Set in and around Jaisalmer Fort, with a sense of danger lurking in the corner and a character that guarantees laughs alongside some brain tease, The Eken: Ruddhaswas Rajasthan has hit the bullseye.
Director Joydeep Mukherjee takes us on a tour of Satyajit Ray’s ‘Sonar Kella’, exploring the golden fort’s wide expanse as well as its nooks and crannies, its townspeople and buzzing market, all the while sprinkling the script with references to Feluda films even as his detective, Ekendra Sen aka Eken Babu (played by Anirban Chakrabarti), tries to crack a case of his own with his two aides.
The second film in The Eken franchise, based on a novel by Sujan Dasgupta, begins with Eken Babu landing in Rajasthan with his long-time friends Bapi (Suhotra Mukhopadhyay) and Pramatha (Somak Ghosh) for a holiday. They bump into Shatadru Ghosh (Rajatava Dutta), an archaeology professor at Oxford University, who is in search of an idol which he believes has been smuggled out of the country. When an artefact at the Jaisalmer Museum, dating back to the Indus Valley civilization, is discovered to be fake, the existence of a smuggling racket becomes apparent and Eken Babu is pulled into investigating the case.
On his list of suspects are the museum curator Rajyasree Sen (Sandipta Sen), museum administrator Sumanta Roy (Sudip Sarkar) and security-in-charge Rajen, who is missing. Along with his former colleague in the police, Adarsh Shrivastav (Sudip Mukherjee), Eken Babu tries to untie the knots of the mystery. A local chemistry professor who is also an antique collector, Anand Gupta (Rajesh Sharma), joins the hunt.
The Eken: Ruddhaswas Rajasthan makes for an enjoyable watch, thanks largely to the signature antics of Eken Babu. Here’s a detective who is an unabashed glutton, has a tendency for wordplay and misusing idioms, with a personality bordering on the clownish. Anirban Chakrabarti owns Eken Babu every bit and keeps the chuckles coming.
On this trip to Rajasthan, for instance, Eken Babu is very keen on speaking in Hindi and generously uses Bengali words where his Hindi vocabulary falls short, resulting in sentences that are hard to comprehend for the listener. To his credit, Anirban stops short of making the character a caricature, lending an occasional gravitas that balances out the comical. The weak point of the film is the role of Bapi and Pramatha, both of whom deserved more involvement in the scheme of things. The two are reduced to being mute spectators as Eken does all the heavy lifting in unravelling the mystery.
The film rides high on nostalgia, with references galore to Satyajit Ray’s Feluda films. From a pit stop at Jodhpur Circuit House where Ray shot Sonar Kella to a camel chase in the climax — The Eken: Ruddhaswas Rajasthan packs it all. A murder sequence right before the interval is depicted just like the chilling murder of the idol-maker Shashibabu in Joi Baba Felunath. In another scene, Eken Babu points a gun at one of the henchmen of the smuggling racket mastermind, wearing a fake beard — a throwback to Feluda in disguise, exposing Machli Baba in Joi Baba Felunath. And when Bapi suggests that Shatadru Ghosh could be faking his identity, Eken Babu calls the professor “nokol Dr Hazra”, referring to Sonar Kella.
The action sequences in The Eken: Ruddhaswas Rajasthan capture the thrill and the opening scene itself has a gruesome murder after an artefact is smuggled on the Indo-Pakistan border. Cinematographer Ramyadip Saha also deserves a pat on the back for capturing the scenic beauty of Rajasthan.
