The essays in this volume consider the issue of figuration in the broadest sense, including formations that are supra-individual, animalistic, divine and machinic.Episode X - 19XX - Pahari Rahasya - Episode 19 - Mahabaleshwar - 1958 - Anjaan Khooni - Episode 20 - 1959 - Kahin Kavi Kalidass - Episode 21 - 1960 - Adrishya Trikon - Episode 22 - 1960 - Wasiyat Ka Rahasya - Episode 23 - 1960 - Bemisal - Episode 24 - 1960 - Balak Jasoos - Episode 25 - 1960 - Chakrant - Episode 26 - 1963 - Paheli Gatha - Episode 27 - 1964 - Kamra #102 - Episode 28 - 1964 - Dhokadhari - Episode 29 - 1965 - Sahi Ka Kanta - Episode 30 - 1967 -?July 30th? - Episode XX - 19XX - Lohe ka biscuit - Episode 32 - 1969 - Chiria Khana - Bengali Movie (with english sub-titles) directed by Satyajeet Ray. Perpetually caught between the home and the world, between elation and agony, such cinematic entities carry in them the diverse, contending energies of the overall assembling arena of Indian modernity itself. These many-armed, complex modes of figuration carry a special tenacity in Indian cinema for many reasons, but perhaps most importantly because the template of classical realist narration usually has had limited authority over its proceedings.
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.
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