| Sumario: | This article is a fortuitous response to Feluda’s letter to his cousin Topse by Maganlal Meghraj, villain in three Feluda stories. While agreeing in principle with Feluda’s insistence to being seen as a popular hero of the general public imagination rather than being a niche figure for juveniles, Meghraj seeks to temper the argument for the ‘popular’ by pointing out numerous continuities between Ray’s ‘arthouse’oeuvreand the Feluda films as well as questioning some of the ‘positive’ characterizations Feluda makes of his status as ‘popular’ hero. Instead of seeing Feluda in the grand Enlightenment tradition of detective knowledge, Meghraj insists on seeing the cinematic Felu Mitter as Satyajit Ray’s dispassionate creation of a figure of public fantasy around whom contemporary Bengali middle-class public anxieties about its worth for historical action congeal. First, Meghraj sees this middle-class fantasizing a reform of a decrepit feudal order from which it has risen. Second, he sees this class fantasizing a rooting out of economic corruption arising from the unregulated conversion of feudal wealth into modern capital. Meghraj reads Mitter’s ‘going private’ and ‘going cinematic’ against the tide of difficult histories as symptomatic of a problematic Indian middle-class nationalism that is framed in a claim to the right to act out technocratic skills in order to get rid of both feudal stasis and corruption. This brand of technocratic action becomes the rallying call around which India is forced to globalize in the 1990s.
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