ABSTRACT
This paper investigates the contemporary afterlife of Satyajit Ray’sprotago-nist sleuth, Prodosh C. Mitter (Feluda) and the new media space he now inhabits. This paper sets off from the debate in this journal around Feluda’s cultural and socio-economic status, his origins, his intentions, his relation to labour, work and leisure, discourses emerging in the wake of Feluda’sfiftieth anniversary. I take the very event and its commemorative objects as the site to think through Feluda’s legacy. I work through Sandip Ray’sDoubleFeluda, the Feluda film released to mark the occasion, the new Feluda addatimes web series and the innumerable graphic novels, online text applications and audiobooks circulating in their wake. The contemporary I show also produces an undercurrent of nostalgia: a retro-fetish for older media forms in which Feluda is ensconced. The rest of the paper as it pans out takes mobility and migration as spectral but operative functions in Feluda’suniverse.Feluda now inhabits a trans-medial universe and different urban regimes, both of which introduce intense affects of speed and travel – moving towards an action-hero status that is radically different from his earlier intellectual and rational demeanour. Ithereby trace Feluda’s reinvention from a Nehruvian socialist imaginary into the corporatized action hero: his suave image con-nected now to a global neo-liberal aesthetic. This global, rootless cosmopo-litanism triggers in its stead a constant search for identity, an exhumation of Feluda’s undead Bangal pasts.
