Next Stop: 36, Chowringhee Lane

I first watched this movie some 30years ago when it was screened in the auditoriums of Universiti Sains Malaysia in an international film festival. My friends and I were not there to rub shoulders with the cultured but rather because we were excited to get free admission to watch an internationally acclaimed and we wanted to kill our curiosity on how an Indian movie could be critically acclaimed! As far we knew, Indian movies were kings of melodramatization and the actors ran around the park and learn relative velocity and theory of relativity by running to each other in slow motion. We were utterly wrong. Firstly, it was an English movie set in India and there was way too much necking for an Indian movie, even the Anglo-Indian character in the movie was embarrassed.

Viewing this film after 30 years makes you appreciate the complex characters and human relationships that can only develop after all the battle wounds of  with ageing. '36 Chowringhee Lane' is art movie produced by Sashi Kapoor for his wife Jennifer Kendall to star. A good work she did to, earning many accolades for depiction of a lonely bored spinster past her prime, Ms Violet Stoneham, who leads a very boring life by any standards.

A typical day for Ms Stoneham would involve visit to the cemetery, teaching English Literature to a bevy of disinterested students in a Calcutta school, going back to empty flat with only a cat (Sir Toby, even the cat has literary connexions; Sir Toby is a controversial character in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night!) to receive her. Her weekly visit to a nursing home to talk to her senile and diabetic brother Eddie seem the only event that she look forward to. Her only other living relative is her niece who is residing overseas who writes to her regularly requesting her to live with her.

I feel that the movie is taking a punch at the people left behind by the colonial masters who still live in the shadow and grandiosity of the British Empire even though they are long and gone. These people, the Anglo-Indians, speak impeccable English, albeit their sing-song mannerism, consider themselves as elitists and feel alienated from the rest of the Indians. Many of the disgruntled Anglo-Indians over the changes in New India seem to be migrating to greener pastures but are also unhappy at their new place of residence.

A new term starts with a new headmistress who 'demotes' Ms Stoneham to teach grammar to the lower forms as a younger qualified teacher takes over her Literature class due to advancing age and failing health.

In this depressive mood, Ms Violet meets up with her former student, a promiscuous Nandita, who is loitering around with her loafer boyfriend. She calls them over for tea and the couple manages for win the heart of this lonely spinster to allow them to use her flat whilst she is at work in the pretext of completing the boyfriend, Shamrukh's poems. Poems, he hardly penned as the couple were more engrossed in their clandestine romantic liaisons. To be fair, Ms Violet did have a whale of a time enjoying their company.

Here, we are also told about Violet's failed romance, her boyfriend Davy was killed in war.

The couple finally gets married and move on up in social strata. They find the old spinster's company not to their liking. They come up with excuses just to get her off their radar. One day, Ms Stoneham decides to surprise the young couple with a Christmas cake, as they had discussed in happier times, by leaving it at their home before their return from an alleged holiday out of town (which was the reason they could not celebrate X'Mas with her). Much to her disappointment, she saw them very much at home entertaining their new found friends.

She walks home heart broken and decides to leave India to live with her niece overseas as her only remaining relative, Eddie had died due to complications of diabetes.

It is a depressingly sad tale of old age, loneliness, spinsterhood and children flying from the nest.