The third movie I want to talk about, in this movie sojourn of mine, is ‘Ora Thake Odhare’. Which literally means ‘They live on that side’. The movie is based on a story by Premendra Mitra, and the movie released in 1954. The cast was filled with stalwarts of Bengali cinema, Uttam Kumar, Suchitra Sen, Chhobi Biswas, Bhanu Bandyopadhyay, Tulsi Chakraborti and Molina Devi. The whole setup and making oozes the style of then Bengali cinema; low budget, only few sets, and tremendously good acting.
The movie is a classic and needs no introduction. And the reason it is still relevant is because this is a hilarious take on the painstriking parition Bengali people mourn till date. After the partition happened in 1947, millions of people (14 million to be precise) moved from both sides of Bengal to each other and just like any other set of refugees, they were also ridiculed, deported (Andaman, Nicobar, Tripura, Assam), beaten to death (Marichjhapi, anyone?) while actually, they had everything in their own livelihood, and also, they actually did not want it. All of that did happen within a decade of a deadly famine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943) thanks to Mr. Churchill from Her majesty’s kingdom.
The Bengali people were (and are) divided into Ghoti & Bangal, depending on which river is closer to their livelihood, Ganga or Padma. Broadly that means whether they are from West Bengal or the East. But these divisions were much softer and to be taken light-heartedly before the partition happened. Many Bengali eminent scholars were born in East and then moved to Calcutta, as that was the capital then and shined in their respective fields. Examples are Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, etc.
But, after partition, that whole refugee issue took off. Calcutta was burdened by an extremely big number of people which it was not prepared for, new areas started to develop just because of refugee re-habilitation e.g. Jadavpur and areas close by.
