Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye carries echoes of Satyajit Ray’s 1971 Feluda thriller Sonar Kella
A book cover (left) and film poster for Sonar Kella
Though I rarely read beyond Bengali novels in recent years, I was drawn to Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye because it seemed to reverse the central premise of Satyajit Ray’s Sonar Kella. A beloved film for many Bengalis of my generation, it is adapted from his Feluda thriller of the same name. There, a middle-class Bengali boy called Mukul (6 or 7 years old) was haunted by his past-life in Rajasthan, in the Mewar region as it turned out. Here, a Marwari girl called Varsha, three years old, remembers her past life in a village in Bengal. Ghosh has flipped sex, and their ethnic identities, although it was Mewari in Sonar Kella not Marwari. But Ghosh goes much further than Ray in his story of re-incarnation. First, however, the similarities.
The time period: Ray’s children’s novel was published in 1971 and the film released in 1974. Ghosh’s novel (published 2025 in India) is set in 1969. They reference the same period. Given that Ghosh’s novel travels to and back from the Covid era, is this a hat-tip to Ray? It could well have been set in the 1980s and the world of Covid, for instance.
Second, both Ray and Ghosh make Bengali psychologists trained in the West their principal investigators. In Sonar Kella, Dr Hemango Hajra was a Canada-trained parapsychologist. In Ghost-Eye, Dr Shoma Bose does her doctoral training in the United States. I find this choice of Western training interesting, particularly for Ray, a man who believed in the Enlightenment ideas of science and progress. Both Ghosh and Ray seem to suggest that among those who practice science, there are those who acknowledge that Western science may not have understood everything about life and the end of it. Who practice it as a method to study material, as a character called Dr Booth says in Ghost Eye, and not as the shield to ward off questions that are not easily answered.
Third, both Ray and Ghosh have their past-life memory holders travel to the site of their past life. And in both, the child encounters a physical site that no longer exists as it did in memory. In the film Sonar Kella, this is an exquisitely moving moment: a young boy crying at the sight of the ruins where his home once stood. When I rewatched it to compare it to Ghosh’s novel, I was moved by the site of the boy mourning the world that meant so much to him in a way that I wasn’t when I watched Sonar Kella as a teenager. Reincarnation or not, the past can sometimes feel so palpable in our memories, yet when we revisit the actual site of memory, we are often confronted by (metaphorical or real) ruins. Ghosh, too, makes this sequence poignant, drawing out an extraordinary bond between a father and daughter. But in fact, he goes much further in the significance of the past, as I shall elaborate.
Fourth, and perhaps most delightful, both sequences of revisiting the site of memory feature animals in superb and significant roles.
For Ray, reincarnation is an interesting setting for the story. He suggests that research on this subject can be scholarly and is not only the subject of superstition. Having said this, the past is the past, to be left in its place. There is no returning to it, no matter how deep the yearning, because the past is now an illusion, he seems to suggest. It no longer exists. Sonar Kella ends with Mukul wishing to go back home to his family in Calcutta.
Ray would change his mind by his last two films, Shakha Prosakha and Agantuk. In the latter, in particular, he argues that we must embrace our indigeneous communities and their scientific way of life, where science was intrinsic to their lifestyle. Science is not exclusively modern and Western, Rays says, indeed that science is responsible for the devastations of the 20th century. Indigenous communities have long evolved a scientific understanding of the world, an understanding that is far less damaging to the earth and its inhabitants.
For Ghosh, the past is the site of violent unrequited loss, where the knowledge and skills of hundreds of years have been viciously severed from us. And we must return to the past, to reclaim the collective wealth of understanding, expertise and learning that we have been made to discard. In Ghost-Eye, this is a past where the reverence for Manasa Devi, the goddess of snakes, means respect and love for the earth and every being we share it with. We may then, yet, have a chance to correct the wrongs done, by others and by ourselves.
We marvel at mathematical and musical prodigies because we are highly-educated middle-class people, and we tend to be blown away when a child can do something that we know to be difficult even for well-trained adults. But why should we assume that these are the only prodigious talents that children can be born with? Or that prodigies are born into middle-class, literate families? What about the whole world of people out there who are neither middle-class nor literate, like the majority of our country’s population? Statistically speaking, if one in every five or ten million children is a prodigy, then why shouldn’ that hold good also for the hundreds and millions of people who make their living with their hands, by fishing or farming or hunting? Isn’t it just prejudice to imagine that children with unusual mental abilities are not born to poor farmers and fishermen?
Manasa is a significant choice, not merely an interesting one. She is a subaltern and local Bengali goddess, not one familiar to upper and dominant-caste Hindus. In my upper-class Brahmin home, for instance, the deities I was aware of are Krishna, Shiva, Durga, Kali, Lakshmi, Saraswati and Ganesh. A call for retrieving the lost knowledge of the past can easily be interpreted as a call for the return of a glorious ancient Hindu past. The principal claim of Hindutva is India was a great civilization before Islamic rule. The ancient glory they reference is a Brahminical Hindu society, structured by caste. Both Ray and Ghosh are disinterested in this casteist project. In Ghost Eye, Ghosh celebrates the knowledge capital of fishing and foraging communities in the Sundarbans–mainly Dalits and Adivasis–who typically worship Manasa Devi.
Particularly brilliant to me is Ghosh’s call to recognise the understanding, skills and talents of such non-white collar communities as knowledge, as subjects worth our time, attention and learning. “We marvel at mathematical and musical prodigies because we are highly-educated middle-class people, and we tend to be blown away when a child can do something that we know to be difficult even for well-trained adults. But why should we assume that these are the only prodigious talents that children can be born with? Or that prodigies are born into middle-class, literate families? What about the whole world of people out there who are neither middle-class nor literate, like the majority of our country’s population? Statistically speaking, if one in every five or ten million children is a prodigy, then why shouldn’ that hold good also for the hundreds and millions of people who make their living with their hands, by fishing or farming or hunting? Isn’t it just prejudice to imagine that children with unusual mental abilities are not born to poor farmers and fishermen?…”
For someone like me, a privileged Anglophone Indian who realised that the country she had learnt about in her school textbooks was diametrically the opposite of the reality she found on the ground when she began reporting, it feels like Ghosh has taken all the inchoate thoughts that have pooled in my mind over the years and strung them into a succinct, moving thesis. Anyone who has had the privilege of discovering India on the ground (because it takes a lot of resources to travel beyond the major cities and occasional well-known town) knows that some of the most impoverished citizens (materially speaking) can surprise you with the richness of their imagination and understanding. While some (or the majority) of the most privileged citizens stun us with the poverty (and indecency) of their ideas.
If anything, this is what makes India a great country, blessed by the resilience and imagination of its most neglected (exploited) citizens.
Ghosh takes all of this and shapes it into this urgent, moving appeal. There is much else in the book that worked for me (and I have suggested these above) but this argument was the moment, about a third into the novel, when I fell in love with it.
