses the pseudonym Jatayu) try to rescue a boy, Mukul, from criminals who have kidnapped him.

In a critical scene towards the end of the film, Feluda and his friends rush towards Jaisalmer from Jodhpur, in a car, pursuing the archvillain Barman. But Barman’s partner Mandar Bose ensures the car’s tyres are punctured — twice. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, Feluda and his companions hire a caravan of camels to reach Ramdevra. As they make their way through the desert, they spot the train carrying Barman and Mukul. Feluda desperately waves his handkerchief, but the train does not stop. Frustrated, he tells the camel drivers: “Chaliyeji Ramdevra! (Take us to Ramdevra!)” For millions of Bengalis — like my friend — even this oblique reference has inducted this obscure village into their collective consciousness.

Even when I watched this film recently, perhaps for the millionth time, the desert, the camel, the train, the chase, and the music, thrilled me to bits. The rhythmic smoothness with which it progresses does not betray the many tribulations faced by Ray and his devoted crew while shooting it. First, the train was cancelled because of a rise in coal prices, then it arrived late on the first day of the shoot, and finally, the several takes that were required to get the scene right. Translated by his wife, Bijoya Ray, the essay, “Camel Versus Train”, is included in a new book, Satyajit Ray: Feluda in the Golden Fortress, published to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film.

The book is edited by Sandip Ray, Ray’s son and a filmmaker, and co-edited by Riddhi Goswami. In the foreword, Sandip Ray writes how Sonar Kella put Jaisalmer on the map and in the minds of Bengalis. “Most Bengalis would equate Rajasthan with specific touristy destinations like Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur or Bikaner,” he writes. “Today, they go to Jaisalmer in order to relive the memories around the locations seen in the film.” It is possibly a typical example of placemaking through cinema, that not only opened up Jaisalmer to tourism but also infused an obscure village like Ramdevra with possibilities of excitement.

The timely book is also very well organised into two parts. The first part reproduces the English translation of the original novel by Gopa Majumdar, whose translation of all the books and stories of Feluda in the 1990s took the detective beyond the Bengali-reading audience. The second part is dedicated to the film. It starts with Ray’s synopsis, which shows how he adapted his own novel, changing it from a mystery to an adventure. In the novel, we don’t know the identity of the criminals till quite late, but in the film, the audience is taken into confidence early on.

In interviews and his own writing on cinema, Ray often spoke of how he changed various aspects of the literary works he adapted. He also explained how film and cinema were starkly different media, with different requirements and conventions. A close study of Sonar Kella reveals how his treatment of his own original material followed the same methods.

This section also includes an essay by the actor Soumitra Chatterjee (translated by Arunava Banerjee), who was Ray’s most frequent collaborator and also played Feluda; interviews with John Hughes, Firoze Rangoonwalla, reviews and a list of awards for the film. What I found most interesting was the detailed outdoor shooting schedule from 27 January to 16 February 1973. It reveals Ray’s legendary eye for detail, such as the time of the shoot (morning, afternoon or evening), brief descriptions and names of characters, and even a special note that mentioned if the scene was a “talkie” or “silent”. This would tell his crew if they needed recording equipment. The shoestring budgets on which Ray made his masterpieces were possible because of such painstaking planning.

In recent years, several books have been published on Ray’s films. For instance, My Adventures with Satyajit Ray: The Making of Shatranj Ke Khiladi by his one-time producer or Travails with the Alien: The Film That Was Never Made and Other Adventures with Science Fiction, providing details of a film that Ray had planned to make. This book will add to this growing body and will be of interest not only to Feluda fans but also to connoisseurs of cinema and literature.

Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.