36 Chowringhee Lane

First time I saw 36 Chowringhee Lane was in a small Art House cinema in Paris in the winter of 1985. There was snow on the ground and chestnuts were roasting in braziers in the street. Five years before that I had spent some time in Calcutta where the action of the movie plays out, so the name Chowringhee reached me like an echo from the poster outside the cinema and I went in with my newly pregnant wife and luxuriated once more in a version of India.

I watched it again last night and, 25 years on, all those associations came together and the themes of the movie and real life got all mixed up with each other in a spicy soup of nostalgia, regret and hope and betrayal.

36 Chowringhee Lane is the address of a certain Violet Stoneham, an aging English spinster who teaches Shakespeare in a Calcutta school for young (unappreciative) ladies. The small, sad flat is not as exotic or upmarket as its address would suggest. Violet (Miss Stoneham to you and me, and played by Jennifer Kendal) had elected to remain in India when the era of the British Raj finally came to its inevitable end. Her own generation had either retreated to England or had died, and Violet was left with little more than memories to reflect on and graves to take care of, and life is now lived within a very small compass of school, her flat, the cemetery and her cat.

As life becomes increasingly empty and difficult for Violet, a former pupil and her boyfriend feign friendship to gain use of 36 Chowringhee Lane to, well … have sex in while Violet is at work. The young couple bring life, fun and excitement into Violet’s life in exchange for the necessary freedom and privacy to carry on their affair, but of course Violet is unaware of her end of the bargain until she comes home unexpectedly one day to find the two in a non-physical embrace which in 1970s Indian cinema implied that the two had just been getting nookie in her bed. Violet says nothing.

Other events confirm to Violet that she has been used and that the friendship was feigned.

The film is a sensitive look at the loneliness that age and frailty can bring, especially to someone who has such an odd sense of identity, a foreigner in a country that should be strange to them but which has been home from the time of her birth. Some people will always remain outsiders, the wounded victims of Empire in this case ….. and in my own case too.

Jennifer Kendal is superb as the meek, impoverished, dignified and humble Miss Stoneham, one of the previously privileged class now superseded by those her people once subjugated and ruled, and mocked by those she used to teach.