Satyajit Ray's private eye Feluda enters new arena

Satyajit Ray's super detective Feluda is going great guns.

Created in 1965, the Charminar cigarette-puffing private eye, whose real name is Prodosh Kumar Mitter, will now feature in an animated series.

This is another stint for Feluda, who has had a successful stint on the silver screen, besides being a novel and comic book hero.

Hyderabad-based production and distribution group DQE will produce an animated tele-movie and TV series based on the adventures of Feluda, who teams up with his cousin Topshe and friend Lalmohan Ganguli to capture devious culprits and solve puzzling mysteries.

According to DQE chairman and CEO Tapaas Chakravarti, "We have confirmed acquisition for Indian broadcasting in several languages from a leading global broadcaster, and this has been a huge affirmation that these stories will be received well by audiences."

The Kathmandu Caper is the first animated tele-movie being adapted and written for animation in London by famous children's writer, Charles Hodges.

The tele-film revolves around the kidnap of a stranger in the neighbourhood which leads Feluda, Topshe, his friend Jatayu and Bones, their wily dog, to Kathmandu.

Last year, publishers Penguin under its Puffin imprint brought out the exploits of Feluda in comic format.

The titles were A Bagful of Mystery, Beware in the Graveyard and Murder By the Sea.

The comic strips were scripted by Subhadra Sen Gupta with illustrations by Tapas Guha.

"These great stories deal with eternal themes – loyalty, greed and courage... all we did was make them visually contemporary, so that kids relate to them better. We have not touched the plots, they are all Ray's," says Subhadra.

According to her, beyond occasionally changing the location from inside to outside, no changes to the original scripts were made at all. "Ray being a filmmaker and artist wrote very visually, giving detailed descriptions and also taking the stories to all sorts of locations, and that made the stories ideal for a comic strip," she says.

"We grew up reading Feluda, and the miracle is that he is now a part of our lives, and he and the other characters feels very real to us."

In A Bagful of Mystery, Feluda's client Dinanath Lahiri has a strange problem. On a train from Delhi to Kolkata, someone has taken his bag and replaced it with an identical one. The action-packed search by Feluda and his sidekicks take them through the busy streets of Kolkata and Delhi and into the final dangerous climax on the snowy slopes of the Simla hills.