“The British have the ‘Empire.’ The Americans have ‘Hollywood’—a silly name for a holy wood. The French have ‘Pathé’—a man’s name. But you… you have a river. A language. A million stories that have never been told outside the addas of College Street. Your industry should not be named after a place. It should be named after a feeling.”
But so was Bengal itself. To this day, no one knows who that wandering philosopher was. Some say he was a descendant of the kavigans —the wandering ballad singers. Others say he was just a madman who liked free tea. bengali film industry name
But Radheshyam’s mind was racing. Tollygunge. The word was a bastard child of English and Bengali— Tolli (an old Bengali word for a narrow lane or a toll-point) + Gunge (from the Hindi ganj , a market). The British had built a canal there, a murderous, mosquito-breeding ditch called the Tolly’s Nullah. It was ugly. It was colonial. It was everything they hated. “The British have the ‘Empire
The eldest was Hiralal Sen, the firebrand pioneer who had once shot a wrestling match and called it a miracle. But Hiralal was tired now, his health failing. Opposite him sat Dhirendra Nath Ganguly, a man with the eyes of a poet and the fists of a revolutionary. And between them, pacing like a caged tiger, was the financier: Radheshyam Mullick, a jute merchant with a heart that beat not for bales of fiber, but for flickering shadows on a whitewashed wall. A language
That film is lost now—eaten by fungus and humidity. But its ghost survives.
Hiralal shook his head, a dry cough rattling his thin frame. “Too colonial. We are not making moving postcards for the Viceroy. We are telling the stories of Maa Saraswati’s own tongue.”
Within a decade, the marshy lanes of Tollygunge bloomed with studios: New Theatres, with its art deco gates; Bimal Roy’s humble shed; Satyajit Ray’s first editing table, cobbled together from a bicycle stand and a magnifying glass. The name “Tollywood” that had begun as a colonial insult became a battle cry.
