Byomkesh Season 7

[Luisa Rodocker]

Byomkeshis a Bengali streaming television series based on the Byomkesh Bakshi character created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Set in the 1930s, the series is based on the adventures of Byomkesh, and his friend and biographer Ajit, who usually accompanies Bakshi during his investigations. Anirban Bhattacharya portrays the lead role of Byomkesh, with Subrat Dutta in the role of Byomkesh's trusted friend-turned-aide, Ajit. The first episode premiered on Saturday, 14 October 2017, being the first Byomkesh[1] series[2] to be available on OTT platform hoichoi worldwide.[3][4]

Season 1 of the Byomkesh[5] is based on four stories, 'Satyaneshi', 'Pather Kanta, 'Artham Anartham' and 'Makorshar Rosh' written by Bengali author Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. The season was released on 14 October 2017 with two episodes, this season was directed by Sayantan Ghoshal and the second series was released on 16 December 2017.[6][7][8]

In Season 2, Byomkesh will solve the mystery of Satyakam's murder. This series is based on 'Raketr Dag' another best seller in the Byomkesh. The first episode of the Season 2 was launched on 16 December 2017, later on, two other episodes are also being released by hoichoi. First two episodes were directed by Soumik Chattopadhyay, and the third episode was directed by Sayantan Ghoshal.[9][10][11]

Byomkesh season 5 started streaming from 10 January 2020. The season is directed by Soumik Halder based on Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's original story 'Dushtochakra' and 'Khnuji Khnuji Nari'. All the cast remains the same except this time Suprobhat Das plays the role of Ajit.[13]

On 7 April 2023, Hoichoi released the eighth season of Byomkesh, titled Byomkesh O Pinjrapol. It is based on Chiriyakhana. This time, Bhattacharya became the creative director of the show. Pratik Dutta wrote the adapted screenplay and dialogues. It is directed by Sudipto Roy.

In the Hoichoi Byomkesh series, there has been a constant urge to present the stories stylistically and add elements of the era and the time that the original stories were written and established. This has given the Hoichoi series a distinctive feel but the fact still remains that the stories are all too well known and for someone like me who has seen multiple renditions of the same story it will always be a challenge for the writer and directors to create presentations of Byomkesh stories that are intriguing and interesting enough to hold on to my attention. Byomkesh O Pinjrapol is one such great attempt and I will gleefully ponder upon the reasons why.

The next best thing about the series is its performance. Anirban Bhattacharya as Byomkesh is fantastic. He is getting so comfortable playing the character that he has now begun introducing subtle nuances to the character that further humanizes it and makes it that much more impactful. In this series, he is shown suffering from stomach upset from start to finish. His troubled bowel and the various symptoms that come with it are shown to impact his investigations and cast a shadow on his behaviour and mannerisms on more than one occasion. Byomkesh is also shown as someone who misses a few beats of the investigation here and there and even doubts his own deduction skill on an occasion. He loses his temper with his best friend Ajith in a brutal fashion and abuses him. All these aspects of the character needed to be executed and realized through a nuanced performance that Anirban is able to successfully pull off. If his performance was not so life-like, these aspects would work to the detriment of the series.

The writer and director take a few departures from the conventional storytelling techniques that were adopted in the original story and its previous renditions. One of the most noticeable was the dropping of the final reveal moment in the films wherein we have witnessed Rajit Kapoor, Uttam Kumar and Jisshu Sengupta as Byomkesh making the entire colony sit and reveal the murderer with much drama and verbal download. In this iteration, Byomkesh takes the truth to the people individually making them understand that they had been discovered. His visits ultimately culminate in the all too well know ending of the story but have a somewhat different ring to it than the previous films.

In another departure from the previous films and series, some of the back stories of the different characters of the colony including the patriarch are revealed not through narrations or dialogue but through flashbacks that are shot in a 4:3 ratio and in sepia tone. While I liked this creative choice, it might not go down too well with some of the other Byomkesh purists.

If you know the story from any of the previous iterations of it, this will definitely be a lesser series for you as you will know what the proceedings were building up to and how it will ultimately culminate. Interestingly, even for the ones who will be walking into this story for the first time, the creative choices and approaches to different characters in the story could have been better. The series needed more investigative elements in the screenplay. How certain characters were approached and the amount of screen time that they were given signalled clearly that they were going to be more important to the story than some others. Some of these characters were laced with such a dark aura through their dialogues, mannerism, behaviours and the looks that they exchanged with other characters that it was clear what they were about to be. This was one aspect of the series that disappointed me.

Byomkesh O Pinjrapol is more of an investigation into the human psyche, and behaviour and deep dive into their most basic instincts to discover their motives for committing murder. It does succeed in doing that but in its effort to concentrate on the humanity of the crime and the why of it, it does miss out on a lot of other different aspects that the previous renditions brought to the table. Thus, it has lesser to contend with but needs to get its audiences involved in the drama of the proceedings more than keeping them hooked with constant moments of thrill and twists in the narrative. While some might enjoy this temperamental nature of storytelling, many might not and shrug it off as utterly and unnecessarily artistic.

The performances are top-notch. The making and other technical aspects of it are at par with the best in the country. The background score adds a lot to the narrative and even though it moves at a leisurely pace, I was so hooked on the interpersonal drama that it blazed past me. For me, this was the best-made and acted Byomkesh series from Hoichoi. There are 7 more seasons of the show on Hoichoi and each and every one of them is entertaining. I would recommend my readers to check out those seasons as well along with a large number of available Byomkesh films and the stunning Basu Chatterjee series that aired on Doordarshan in the 1990s and is now available on YouTube. I will probably have to write about that series someday soon.

The sixth season of Hoichoi's Byomkesh is set in the year of partition when India as a nation was going through a traumatising phase of watching their large country divided into three parts, East Pakistan, West Pakistan and India. Henna Mallick, a spy from then East Pakistan, (now known as Bangladesh) arrived at Santosh Samaddar's residence. The mystery in the plot begins when Henna is suddenly found dead in the garden. While everyone tries to pass it off as an act of suicide, Byomkesh Bakshi is convinced that there is more to this death than it meets the eyes. It took director Soumik Halder as many as three long episodes to complete his narration.

What Mirzapur is to Amazon, Sacred Games is to Netflix, Game of Thrones is to Hotstar, Byomkesh is to Hoichoi. Each season of this show has been a huge hit since its launch. Byomkesh happens to be the only Hoichoi web-series which has as many as six seasons. The thrill which was explained and explored in the works of Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay's text was hardly found in any of the visual adaptations of Byomkesh. But the screenplay arrived with a lot of balance.

Although, the pain of the partition wasn't visually depicted it was felt when Byomkesh Bakshi screamed at Santosh Samaddar and explained how the division of the nation into three parts on the basis of religion was never a good idea in the first place, and this division would come back to haunt us time and again. Even in contemporary times, when you read the news online, newspaper, radio or watch anchors explain their biased version on television, you understand what Byomkesh meant in 1947, and how it's still relevant today.

The tales of Byomkesh Bakshi are stitched in a manner that it doesn't just appear as a black and white story. The victim does not gain higher grounds for being murdered, neither does the perpetrator is immediately branded to be the villain. Byomkesh Bakshi, who calls himself 'Satyaneshi' (seeker of truth) only investigates to understand the psychology, motive behind a murder.

Henna Mullick, who was at the receiving end of the murder in the latest season, did not become a hero of the story for her gender or circumstances. Rather, director Soumik Halder's usage of keeping Henna, as the conniving, blackmailer, was well written. Over the years, men have been the organisers of crime, but here Henna Mullick became a villain to the point where she had managed to blackmail her enemy to the point that he also had to provide her security and shelter.

Henna, who was a spy of East Pakistan, literally (and geographically) crossed her limits inside the household which gave her shelter. She was a villain when she was alive and remained so even after a solved case, and closed case of her death.

Actors Anirban Bhattacharya, Ridhima Ghosh and Suprobhat Das were reserved for their roles as Byomkesh Bakshi, Ajit and Satyabati, and while they have consistently played their part with brilliance and conviction, it was Debshankar Halder who managed to shock us all. The actor, who comes with a lot of theatre training, seemed to be immersed in his character as the rich influencer Santosh Samadder.

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