Sonar Kella (1974)

The first film featuring the detective Feluda from the Sherlock Holmes pastiches which Ray had published and illustrated since 1965 in his magazine Sandesh. The 6-year-old Mukul (Chakraborty) is obsessed with memories of a previous life in a golden fortress with pigeons, peacocks and camels. Parapsychologist Dr Hazra (Sailen Mukherjee) guesses that the location of Mukul’s past life is in Rajasthan and takes the child there to find it. Two crooks, Burman (Ajoy Bannerjee) and Bose (Kamu Mukherjee), read about the expedition in a local paper and, sensing there is a fortune to be made, try to kidnap Mukul. This brings the famed detective Feluda (Soumitra Chatterjee) and his sidekick Topse (Siddhartha Chatterjee) into the case. In an extended chase through Rajasthan, the detective is joined by the thriller writer Jatayu (S. Dutta) as the action, energetically orchestrated via parallel cutting, moves from cars to camels and a train. The film is dominated by the remarkable performance of Kushal Chakraborty as the boy, as well as Santanu Bagchi’s extraordinary cameo as the boy who gets kidnapped by mistake and then explains what happened to the detective. Ray made another Feluda story, Joi Baba Felunath (1978).