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Who doesn’t love a good whodunit? The setting is usually so simple that you don’t expect anything to go wrong. The characters are relatable and only a little off-kilter to make you trust only your instincts. As soon as you start to settle in, something criminal happens, thereby sending everything into a state of chaos. And the best part is when it all comes together in the most satisfying, cathartic, and sometimes anticlimactic fashion imaginable. I have grown up reading and watching anything that’s related to Satyajit Ray’s Feluda. Which obviously means that I have read and watched almost everything that has “Sherlock Holmes” written on it. Amongst the more recent stuff, I think Game Night is a masterpiece. The Knives Out movies are excellent. Neeyat and A Haunting in Venice really caught me by surprise. Also, Bodies Bodies Bodies has to be one of the most subversive whodunits out there.

Parambrata Chattopadhyay is the latest actor to play Oscar-winning Indian master Satyajit Ray’s detective Prodosh Chandra Mitter Aka Feluda in streamer ZEE5 Global’s series “Shabash Feluda.”

Feluda first appeared in the Ray family’s Bengali-language magazine Sandesh in 1965. Ray directed two Feluda films, “The Golden Fortress” (1974) and “The Elephant God” (1978), where the Bengali detective was played by his frequent collaborator Soumitra Chatterjee. Feluda has subsequently been played by a range of Indian actors, including Shashi Kapoor, Abir Chatterjee, Tota Roy Chowdhury, Indraneil Sengupta and Bangladesh’s Ahmed Rubel.

The detective is part of the fabric of growing up in West Bengal and Bangladesh, akin to what Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple used to be for several generations in the west.

Chattopadhyay first interpreted the detective in 2017 for series “Feluda” for Bangladesh’s Bioscopelive which he directed and also played Feluda. “It was a very radical interpretation...

by Sayaak Santra

Now this is one of the most obvious things you could ever read, isn’t it? A movie reviewer from India Not reviewing one of Ray’s films….? Well, this can’t be happening. So, here it is. A good old review of the masterpiece which once defined a much neglected segment of Indian as well as world cinema. Am I really going to rant about the state of the art cinematography or the captivating screenplay of a masterpiece that is already beyond any kind of criticism?. No, I won’t. On the contrary, let me guide you through a rather overlooked aspect of Ray’s filmmaking, The Music; in this particular case the musical score of ‘Sonar Kella’.

Ray’s film music not only hails a wide appreciation but also manages to set quite a few trends. In his earlier films, such as the ‘Apu’ Trilogy,...

He turned a frock-clad school going teen Sharmila Tagore into Aparna - Apu?s wife. The clich? concept of all-evil in silver screen villains bored him. Javed Akhtar once said, ?While Hindi films have ferocious villains who only evoked hatred, you actually felt sad for Ray?s negative character. Such was the sensitivity of the man?. He gave Bengali cinemas? most real and grounded hero ? Soumitra Chatterjee who turned into his blue-eyed boy. He used real comedians in humour, he transformed his characters into all time legends ? Apu (Soumitra Chatterjee), Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), Nayak (Uttam Kumar), had a unique eye for creating child characters, the man who created the iconic Feluda.

One of Indian cinema?s most influential filmmaker it won?t be an exaggeration if I say Asian cinema or world cinema in that matter ? Satyajit Ray if by any reasons or circumstances couldn?t make it as a filmmaker,...

He used to be the blue-eyed boy of almost every urban filmmaker, but seems to have lost the hot seat to some of his contemporaries. Now, after bagging the most coveted copyright in the Bengali film industry, Parambrata Chatterjee is back in business with Feluda. In a freewheeling chat with us, the actor-director-producer spoke about his journey from Topshe to Feluda, the copyright tiff with Sandip Ray and things that he no longer finds interesting in Tollywood. Excerpts: Anukul has released and everybody is praising your work… I was waiting to work with Sujoyda (Ghosh) again. In the five years since Kahaani, we’ve planned so many things — some never happened, some will happen in the coming years. But this came as a sudden opportunity and we pounced on it. Now that it’s receiving so much appreciation, I feel ratified and satisfied to the hilt. In Tollywood, nobody rubs anybody the wrong way.