A thriller in the desert

Satyajit Ray's Sonar Kella put Jaisalmer on the map. A new book celebrates the 50th anniversary of the film

- Uttaran Das Gupta

In December 2013, a few friends and I took the Corbett Park Express from Old Delhi railway station, two days before Christmas. Our holiday destination was Jaisalmer, a distance of about 980km that the train covered in 20 hours. It was about 8.30 pm on Christmas Eve when the train finally reached Ramdevra, two stations before the final stop. My friends and I were eagerly waiting for this. We alighted and started taking selfies in front of the station signage.

One of my friends cried out in his heavily accented Hindi: "Pahuch gaaye Ramdevra (We have reached Ramdevra)!"

There is no reason why this village in western Rajasthan, named, apparently, after a 14th-century Hindu ascetic, would have any significance for tourists from Bengal. And it did not, until 1974, when Satyajit Ray released his adventure film, Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress). Adapted from his eponymous novel, the film featured private detective Pradosh C Mitter, better known as Feluda. Much of the film is set in Rajasthan, where Feluda, his cousin Topshe, and his friend Lalmohan Ganguly (a crime novel writer who uses the pseudonym Jatayu) try to rescue a boy, Mukul, from criminals who have kidnapped him.

In a critical scene towards the end of the film, Feluda and his friends rush towards Jaisalmer from Jodhpur in a car, pursuing the archvillain Barman. But Barman's partner Mandar Bose ensures the car's tyres are punctured - twice. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, Feluda and his companions hire a caravan of camels to reach Ramdevra.