In 1965, Satyajit Ray, drawing from the detective tradition made popular by characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, created a character who would go on to influence Bengalis of an entire generation: Feluda. And when Soumitra Chatterjee played the dapper detective in the film Sonar Kella, a cult was born. Fifty years later, the cult endures. Every new Feluda film has the box office in a tizzy.

Feluda @ 50 seeks to explore the phenomenon. What makes Feluda tick? What is it that love about this man? Why is it that every Feluda film continues to run to packed houses for weeks and mother on end in an otherwise struggling Bengali film industry? What is the way forward for the franchise in the years to come? What role do Feluda’s sidekicks, Topshe and Lalmohan-babu, play? The book also delves into Ray’s motivations for keeping Feluda cocooned from contemporary politics and never allowing him to have a love interest.

Also including in-depth interviews with the three stars who have played Feluda onscreen, this is the quintessential fan tribute and a celebration of Feluda on the occasion of the sleuth’s fiftieth anniversary.

Boria Majumdar, a Rhodes scholar, went to the University of Oxford. His doctorate was published as Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket. He has taught at the universities of Chicago, Toronto and La Trobe, where he was the first distinguished visiting fellow in 2005. He was also a visiting fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 2009. He is currently senior research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire and consulting editor, sports, at the India Today Group.

Boria is the co-author of Sachin Tendulkar’s autobiography Playing It My Way, and is one of India’s leading sports scholars and journalist. Some of his other books include Olympics: The India Story, Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation and The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket.