From filmmakers and actors to poets, the Bengali intelligentsia seems to be jubilant over the name-change since ‘West Bengal’ hinted at partition.
Kolkata: Eminent personalities in West Bengal today welcomed the TMC government’s move to rename the state as ‘Bangla’.
The state Assembly today passed a resolution to rename the state as ‘Bangla’ in three languages — Bengali, English and Hindi.
Film director Goutam Ghosh said that he was happy with the move.
The name Paschim Bango (West Bengal) had reference to the partition, he said. “It rekindles the painful memory of migration and leaving behind one’s residence and property, one’s place of birth and growing up.”
The new name will leave behind that past, Ghosh, who had directed a film on the partition a few years ago, said.
“It will enable Bengalis to think they have a state of their own. Like the way the people in Bangladesh feel that the Bengalis have a country of their own in this world,” he said.
Thespian Soumitra Chatterjee said while the name ‘Paschim Bango’ (West Bengal) had been in use for a long time after Independence, the new name ‘Bangla’ is all right.
“I have no problem if our state is known as Bangla from now on,” the Dada Saheb Phalke award winner said.
Popular Bengali writer Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay said, “We all had been asking for this for long.”
“Feeling happy, this is what I had wanted. We all had known this place as Bangla since our childhood days. Hence renaming it after the partition as West Bengal was totally illogical,” Mukhopadhyay said.
“By renaming it as Bangla, we are retaining the tradition and the long history of this region,” he said.