If you scan through the list of top 250 Indian movies by IMDB, you will see apple examples from Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam industries, but there will only be a handful of Bengali movies. Even if some contemporary Bengali movies are highly superior than some of the movies in the list, there is still no mention of them. Why is that?
Of the movies that are listed are the three films from Apu trilogy, there is ‘The Music Room’, there is ‘Charulata’, all from Satyajit Ray. Do people guess that Satyajit Ray was the only good filmmaker from Bengal? Or is he only slightly popular because of getting the Oscar? Having no movies from Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak in the top 250 list is almost blasphemy. Both of them have movies in their oeuvre that deserves to be in the top 5 and it is no exaggeration.
From contemporary examples, there is only ‘Baishe Srabon’ in the list. It is ridiculous that there are so many good films made in the Bengali film industry and they are utterly neglected bu mainstream film-buffs. There are some titles which do not deserve to be in the lost at all and there are lots of Bengali movies that are more suitable there. Fans are not capable of finding out good movies in Bengali and the blame goes to the producers and distributors as well for not promoting their movies well. If the movies are promoted well enough, people will find out there are enough titles that deserve to be in the top 100 Indian movies of all time.