There may be, in the years to come for readers and critics alike, room for some debate as to whether or not Byomkesh Bakshi is the most read detective character from the Bengali fictional detectives’ club. There may be some meat left on the bone for fans wishing to gnaw at the customary ‘who is smarter — Byomkesh or Feluda?’. Why there may even be room for someone to throw up names like Arjun (of Samaresh Majumdar), Kakababu-Santu (Sunil Gangopadhyay), Kirity Roy (Dr. Nihar Ranjan Gupta) and, God forbid, Pandab Goenda (Sashtipada Chattopadhyay).
But when it comes to who has the most amount of celluloid (and pixels and bytes) to his name, Byomkesh will probably win hands down.
From Satyajit Ray in 1967 till date, Byomkesh Bakshi has to his name over 15 film and TV adaptations in Bengali and Hindi. And a dizzying 12 of them in the last six years.
Everybody is making one. Yes a ‘different’ one never done by another, but a Byomkesh film nevertheless.
In fact one could well suspect that there is some form of a instant noodle-esque formula for Byomkesh movies that go:
— Take the 32 complete and one incomplete story set written by Saradindu Bandyopadhyay and throw them into a blender.
— Strain away the main plot keeping only the large pieces like his wife Satyabati, his sidekick Ajit, his dhuti , his cigarettes or any other detail that may suit your personal liking.
— Using permutations and combinations of these set them in a completely unrelated story of your own, add tropes to taste and voila! Your unique look at the suave, Bengali, sharp and other adjective to taste, Byomkesh Bakshi is ready.
Why does Bengali filmmaker after Bengali filmmaker flock to this one character? Why make bad movie after bad movie with this one overused character? Why this desperation to make movie goers ask abar Byomkesh ? (Byomkesh again?)
At this point one could affect a grave, post modernist, Bengali bhadrolok-esque, critic tone and say this is a complex question that calls for a nuanced answer. But alas it really is quite straight forward.
The first reason is, there is no one else to turn to.
Detective Prodosh Mitter aka Feluda is as entertaining a read as Byomkesh Bakshi but he was essentially created by Satyajit Ray to fill the pages of his children’s magazine Sandesh . So Feluda’s stories are suitable for young readers and contain no references to the sins of adults. He deals with lost gems, mysterious parapsychology and stolen manuscripts, but he stays firmly within rated 13. In fact, the language and plots of Ray are so sanitised that the only somewhat adult word ‘girlfriend’ appears just once in Bombayier Bombete (Buccaneer of Bombay) set in the Indian sin city of Bollywood.
Same is true of Kakababu Santu, Arjun, Pandab Goyenda and others. All written for children’s magazines which are, volume wise, a huge market in Bengali print. And in addition, they have the serious handicap of being far inferior as compared to Feluda and Byomkesh.
Byomkesh, however, roams freely in the realms of things adult and forbidden.
So, going from cocaine in Byomkesh’s very first story Satyanveshi to gold smuggling in his last Lohar Biskut , he has covered degenerate relations and brothels ( Chiriakhana ), gory murder ( Raktamukhi Nila ), infidelity ( Banhi Patanga and Shajaru’r Kanta ), illegitimate children ( Achin Pakhi ) and what not.
Dr. Nihar Ranjan Gupta’s Kirity Roy was close to dealing with the sins of adults, but the slow pace and loose plot make them a rather hard sale.
And beyond these detectives there is nothing. At least nothing mentionable.
Of course, the absence of solid mass market detective stories is nothing unique to Bengali writing. Other Indian languages have even lesser. And even if they did, they don’t have the exposure Bengali has.
Why just the detective genre? Unlike the West we just haven’t ever written enough in action packed genres like science fiction, thrillers, dystopian, mystery and so on. We’ve written human stories, love stories, tragedies and all things drama. And we have happily carried that into these times and into our films. Happily unchanging.
What has however seriously changed is the access the West has to our market now. And since everything from Transformers to Batman to Jeffery Archer, Stephen King, Dan Brown, Scandinavian detectives, are as much here as the West, and that too in real time, our chaps are hard pressed to tell equally exciting stories or die trying.
That’s when the aforementioned shallow pool to which our filmmakers are turn, is making life hard. Even if not for them, most certainly for the viewers.
Second reason is the imitation game.
Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay started writing full time in 1929 and with the first taste of success, shifted to Bombay with stars in his eyes in 1938. Fourteen years from that he gave up trying to be successful in filmdom and retired to Pune for good and lived there until he died in 1970.
During this time, besides Byomkesh Bakshi, he wrote loads of entertainment for grown ups. Blockbuster scripts like Dadar Kirti , rollicking romances like Gourmallar , pot boilers like Jhinder Bondi and a host of other lesser known to unknown stories and scripts. In all of these he wrote everything that was commonly known to sell well.
As for Byomkesh Bakshi, although over time the Bengali detective grew to be his own man, and we can’t deny the author any credit for his success, we just can’t deny the likeness in the paths of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay and Arthur Conan Doyle either.
Not just the similarity in the plots of detective Byomkesh’s early cases with that of Sherlock Holmes; not just the conservative socio-political views of the authors that come through repeatedly from the plots and mouths of characters; in striking similarity with Doyle, Sharadindu took to fascinating himself with the occult. Doyle’s was the fine British pursuit, spiritualism, and Sharadindu did the Indianised one — astrology.
And just like Doyle’s voluminous writings on mysterious and paranormal beings and events, Sharadindu diligently chronicled paranormal investigator Barada. Sharadindu’s work is similar to Doyle’s not only in the subject they handled, but also in the relatively little success it had vis a vis the detective series.
In Jhinder Bondi , he straight lifted off The Prisoner of Zenda written in 1894 by Englishman Sir Anthony Hope and simply made an Indianised remix of names and places. It became a hit movie with Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee in leading roles and nobody asked about originality. So quite plainly the imitation game was a favourite with Sharadindu himself. This game is currently the hot favourite of present day Bengali filmmakers too.
Movie after movie they are taking excitement inducing tropes left behind by storyteller of years gone by — tourist bungalows, picnics, simple ghost stories, Sukumar Ray’s limericks, Satyajit Ray’s characters, snatches of Tagore’s songs — tropes so well known and enjoyed that they are the urbane Bengali’s intellectual equivalent of comfort food. Then they take iconic characters — Lalon Fakir, Antony Firingi, Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne or their ghost king — which are yet again very familiar very popular. Thereafter they mix these tropes and icons with that which is doing well in the West (and sadly Bombay, Hollywood, Scandinavia, everything lies west of Kolkata) hoping to dish out things that can’t possibly go wrong.
But clearly things do go wrong in the imitation game.
Anjan Dutta’s pointless Abar Byomkesh went horribly wrong. Rituparno Ghosh’s listless Satyanveshi did too. In fact the entire deluge of unwatchable Byomkesh Bakshi movies that has hit us, has gone all very wrong — well at least for the audience.
The problem is present day story tellers don’t have the elbow room Sharadindu did. When Sharadindu wrote Byomkesh, 1930 and 40s, far fewer Indians read and even fewer watched thrilling English stories than do now.
But here in 2015, Hollywood’s Christopher Nolan reaches us at the same time he reaches the American audience. So when Dibakar Banerjee names his movie Byomkesh Begins instead of something in Hindi) and calls it a franchise instead of a series, he is only making things difficult for himself — or at least for the audience.
