Her home still occupied
Silver screen legend Suchitra Sen's first home in Pabna is still in the hands of a Jamaat-backed organisation.
Her home in Gopalpur of Pabna town has been occupied by Imam Gazzali Institute -- a Jamaat-backed institution -- for decades and the government has done little to recover it, let alone protect it. The little that the government had done got caught up in legal tangles.
However, there is an organisation in Pabna that wants to preserve the home and memories of Suchitra.
Saidul Haque Chunnu, convener of Suchitra Sen Memory Preservation Committee, said, “Suchitra Sen is the pride of Pabna. Her home is a historical establishment for us … It is the demand of the people here that her home is made into a museum.”
Deputy Commissioner Kazi Ashraf Uddin of Pabna said the administration served a notice upon the occupiers of her home in 2009 asking them to leave. The occupiers, who had set up a school there, then filed a case against the order and the matter remains hanging in court, he said.
Interestingly, it was the district administration that had leased out Suchitra's home to Imam Gazzali Institute in 1987 for just one year.
Suchitra was born on April 6, 1931, at her grandfather's home at Vangabari of Belkuchi upazila of then greater Pabna, but her first home was in Gopalpur, her father Karunamoy Dasgupta's house.
Named Roma Dasgupta, she grew up in the small district town and went to school way into her teens.
From her Gopalpur home, she went to her first school, Mahakali Pathshala, in the town and then to Pabna Girls School, now named Pabna Govt Girls High School, where she studied until class-IX.
Her family moved to Kolkata a few months after India and Pakistan were born ending the British era. But next to no evidence remains of this glamorous person in Pabna.
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