![]() Such figures are products of discontinuous assembling processes that cut through dyadic arrangements and pass the same character/body/identity via different, often contradictory, moral economies and sign systems. That is, incarnations often emerge at critical interfaces between good/bad, Indian/western, self/other, virtue/vice, myth/reality, and so on. Indian cinematic traditions have always relied on eclectic ways of figuration that combine signs and affects of desire and abomination. In the present essay, the attempt will be made to study, through a comparativist’s prism, this gravitas, endowed by society, which is associated with the image of the successful private investigator in Bengal often, his is a voice striking a blow for the spirit of rational enquiry, as with Feluda, and, in other cases, he upholds the dignity of the traditional order/s, while exposing its/their soft under- belly of moral corruption and criminal collusion, as with Byomkesh Bakshi. ![]() The figure of the socially-engaged detective who transcends his – a high- ly gendered agency operates here – generically-sanctioned roles as a glorified intellec- tual mercenary or “gumshoe”, solver of conundrums and “tangled skeins”, champion of the rule-of-law and keeper of the last resort, while attempting to uphold a universe of moral and ethical values that, simultaneously, do not stray too far from the high road of societal and political acceptability, is a figure to conjure within the literary history of Bengal in the twentieth century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |