Review: Detective Byomkesh Bakshy.

If there’s anything that Detective Byomkesh Bakshy makes clear within its first fifteen minutes or so, is that it has little to do with the books it is based on. Yeah, the characters and some plot details are from Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s tales about the Bengali sleuth, but that’s about it. To me, at least, this is a relief, because for those of us who have read the tales often enough to remember them inside out, an adaptation that sticks to what Bandopadhyay wrote simply cannot generate much suspense: the moment the actor playing the character who shall turn out to be the culprit makes his/her appearance, the conclusion to the case is, well, a foregone conclusion. Besides, too much fidelity results in too much familiarity. The film adaptation ought to offer something that makes it distinguished in its own right, and this can hardly be achieved if all that is present in the book is dutifully laid out on the screen. I concur that deviations from the source material doesn’t necessarily result in a good adaptation unless the director is sure about what he is doing. As it turns out, though, Dibakar Banerjee does.

To put it simply, he makes a Byomkesh film that: (a) is an origin story, depicting Byomkesh’s introduction to the world of crime and crime-fighting, rather than giving us a Byomkesh who is already an established detective, and (b) has broadened the canvas of the saga considerably to raise the stakes in the case that Byomkesh is out to solve. If that means making Byomkesh behave less like a mature, unerring crime-fighter and more like a young man who has recently completed his education and, not having any inherited money or designations to fall back upon, is trying to determine his place in the world, then so be it. If that means fusing multiple tales of Byomkesh and introducing characters and events that Bandopadhyay never wrote about, then so be it. If that means adding full-fledged fight scenes and songs (mostly as part of the background score, though), then so be it. If that means borrowing from the works of other authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Hemendra Kumar Roy, then so be it. If that means that cases involving a single, local crime are replaced by one that involves international drug trafficking and the outcome of the Second World War itself, then so be it. In other words, if, Banerjee seems to be saying, the accomplishment of (a) and (b) means that the comparatively genteel tales of Bandopadhyay have to be turned into a ‘masala’ film, then so be it—and I, for one, cannot approve enough. These transformations ensure that the suspense-killing familiarity I mentioned earlier seldom rears its head. For instance, though we find out the identity of the culprit shortly before the interval, he turns out to be a person so different in manners and motivations from his counterpart in the books, that we are kept guessing as to what he is actually up to, who he really is, and how Byomkesh is going to stop him.
Banerjee displays a similar absence of hang-ups in other aspects too. The film opens in 1942, the year that saw the Indian freedom struggle reach its zenith, but the first line that Byomkesh Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) speaks is about his indifference to Gandhi’s imprisonment. The purpose is not, as some are bound to screech, to “disrespect” the Mahatma, but to convey Byomkesh’s utter indifference to what is going on around him (“kaun si duniya mein rehte hain aap?” he shall be asked later), an indifference that he shall overcome once he gets involved in the search for Ajit Banerjee’s (Anand Tiwari) missing father, and that the film decides to portray this indifference through a crack about the Father of the Nation is an indication that, to Banerjee, little is sacred. The film sticks its tongue out at another Holy Cow of the Indian freedom movement when the activities of the antagonist are revealed to be similar to that of a Bengali leader who had decided to collaborate with the Japanese to free India from the British. A courtyard soaked in blood, a corpse lying among utensils, the many (and none of them very pleasant) fates that may have befallen a person who has not been found in two months, the addiction to narcotics—each of these unlikely scenarios and situations supply the humour in the film. Indeed, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy may be seen solely to appreciate how it gets chuckles out of the audience in ways least foreseen.

The detective work is finely portrayed as well. The revelations (a letter composed of alphabets cut out from an English newspaper being a subterfuge, an unassuming boarder turning out to be a police agent, the fact that a dreaded criminal Byomkesh is pursuing is the same man he has known all along) are satisfyingly gradual: in particular, the link between the maker of a delicious paan-masala and a drug racket is so adroitly brought to light that you can almost hear the sweet click of things falling into place. That these investigations unfold in a yesteryears setting is part of the film’s charm. There’s a scene where Byomkesh visits an old boarding house run by Dr. Anukul Guha (a stupendous Neeraj Kabi) in order to gather some clues about Ajit’s father. It’s late at night; the boarders, Byomkesh and Dr. Guha are having dinner, with a lamp placed in front of them being the sole source of illumination, and the conversation they are having is suddenly interrupted by the wails of the siren that is intended to warn the people of Calcutta that Japanese combat planes may soon be dropping bombs on the city. The lights in the boarding house are swiftly turned off, the people huddle inside a room, and Byomkesh and the rest are given strips to hold in their mouths, so that should a bomb fall, the impact doesn’t make them bite their tongues. The sense of being in a place, an era, when the chances of such an invasion were considerable, and the perpetual fear of the same, is evoked so palpably, it may be the closest that today’s audience, far removed from those years, can come to experiencing what people in the 1940s Calcutta did. This sense of something imminent and threatening that is about to happen fits in nicely with the details of the case, which, as stated before, has more to it than one missing person.

Our investment in the case is guaranteed, also, by Rajput’s performance. This young actor has the rare capacity to convey both vulnerability and resilience onscreen, best seen in Kai Po Che. There, his character feels dejected because he is unemployed—for which his father often berates him—and because of his inability make it big as a cricketer, but when it comes to standing up to the communalism that the people around him display, there’s little dilemma on his part. His Byomkesh is much the same. The introductory scene presents him as an abrasive youth, but that scornful, devil-may-care demeanour turns out to be a mask to hide the sense of lowliness that comes from being an orphan with no money and little clout. The scene where he goes back to Ajit after brushing him off initially shows Byomkesh for what he really is: a man who is eager for an opportunity to prove himself, but is too proud to make that eagerness evident. In this scene, though, he has been forced to keep aside the pride and ask Ajit about his father, and his hesitant smile, the way he thrusts his palm forward for a reconciliatory handshake, and the keenness in his diction all say the same thing: “Let me look into this, please. I know I behaved like a git, and I am sorry about that, but please, let me take a look at this case.” I have said before that this is a Byomkesh who is learning to find his footing, and Rajput is remarkable in bringing out the character’s trial-and-error modus operandi. One moment he is confident and clever, managing to find his way into a house by posing as a police officer; the next, he is a rookie who has been bested by an older, cleverer nemesis. He makes mistakes, he is prone to fits of anger and depression, and the sight of blood and corpses make him sick, but these setbacks and youthful gaffes can’t eclipse the fact that here is somebody who opts for the uncertainties and perils of a life of crime-solving in an era when most people his age are grateful to find employment in any capacity. Byomkesh himself seems to be headed in that direction: he says he has been promised the post of a lecturer at a college, but then forgoes that post to look for a man he has nothing to do with. The precise reason for this is anyone’s guess, but that Ajit approaches Byomkesh, of all people, for assistance, is proof that he has already built up something of a reputation as a person who is unafraid to get involved in troubles if he is rewarded with thrills. This is confirmed later, when he practically leaps in delight, saying, “Khoon huwa hai, khoon huwa hai” after discovering definite evidence of the same. (He isn’t callous, though. He turns considerably more sober upon meeting the grief-stricken kin of the deceased person). That spirit of daring, of going off the beaten path to carve out for himself a different destiny, and most significantly, the doggedness that manifests itself in his relentless digging into the case to solve it are also convincingly rendered by Rajput: watching him cross swords with the fearsome antagonist during the climax, I could accept him completely as the hero of the film. Rajput is aptly complemented by the rest of cast, including Tiwari, whose Ajit, in spite of being a bespectacled Bangali-babu, is not incapable of kicking down doors or getting into fights. His chemistry with Rajput is splendid. Their first meeting ends with Ajit slapping Byomkesh, the surest indication that theirs is a union destined for the ages. Indeed, the homoerotic vibes in the books find their way into the film in the many scenes, such as the one where Byomkesh and Ajit bicker like a couple, so much so that when somebody blunders into the room during their argument, Byomkesh, irritably, says, “Lad rahe hain, baad mein aiye”, much as any spouse would when interrupted by a third party during a quarrel that nobody else is supposed to know about.  Even more revealing is Byomkesh’s response to a girl who often appears on a nearby balcony, eyeing him romantically. Byomkesh is thinking about Ajit the first time this happens, and when the girl’s apperance interrupts his thoughts, he vexedly shuts the casement next to his bed, thus shutting out her unsolicited attentions. Ajit’s insistence on accompanying Byomkesh even as his impatience with the latter increases, and Byomkesh saying, at the end, that Ajit is all he has, also lend themselves to possibilities of a simmering love that dares not speak its name. As much as I like Divya Menon’s Satyavati, I hope the next films carry on with this made-for-each-other relationship of Byomkesh and Ajit, and that Satyavati is turned into a sympathetic friend who aids Byomkesh in his investigations. I look forward to some of the other characters, such as Meiyang Chang as a boarder with some surprises up his sleeve, and Mark Bennington as the British police commissioner who has more regard for Byomkesh than he lets on, to also make appearances. Swastika Mukherjee’s Anguri Devi, on the other hand, I am glad to see go. A more gifted actor may have been able to make Anguri fascinating, but Mukherjee, with her terribly accented Hindi and over-the-top mannerisms, isn’t that actor, and this bit of casting, and that slow-motion fight at the end (it makes the climax unnecessarily drawn-out) are the sole complaints I have about this film.

I would like to conclude with a couple of observations. Firstly, this film is likely to be the first prominent Bollywood release with an amateur detective as the protagonist. There have been thrillers aplenty in Bollywood, but the heroes in them are police officers or innocents out to prove they are not guilty. The figure of the independently operating detective, as we understand the term, has been rare, and has certainly never been given this heroic a stature. Secondly, the film made me think, all along, of another famous Bengali literary creation—Premendra Mitra’s Ghana-da. For those who don’t know, Ghana-da aka Ghanashyam Das is a resident of indeterminate age at a lodge not unlike the one we see in the film; his fellow boarders are a group of young men who are a mostly appreciative audience to Ghana-da’s tall tales about his involvement in events of global significance. In one such tale, titled ‘Kaanch’ (‘Glass’), Ghana-da holds up a broken piece of glass and says to his listeners, “Had it not been for this, world’s first atomic bomb would have been dropped on Britain.” Then, he goes on to explain how he, a slightly-built, dhoti-clad Bengali, prevented that mishap. Ghana-da’s story is, of course, a concoction, but in this film, we have a slightly-built, dhoti-clad Bengali who does actually stop a similar mishap from taking place. That, I guess, makes Banerjee a Ghana-da of sorts: his decision to catapult Byomkesh to a global arena, to make the fates of multiple nations hinge on Byomkesh’s abilities as a detective, bespeaks a flight of fancy that Ghana-da would have appreciated. What we have here, then, is Hindi cinema’s first prominent detective, who is a Bengali, being portrayed by way of Ghana-da, another Bengali fictional figure, by the Bengali Banerjee, in a film set entirely in Bengal. In Bengali, that is precisely the sort of thing that is known as “Shonaye Shohaaga.”