Humour was in Satyajit Ray’s DNA, quite literally so. His father Sukumar Ray was one of the greatest children’s writers in Bengali, and his nonsense verse continues to be staple reading for Bengalis, young or old. Having lost his father at the age of two, the adult Ray would go on to revive and edit, along with his aunt Leela …
Today Jatayu would have been a Twitter star. Feluda, Satyajit Ray’s unflappable cerebral detective, and his hero-worshipping young sidekick Topshe, may have carried echoes of other detective duos like Holmes and Watson. “He’s a very Bengali character.” It is a great tribute to Santosh Dutta, the lawyer turned actor who inhabited Jatayu so completely, that in Ray’s later Feluda books, …
