But every year, on the night of Saraswati Puja, the surviving technicians of the Bengali film industry—the aging light men, the re-recording artists, the costume stitchers—gather on the steps of the old Tollygunge studio. They don’t pray to a god. They pray to a name.
But Hiralal Sen, on his last day of good health, shot the first slate. On it, he wrote in chalk:
Radheshyam’s ears pricked up. “Go on.” bengali film industry name
Not for their first production. Not for the industry itself.
In the winter of 1918, Calcutta was a city of ghosts and gramophones. The Great War had ended, but the city still hummed with the tension of empire and the whisper of swaraj. On the northern fringes of the city, in a crumbling pathuriaghata mansion on the banks of the Hooghly, a fire burned in a small room. Inside, three men were trying to name a dream. But every year, on the night of Saraswati
“Art,” the old man repeated, stepping inside uninvited. He pointed a gnarled finger at the idle Pathe camera. “You trap light in a box. You make the dead walk again. You are not a society. You are not a shadow-picture. You are a jagaran —an awakening.”
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. But Hiralal Sen, on his last day of
The old man smiled, revealing a single gold tooth. He stood up, dusted his shawl, and walked back into the Calcutta fog. He was never seen again. The next morning, Radheshyam registered the “Tollywood Film Studio” with the Calcutta Municipal Corporation. The clerk laughed. The British trade commissioner sent a mocking memo: “Tollywood? Next, will they call the jute mills ‘Jute-wood’?”