India's oldest litigation at 72 years was disposed of last week by a bench of the country's oldest high court, whose current Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava was born a full decade after the case had been filed in 1951. While the Calcutta high court would be relieved that the litigation pertaining to liquidation proceedings of the erstwhile Berhampore Bank Ltd is finally out of the way, it still has two of the next five oldest pending cases in the country to deal with -- all of them filed in 1952, a year after the one at the top of the pile made its entry. Of the remaining three cases, two are civil suits being heard in civil courts in Bengal's Malda and one is pending in the Madras high court. The Malda courts have lined up hearings in March and November to try and settle these sticky litigations. The Berhampore case finds mention in the National Judicial Data Grid as the oldest one to be heard in any Indian court until January 9, when Justice Ravi Krishan Kapur's disposal order of September 19 last year was signed, sealed and delivered with a typographical correction. The genesis of the case was a November 19, 1948, order of the Calcutta high court to wind up the then insolvent and litigation-mired Berhampore Bank. A petition challenging the liquidation proceedings was filed on January 1, 1951, and registered the same day as "Case No. 71/1951”. The Berhampore Bank had been entangled in multiple litigations to recover money from debtors. Several of these debtors moved court, challenging the bank's claims.