The Seeker

He had a penchant for reading the personal advertisements in newspapers like Khushwant Singh, and could quote from Tagore and Abol Tabol by Sukumar Ray with equal felicity. Rituparna Ghosh based his last film Satyanbeshi ( one who trails the truth), on one of his exploits, and Dibakar Bannerjee’s upcoming project is on another one. Sharadindu Bandopadhyay’s Byomkesh Bakshi, the quintessential Bengali gentle man had never been out of sight since Satyajit Ray first screened him in the national award winning Chiriyakhana, 1967, and of course he can never be out of mind of those who have known him.

Here is why and how.

Byomkesh was born in 1932 in a story called Pather Kanta ( The Gramophone Pin Mystery), and Saradindu wrote a prequel - Satyanweshi in which he met Ajit, a writer who remained bachelor to make a career out of writing, his lifelong friend and assistant. They moved to Byomkesh’s bachelor pad on Harrison Road (the present Mahatma Gandhi Road, which became as popular a landmark in the minds of the mystery lovers as 221 B Baker Street in the history of Crime and Punishment.

The sleuth who preferred the word Satyanweshi ( a truth seeker) over detective as his calling card, solved 33 cases during Saradindu’s lifetime, and even one after his demise. The incomplete story Bishupal Badh was completed by eminent writer Narayan Sanyal.

Byomkesh, modeled on the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercules Poirot, Father Brown, was a Bengali gentleman first, which made him stand out from his indigenous predecessors like Robert Blake, Debendra Bijoy Mitra, Deepak Kumar.

His distaste for the word ‘detective’ could be rooted in a desire for being independent of the occidental values which shaped most fictional Bengali crime busters before, and around him. It was also sign of things to come; that this fictional Bengali intellectual would chart out a course ebulliently different from those of his illustrious global peers.

Byomkesh Bakshi fell in love, married, and had a child. He grew old like a normal human being and saw Calcutta, the city where he lived and worked,evolve before his own eyes. Yes, Holmes too had something for Irene Adler, and he took to beekeeping in his later years. But unlike Byomkesh, he didn’t grow old with Irene, or for that matter with London.

Many private detectives have let a criminal go scot free, because the act of crime had been poetic justice in one way or another. But how many of them had paid protection money to a hoodlum in the time of a riot? In Adim Ripu, Byomkesh does that like any other normal human being would do, or actually did when Calcutta was torn asunder with post - Independence riot. Saradindu himself declared that Byomkesh stories were also social documents, actually they were also an account of a city shedding its colonial past, and the turbulence of the essential Bengali ethos to find a foothold in the changing milieu.

A particularly sensitive reader is supposed to have written to Saradindu, pleading for Byomkesh’s stagnant financial condition. He wrote that he saw Satyabati, Byomkesh’s wife in a street corner, looking harried with armful of groceries, trying to hire a rickshaw. The reader had ended his plea by saying that it was time for Byomkesh to have a car of his own. Saradindu, also famous for being an amateur astrologer, wrote back: ‘I have studied Byomkesh’s horoscope. There isn’t any car in it’.

This was the famous Bengali disregard for material comforts at its best - it could come on it’s own, but there are better things to get preoccupied with. Byomkesh stands as a representative of that generation of Bengalis who could actually say that without being supercilious. In fact, that was also the last generation which acted out their belief instead of speaking it out. They walked their talk.

Byomkesh, and Ajit faced an economic slump in the latter half of their careers. Ajit’s books were not selling, and Byomkesh, though not dirt poor, had never been well off either. Ajit even thought of driving a taxi for a while. Finally their crisis gets resolved and they acquire a bookshop.

Byomkesh was successful in solving mysteries. He was also successful in living a real life, which sets him apart from those who came before and after. His tweet R.I.P would read : ‘He shall be  around always; he got a life’.

After Ray, Byomkesh was filmed by the livewire actor Manju Dey, and a virtuoso director in her own rights, in 1974. Shajarur Kanta (The Porcupine’s Quill) is a favourite with many Bengali film aficionados, and though is thematically inspired from Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders, Saradindu gave it his own magical spin like he did with Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda in Jhinder Bandi.

Anjan Dutt has made two Byomkesh Bakshi film (Byomkesh Baksi, Abar Byomkseh) as of now, and a third one is in the anvil.

Basu Chatterjee, the reputed maker of Hindi films with a middle class heart, directed the very successful Doordarshan series Byomkesh Bakshi in 1993, and 1997 subsequently. Rajit Kapoor played an unforgettable Byomkesh in the television adaptations.

Byomkesh will never be out of sight. And, of course, he can’t be out of mind.

He sought truth in every aspect of his life, and kept it at the highest pedestal. Coincidentally his better half’s name was Satyabati (one who keeps the truth).