HIS ENDLESS INHERITANCE
After Feluda, filmmaker SANDIP RAY is adapting another of his father’s creations, Professor Shonku
Kolkata’s Lee Road was recently renamed Satyajit Ray Dharani. Since ‘dharani’ means earth, the street, it can be said, encapsulates ‘the world of Satyajit Ray’. The filmmaker had made Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) after moving here. He wrote his famous fictional private detective Feluda books, here too. The building where he lived is now a shrine for cinephiles. Inside, Sandip Ray’s living room still resembles his father’s. There are books all around.
“For my father, Feluda went to places he had gone to already. But Professor Shonku, was different because he travelled the world and beyond. In the first book, for example, he goes to Mars,” says Sandip, 66.
Professor Shonku will now be seen on screen for the first time on December 20. Shonku O El Dorado, though not the first of the series, will see the eccentric professor look for the mythical city in the Amazonian rainforests. Written in 1961, the Shonku series was something Ray had created for the Puja edition of Sandesh, a children’s magazine he used to edit. “Initially, he would mostly translate Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear for it, until, I guess, he felt like creating something of his own. Shonku was thus born and became a hit,” says Sandip.
As a reader and a fan, Sandip has been deeply fond of Shonku. Feluda was a favourite too, but Shonku “came first”. Ray never filmed Shonku because he was unsure of the quality of VFX and animation in India, and because “it would mean shooting abroad”. Shonku O El Dorado had to be filmed almost entirely in Brazil: “It sort of fell into place. We have come far in terms of technology. And our producers (SVF Entertainment) had worked in the Amazon belt before.”
Speaking of casting, Sandip says, “Dhritiman (Chatterjee, who plays Shonku) was an obvious choice. I wanted a Bengali man of the right age and whose diction would be above par.” He admits that one needs to be especially careful with Shonku because he has an almost fanatical fan following. “Especially in these days of social media, I needed to be doubly careful. Shonku was harder as we were setting the benchmark,” he says. Sandip claims to not have deviated from the books, except perhaps for the depiction of Annhilin, one of Shonku’s many inventions. “We couldn’t make it look like a pistol. It wouldn’t get past customs. In my father’s time, airport security was perhaps more lax,” he laughs.n
—Malini Banerjee