Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! trailer: Can dhoti clad Sushant save Calcutta from Chinese gangsters?

As we inch closer to April, Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! is revealing secrets little by little. Trailer number two of Dibakar Banerjee’s eagerly anticipated film based on one of Bengali literature’s most beloved detectives has just hit the internet and for the first time, we have a few clues about what’s eating Byomkesh Bakshy. See the new trailer here:

To quote Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” Calcutta looks beautifully and authentically vintage in the trailer, but that’s about all that seems familiar about Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!. This Byomkesh Bakshy, with two ys and one that isn’t silent even though it should be, is a very different kettle of fish from his literary namesake. Banerjee’s Byomkesh has a unibrow, looks like he was recently dunked in a vat of brown paint, and he’s a dude, 1940s’-shtyle.

Sure, he wears a dhoti, travels by tram, lives in a boarding house and has a thoroughly unflattering moustache, but this Byomkesh is not your average, middle-class gent from 1940s’ Calcutta. This Byomkesh fights, smooches, knows a lot about heroin (that’s not a typo, we’re talking about the drug here) and is the man who’s going to take on a fearsome and murderous Chinese gang.

The heavy metal background score of the teasers gives way to husky crooning as we’re taken back in time to Calcutta in 1943. Ajit (Anand Tiwari) gets in touch with Byomkesh (Sushant Singh Rajput) when Ajit’s father goes missing. When more people start disappearing, Byomkesh is convinced that these are murders rather than simple cases of missing people.

His investigations take him into Calcutta’s Chinatown and may we say, it’s wonderful to see a Chinese character who speaks Hindi without any affectation. Along the way, Byomkesh encounters a range of ominous and not-so-ominous characters, including an undercover British policeman, many scowling Bengali men and at least one angry Chinese gent.

The man Byomkesh needs to vanquish appears to be the Chinese gangster, Yang Guang. As if it wasn’t hard enough for a dhoti-clad Bengali to tackle a swashbuckling Chinese drug lord, Yang Guang has the additional talent of having risen from the dead, in a manner of speaking. We’re told that Shanghai’s Green Gang killed Yang, but somehow, Yang is alive and kicking, and he’s determined to reclaim Calcutta’s underworld as his dominion.

Oh, and thanks to World War II, the Japanese might just bomb Calcutta. Just in case you thought there wasn’t enough tension already.

Fans of Saradindu Bandopadhyay’s Byomkesh will no doubt be uneasy about this avatar because let’s face it, Dibakar Banerjee’s Byomkesh is a whole new character who shares little more than a name with Bandopadhyay’s creation. Banerjee’s Byomkesh has elements of Sherlock Holmes, Dick Tracy and other pulp fiction detectives. There’s a lot more action and violence in the film and the literary Byomkesh would probably have broken out in hives if he found himself sitting next to a bathtub that has a naked, half-Indian vamp lolling about in it.

But none of this is reason to think Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! won’t be an enormous amount of fun. Sure, it may be a departure from the literature on which it’s based and the Calcutta in the film might not be entirely historically accurate, but it’s Dibakar Banerjee’s imagination at work. And while we wait for this new, (literally) darker Byomkesh, fans of the classic avatar can see the television series starring Rajit Kapur on Doordarshan’s YouTube Channel.

Detective Byomkesh Bakshy releases on 3 April, 2015.