We know the road Madan Street or Madan Square, but we don’t know who the man was. The roads belongs to the name of a Great man who came east from the west to rising up the sun of the bengali film industry, Jamshedji Framji Madan.
jamshedji framji madan
Jamshedji Framji Madan (1856–1923), born in a Parsi family in Bombay, was one of the pioneers of the Indian film industry and he was the man who makes first silent Movie in Bengali language. In kolkata No can can think that it can be an industry before him.
In 1902, he started bioscope shows in a tent in Maidan, Calcutta along with similar shows in Corinthian Theatre. The equipments used were procured from Pathé Frères of Paris. Most of the films shown in those shows were from Pathé Productions. These bioscope shows (A Bioscope show was a fairground attraction consisting of a traveling cinema) were organized under the banner of Elphinstone Bioscope Company. Elphinstone Bioscope Company produced a number of short films. He also started film shows in Alfred Theater, which he bought in the same year.
In 1907, he established Elphinstone Picture Palace (currently known as Chaplin Cinema), which was the first permanent show house in Calcutta.
He also opened Madan Theatre and Palace of Varieties (now known as Elite Cinema).
After World War I, his business started growing rapidly. In 1919, his film production business became a joint stock company with the name of Madan Theatres Limited. Madan Theatres and its associates had great control over theatre houses in India during that period. In 1919, Madan produced the first Bengali feature film, Billwamangal. It was first screened in the Cornwallis Theatre (now known as the Sree Cinema).
The Madan Theatre Company has its roots in 1902 when Jamshedji Framji Madan, a wine merchant who came to Calcutta from Bombay as a child, started his entertainment business by acquiring two theatre companies in Calcutta and then beginning film exhibitions.
The Electric Theatre (now known as Regal Cinema), Grand Opera House (currently known as Globe Cinema) and Crown Cinema (now known as Uttara Cinema) were all owned by Madan Theatres.
His films were marked by a high degree of technical sophistication, facilitated by his employment of experienced foreign directors like Eugenio De Liguoro, Camille Le Grand and Georgio Mannini. Such expertise was complemented by grand sets and popular mythological storylines which ensured good returns. Many of these films were versions of earlier popular theatrical forms. Liguoro directed Nala Damayanti (1920) and Dhruva Charitra (1921), Le Grand directed Ratnavali (1922), and Mannini directed Savitri Satyavan (1923). Patience Cooper, one of the early stars of Indian Cinema, acted in many of the movies produced by Madan Theatres.
Madan also took the initiative in obtaining the film rights for works of stalwarts of Bengali literature like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Rabindranath Tagore. Madan Theatres produced films like Bishabriksha, Durgesh Nandini (1927) and Radharani (1930), based on Bankim Chandra’s works. Giribala (1929) was based on Tagore’s work.
