Bengali actress-writer-director Aparna Sen’s film 36 Chowringhee Lane (1981) is this month’s Classic Tuesdays offering at the National Gallery, Castellani House.
According to a press release, Sen directs her own story about the aftermath of Empire in a modern Indian society where colonialism is already a generation old.
In the film Violet Stoneham (English actress Jennifer Kendal-Kapoor), a teacher of Shakespeare at an all-girls school in Calcutta is an Anglo-Indian (of British ancestry living in India) whose younger family members have migrated, she lives alone in a tiny flat, regularly visiting her surviving relative, her brother Eddie, in a nursing home.
At a chance meeting with an old student, Nandita, and her boyfriend, Samaresh, she invites them home to tea, where they realize that this is the perfect place for them to meet secretly, telling Violet instead that Samaresh needs a quiet place to write. Violet agrees, happy to be greeted by the couple as she returns home to her flat every day, and a warm friendship develops between the three.
She inevitably does discover that she has been duped, but only realizes the Christmas after their marriage how short-lived the couple’s friendship really is. She finally understands that she must accept change in a world that is unrecognizable from the one that she knew.
According to the release, Jennifer Kendal was part of an English acting family which toured India performing Shakespeare in the 1950s.
There she met and married Shashi Kapoor, the most dashing of Bollywood’s leading men in the 1960s and 70s, and himself from a noted Indian acting family. Kapoor produced the film, and two of their children, a son and daughter, play cameo roles in a dream sequence where Violet remembers her childhood sweetheart, a soldier in WW II. Additionally her father, Geoffrey Kendal, plays the role of her ailing brother, Eddie, in the film.
The film won the Best Feature Film award at the Manila International Film Festival 1982 and the Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Regional Feature Film (Hindi) awards, at the Indian National Film Awards in the same year.
Jennifer Kendall also won the Best Actress award at the Evening Standard British Film Awards in 1982, and was nominated for Best Actress for this role at the UK’s BAFTA awards the following year.
This film is shown courtesy of the High Commission of India, Georgetown and its running time is 1 hour 50 minutes. Admission is free.
