When I heard earlier this year that a film based on the book was being made, like thousands of other fans, I was cautiously optimistic. Although Bibhutibhushan had never traveled outside of India, through meticulous research and imagination, he had created an adventure novel rivaling Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. It was an excellent adventure novel about a boy who filled with wanderlust travels to Africa and has a fantastic adventure. When I put it down later that afternoon, I had finished it.
Intrigued by the cover but not really expecting much (after all who had heard of decent adventure fiction in Bangla?) I picked it up and started reading it. The face of the boy was not visible but you could see that he was heading through a dense forest. He handed me a slim volume with a brown cover that had the illustration of a boy wearing shorts who had a backpack and a rifle. Finding that I had run out of books in English, I asked a cousin if he could recommend any books in Bangla. I had even read the books that my father had won as prizes in his youth. I was an avid reader and had read Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, and all of the Tintin comic books multiple times. I remember first reading it when I had just turned thirteen and was spending a few days during the summer in the ancestral village.
It is a film worth experiencing.īut first a few words on the novel Chander Pahar. I went to see the film yesterday in a packed theatre and thought that it lived up to the pre-release hype. The film based on a short children’s novel written by the Bengali author Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (who also wrote the source material for Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Ashani Shanket) and produced by media-house Shree Venkatesh Films, is a directorial venture of Kamaleshwar Mukherjee and the biggest-budget film to come out of Kolkata to-date.
Chander Pahar (চাঁদের পাহাড়, in English, “Mountain of the Moon”) released across theaters in West Bengal a few days ago to unprecedented anticipation.