The one image in 36 Chowringhee Lane that haunts you way after you’ve finished watching the movie, is that of Violet Stoneham (Jennifer Kendall-Kapoor), sitting outside this house with her cake tin in her hands, with a completely bewildered, shattered expression on her face.

36 Chowringhee Lane is about an Anglo Indian lady, Violet Stoneham, in her sixties, who lives in Calcutta, teaching English in a school. Her life consists of teaching Shakespeare to a bunch of largely disinterested girls, coming home to a dusty old apartment with a cat for company, and visiting her cranky, dementing, often unappreciative brother in a nursing home. As the movie unfolds, Violet seems kind of resigned to accepting her life the way it is. As a viewer, although you might feel sorry for her rather bald, lonely existence, you get the impression that Violet isn’t sorry for herself at all, seeming quietly cheerful in her own way.

Then, rather unexpectedly, her life takes a turn with the introduction of two new characters in her life, Nandita (Debasree Roy) and Samaresh (Dhritiman Chatterjee). Nandita is a former student of Violet, just out of university, comes from a privileged family, in love with Samaresh..a struggling writer. Samaresh is like a lot of young men of his time....intelligent, cynical, somewhat self serving, ambitious, and very into seducing his girlfriend! The couple befriends Violet in order to make use of her apartment when she’s not in, telling her its for his writing . Violet, in her turn, is completely enamoured by this couple, perhaps seeing in them a way out of her mundane existence, something or someone to think of other than herself. She is also reminded of her own youth and the time she was in love.

To be fair, the relationship between Violet and the couple is not all about exploitation on their part, they do take her out with them a few times, teach her to enjoy simple things like eating chaat on the roadside, something that may be seem rather ’’Indian’’ and not really part of Violet’s Anglo-Indian culture....and Violet finds herself enjoying these experiences. But once they get married and have their own place, Nandita and Samaresh dont really bother keeping in touch with Violet. Samaresh quite cold-bloodedly wants to cut her out of their life, being an executive on the rise in society, having friends in ’’high places’’ wth no place for Violet in his social life..and Nandita, although she professes to feel bad about it, supports Samaresh, using devious, less direct ways to avoid Violet. Although Violet is wise in her own way, she is still naive where it comes to relationships and people, and it takes a particularly heartbreaking incident towards the end (which i’m not about to reveal), to get her to realise that.

There are other characters and sub-plots that I havent written about here.

36 Chowringhee Lane is a beautifully directed (Aparna Sen), and acted film. You get the feeling Aparna Sen knew all there was to know about the milieu, about the experience of being Anglo-Indian in post British India, and about the loneliness of old age. In Violet, Jennifer Kendall and Aparna Sen create a character that is full of dignity and pathos. Those of us who are young, are often cynical about people who are older, being impatient and dismissive with them, perhaps fearing the worst that comes with old age and dreading the inevitability of it in our own selves. This movie has given me a lot to think about and a lot to change in myself. Thank you Aparna Sen and Jennifer Kendall. 




Rajaputhran.