Filmmaker Basu Chatterjee , who died in Mumbai on Thursday, is celebrated for his slice-of-life comedies. He also directed the acclaimed se...
Filmmaker Basu Chatterjee, who died in Mumbai on Thursday, is celebrated for his slice-of-life comedies. He also directed the acclaimed serials Rajni and Darpan, but his most noteworthy late-career contribution to television falls in the crime detective genre: the Doordarshan series Byomkesh Bakshi, based on the Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay character of the same name.
Rajit Kapur starred as Byomkesh, the early-20th century Bengali sleuth who preferred to call himself a “truth seeker” rather than a “detective”. His Watson, Ajit, was played by KK Raina. Chatterjee adapted all 32 stories across two seasons between 1993 and 1997.
Chatterjee’s films between the 1960s and ’80s captured urban middle-class lives. Byomkesh Bakshi’s bhadrolok character was a Bengali middle-class man too, this time operating out of Kolkata.
Chatterjee shot the interior shots that formed the majority of the series in Mumbai before moving to Kolkata for the exterior shots. In an interview to Hindustan Times in 2016, Kapur explained: “I would take notes on my script, because we were jumping scenes and costumes. I was doing episode one and then a scene from episode 12.”
The marvellous casting held the series together. Kapur played Byomkesh with calm confidence and the occasional spark of daredevilry that marked the character. As the...
