Okay, head to Tollywood, briefly?

Unsure exactly how the word Bollywood for Bombaybased Hindi cinema came about There was film historian Bunny Reubenrsquos book Follywood Flashback in the early rsquo90s Also top showbiz executive and lyricist Amit Khanna apparently first coined the term lsquoBollywoodrsquo in a column to describe Bombayrsquos film industryEver since the word lsquoBollywoodrsquo I guess all movie industries have had the suffix lsquowoodrsquo attached to it In the same way that all scamsscandals have been called some lsquogatersquo or the other since Watergate 1972Hence Tamil cinema is Kollywoodmdashout of Kodambakkam in Chennai Likewise Lollywood for Lahorersquos film industry or Nollywood for Nigeria Even Sandalwood for Kannada cinemaThe only nickname that makes sense is Tollywood for the Bengali film industry Because it operates out of Tollygunge neighbourhood in Kolkata If its capital was Ballygunge instead five kilometres away you could call it Ballywood tooTo be sure Tollywood at its inception was totally comparable to Bombay cinema in terms of scalereach Consider for instance Bollywoodrsquos oldest franchise DevdasWhich was the first one In 1935 directed enacted by P C Barua with K L Saigal in the Hindi versionmdashreleased by New Theatres decidedly one of the biggest national studios from Calcutta Bimal Roy was an assistant on Baruarsquos Devdas By the time Roy filmed his own version of Devdas 1955 he had moved to BombayWhat explains the decline of Tollywood as a more national film industry Multiple reasons One of them is the Great Famine of Bengal 1943 There was also WWII which led to hyperinflationmdashrendering imports of rawstock prohibitively expensiveWhich is also a reason for the decline of Bollywoodrsquos fully integrated studio system in the 1940s And there was of course the partition 1947 that led to the split between West Bengal and East Pakistan now BangladeshPartition for Bollywood also meant strong migration from what became Pakistan into Bombaymdashmany of whom took to film tradedistributionproduction replacing studios with a fullfledged mainstream star systemBengalis on the other hand formed a wide talent poolthinktank of directors writers musicians in Bombay Of whom Gulzar writes about lovingly in his memoirmdashActuallyhellip I Met Them 2021What about Kolkata then It got associated with the art house movement starting with Satyajit Ray a star director so globally huge that most others have been eclipsed by his influence since Pather Panchali 1995 cofunded by the West Bengal governmentMrinal Senrsquos Bhuvam Shome 1969 is widely associated with the birth of the lsquoIndian New Waversquo And besides his films I donrsquot think one acknowledges enough the role of Ritwik Ghatak as an institutionbuilding faculty member at the brandnew Film amp Television Institute of India FTII in Pune also pioneering the New Wave in a wayBut what about Tollywood as the mainstream popcornled film industry Given the other Tollywood ie Telugu cinema is seen to be invading theatres nationwide as we speakThe clicheacute is that money industry investment risk was never the Bengalirsquos strong suit And that the mercantile brain that still exists in Kolkatamdashruled by the Left for 34 years until 2011mdashbelongs to the Marwaris These are clicheacutes because they can always be contested with examples to the contraryThat said I havenrsquot seen many Bengali films in theatresmdashthe last one was the Naseeruddin Shah Soumitra Chatterjee starrer A Holy Conspiracy 2022 which was better intentioned than wellmade frankly But then the best way to gauge showbiz so to say is to be a visible moth at the bar where the film industry is partying togetherWhich is where I ammdashat the biggest bash in Kolkata celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Bengali streaming app Hoichoi owned by Shree Venkatesh Films SVF which if yoursquore here you realise is probably DharmaExcelYashraj YRF in Bollywoodmdashputting out most of the big Bengali theatrical releasesAt the party Hoichoi reveals 25 new series for the yearmdashwhich as a slateannouncement including the razzmatazz seems no less than NetflixAmazon gigs Irsquove checked out in the pastFrom the bar of course what strikes you first are the supremely attractive Bengali female actorsmdashmale equivalents of whom might well be the PathanPunjabi blood dominating Bollywood Unsurprisingly heroines of Bengali origin have forever ruled in MumbaiThe Bengali heroes with their own hierarchies lsquoBig Brsquo ProsenjitBumba Da lsquoRanveerrsquo Dev lsquoRanbirrsquo Anirban etcmdashalthough welldressed wellmanneredmdashdonrsquot seem like stars from another sky As stars do when yoursquore at a similar soiree in say HyderabadWhat catches my ears more are people overtly reverential to famous faces equally if not extra bitchy behind the back right thereafter Havenrsquot noticed this swift a flip in Bollywood eitherBut the applause is loud and real particularly for a bunch of actors directors whorsquore not from Kolkata From where then Bangladesh The hawa at the smoking area is for a film called Hawa from Dhaka that hasnrsquot been released in Kolkata yetIrrfan Nawazuddin Siddiquimdashhaving worked on Bangladeshi films No Bed of Roses 2017 No Landrsquos Man 2021mdashhad told me separately to look out for stuff from across the border in the futureI see prolific OTTs and a thriving Tollywood incredibly bridging that gap deepened by politics alonemdashthatrsquos the unexpected great news about an international language cinemacontent I take home from KolkataMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper