Felu-da goes on air

Satyajit Ray's private investigator resurfaces "" on FM.

Felu-da, the private investigator created by Satyajit Ray, needs no introduction, at least to Bengalis. The Felu-da series, comprising 35 novellas and short stories, not only continue to be bestsellers, but they have also been made into films and television series.

And now Felu-da will be on FM radio. Big 92.7 FM will broadcast radio plays based on the Felu-da stories on Sundays, starting with Baksho Rahasya (Mystery of the Box), on October 28. Tarun Katial, chief operating officer, Big FM, says this is in keeping with Big FM's programming policy to include a local flavour in its different stations.

Interestingly, Baksho Rahasya is the only Felu-da story that was made into a play during Ray's lifetime. The script was written by Ray's son, Sandeep Ray, who had earlier assisted his father in the direction of the radio play in 1984.

Ayan Guhathakurta "" at whose father's studio, Admakers, the play was recorded "" remembers that after the broadcast of the first 15-minute installment of the play, such was the furore over Santu Mukherjee giving voice to Felu-da that Ray had to bring in Soumitra Chatterjee, Santosh Dutta and Siddhartha Chatterjee "" the cast of Ray's own Felu-da films "" and record all over again.

This incident is a testimony to the wide popularity of the radio play in the pre-television era.

According to Gautam Sengupta, deputy station director, All India Radio, Kolkata, "It's a very old tradition, going back to 1927 when Kshirode Prasad Bidyabinode's Nara Narayan was broadcast. Its origins can be traced to the BBC (on which AIR was modelled) where the first radio-play, a scene from Julius Caesar, was aired in 1923. Its importance in the cultural life of Bengal can be gauged from the fact that Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, Raichand Boral, Shambhu Mitra, Ajitesh Bandopadhyay "" all stalwarts of the theatre, film and music world "" have been associated with it."

In fact, listening to the Friday evening play on Akashvani continues to be tradition in many a home, at least in the suburbs of Kolkata.

Strangely, the radio play is one genre that private FM stations have largely neglected.

Jimmy Tangree, station director, Red FM, feels that it is because FM radio is more of a background medium, where there's very little of appointment listening and with audiences surfing stations as soon as they feel an RJ's talking too much. "Listeners are yet to develop a one-to-one concentration for talk radio."