The Elephant God (1979)
Directed by Satyajit Ray

Film Review

Outside India, Satyajit Ray is renowned as an auteur filmmaker of the first rank, best known for his realist dramas, exemplified by his Apu Trilogy.  In his native India, he is just as well known as a writer of detective and science-fiction stories.  His best known creation is Feluda, a shrewd Sherlock Holmes-like sleuth whose exploits continue to be popular with adults and children alike.  In the 1970s, Ray adapted two of his Feluda stories as films: Sonar Kella (1975), and Joi Baba Felunath (1979).  Several other Feluda adventures have subsequently found their way onto cinema and television screens, courtesy of Ray's son, Sandip.

For those whose experience of Satyajit Ray is limited to his auteur masterpieces, Joi Baba Felunath (a.k.a The Elephant God) will come as a surprise, and perhaps a pleasant one at that.  Here, Ray is not preoccupied with the subtle complexities of human experience, the injustice of India's class system or the cruel ironies of existence.   Instead, he sets out merely to entertain his audience with an intricately woven crime mystery which Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie would both be proud to claim as their own.

Playing the hero Feluda is Satyajit Ray's long term collaborator Soumitra Chatterjee, who made his film debut in Ray's Apur Sansa (1959) and subsequently blossomed into one of India's finest screen actors.  Chatterjee's Feluda is every bit as charismatic and sharp-witted as Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, although Chatterjee only played the role twice (here and in Ray's previous Feluda film).  Complementing Chatterjee in this (arguably the best) Feluda outing are two other fine actors, Santosh Dutta and Utpal Dutt, who both give great value as, respectively, a comical Watson-like sidekick and a sinister Moriarty-like villain.

Joi Baba Felunath may be a lesser film compared with Ray's other great achievements but the director nonetheless handles it with his characteristic finesse and artistry.  Some ingenious camerawork makes the location, the holy city of Benaras (the setting of Ray's 1956 film Aparajito), resemble a complex maze, mirroring the labyrinthine plot which Feluda soon finds himself caught up in, like a latter-day Theseus.  Borrowing a few tricks from Hitchcock, Ray masterfully builds the suspense, but also takes time out for some bizarre comic diversions.  Tension and humour are wonderfully married in the set-piece sequence in which Feluda confronts his arch-nemesis and uncomfortably has to accept some unwelcome hospitality, which includes watching his friend being terrorised by a decrepit sword-thrower.   Whilst the film is clearly not a masterpiece, it is an enjoyable divertissement and serves to lend another dimension to Ray's complex personality.

Film Synopsis

Feluda, one of Calcutta's sharpest detectives, decides to take a holiday in Benaras, the old holy town on the banks of the River Ganges.  He is accompanied by his cousin Topshe and his friend Lalmohan Ganguly, a renowned writer.  Feluda has barely had time to unpack his suitcase when he is invited to the house of a wealthy Bengali family and entrusted with the recovery of a stolen idol of the Elephant God, Ganesha.   The evening before the valuable heirloom went missing, the family was visited by businessman Maganlal Meghraj, who offered to buy it for a large sum of money.  The owner's son refused to sell, but by the next morning the idol had mysteriously vanished.  Feluda pays a personal call on Meghraj, who admits that he bought the idol honestly from its owner.  It is obvious that Meghraj is lying, but if he doesn't have the idol, who does?