This locative media project is one where I think about literary space and its relationship to how I occupied physical space. The project ‘Traveling with Feluda’ documents the way the Feluda series influenced my family’s travels over the years, as I read and re-read the 35 stories in the series.
What is Feluda?
The Feluda series is a detective series written by the world-renowned filmmaker, Satyajit Ray. The stories are primarily for children and largely feature male characters. The three main characters are Feluda (this is a nickname, ‘Felu’ is name, and ‘da’ is prefix used to refer to older brothers or cousins in Bengali, his actual name is Pradosh Chandra Mitra), Feluda’s cousin and the narrator, Topshe (again a nickname, his actual name is Tapesh Ranjan Mitra), and Lalmohan Ganguly, Feluda’s friend and a novelist.
What is the locative in this project?
Feluda’s world is overwhelmingly male, but Ray argues on multiple occasions that what he attempts to achieve is a gender-neutral space for kids. As a child and a teenager, my travels have often pushed me to step into Topshe’s shoes, and travel as he did with Feluda. The locative aspect of this project is the narrative space, and now the narrative space and lived experiences combine. The project attempts to see how mapping leads to gender less space.
Fan Fantasy and Embodied Fandom
This project is also a testament to the idea of embodied fandom.The Feluda series is increasingly popular amongst Bengali audiences of all ages and provides many different kinds of interpretations. This project is in a way of diverging from the traditional speculative fan fiction, which is most common in podcast format, and art that is more common in reimagining Ray’s illustrations into something I want to call embodied fandom. Within embodied fandom, I physically occupy and then document the places that these characters visit. This works with multiple layers of ‘new’ media, as there is not just the media itself, but one that puts me, the creator, at the center of this form of fandom. The fan is no longer a consumer or a creator, they are at the heart of where the action is supposed to take place.