Natun Yahudi (1953)

Sen adapted his own play, first staged by the Uttar Sarathi group (1948) to raise funds for refugees from East Bengal (cf. Bhanu Bannerjee), and part of a genre of 40s ‘realist’ theatre addressing the 1942-3 Bengal famine and Partition (cf. plays like Digin Bandyopadhyay’s Bastubhita, Tulsi Lahiri’s Banglar Meye). School-teacher Manmohan Pandit arrives in Calcutta as a refugee from what had become East Pakistan. His eldest son was killed in the freedom struggle and the family is determined to live up to the dead son’s idealism: second son Mohan refuses a job out of solidarity for striking workers and becomes a coolie while the father finds employment as a cook. The other son, Duikhya, is rejected by the family when he turns to crime, but he is the only one with money when the father falls ill. Eventually the criminal son and the father die, shortly before the latter’s delayed pension arrives from Pakistan. Although a straight adaptation of the play, the film followed Chinnamul’s (1950) example and used Bangladeshi dialect.