THIS FILM IS ALSO A CHANGE OF GEARS FOR SANDIP RAY. AFTER SATYAJIT RAY’S DEATH IN 1992, SANDIP HAS BEEN DIRECTING FELUDA FILMS MAINLY.
Shonku is old school definitely. His inventions may be the cottage industry kind but the duplication of his inventions is not possible... Does discovering mean going around the world like a top? No, you can do it at home, though in this film, as in the original story, he is stretching himself by going to Brazil.
SANDIP RAY, Director
look bigger but it was quite a sight.” Dhritiman Chatterjee as Shonku is appearing on screen with no enhancements. Satyajit Ray ran the parallel universes of Shonku and Feluda since the ’60s and distributed his likes and dislikes between the two characters. “What he hated, Feluda hated. Integrity was important to both and intellectual dishonesty was not to be borne,” says Sandip Ray. “And likewise for Professor Shonku. Baba had foreign friends and so did Shonku.”
But there was one difference. Feluda’s adventures in Gangtok, Varanasi, Lucknow were set in places Ray had actually travelled to. Shonku’s settings – Congo,
Rio de Janeiro, the Taklamakan desert – were more fantastical as for these he was relying on imagination. Shonku was situated in places Ray wanted to go. “When he was writing, these were pre-Google days, he had to be dependent on friends to send him maps and postcards of these places. But they did not arrive on time. He was under constant pressure of missing the deadline,” says Sandip Ray.
Shonku’s attitude to his work, too, not surprisingly, is Ray-like. Says Sandip Ray: “Shonku was old school definitely. He was eager for new things. His inventions may be the cottage industry kind but the duplication of his inventions was not possible”. None of the Shonku’s inventions were made in a factory or released in the market. They were made for research or one could say, for his own pleasure. He also did not feel that working in a lab in a small city was a disadvantage to unlocking the mysteries of science.
“Does discovering mean going around the world like a top? No, you can do it at home,” says Sandip Ray with a laugh, “though in this film, as in the original story, Shonku is stretching himself by going to Brazil.” And in an important departure from the all-male world of his father’s literary fiction, Sandip Ray promises there will be in the film, women too. Women scientists to be precise, and Brazilians to boot.