The arm-stretched tree-man at the Republic of Nandan. Photo by author.

It is difficult to believe that there was a time when CPI(M) did not resemble a felled behemoth that was howling away on its way to dusty death. In those days it did many other things. And it also did Kaalture, so to say. It had aspired to be a party that stood erect for the working classes while sitting down to sip tea and discuss cinema with the privileged classes. Nothing wrong with that. No other working-class party in the world was doing anything else unless they were busy sending people to the Gulags or tricking them to believe in an ever-procrastinating revolution. 

Early in its life in power, the CPI(M) was characteristically found wanting in a centralised kaaltural administering area, like the one they had at Alimuddin Street for political ministrations. So experts were consulted, architects mooted and the plot identified. In a land adjacent to Rabindra Sadan, atop a large pool, a film centre was planned in a manner, ‘like a fish (leaping) out of water’. In 1980, three years into the Left reign, the foundation was laid and five years later, on September 2, 1985, Nandan materialised as a symbol of Party’s unflinching commitment to the high Kaalture of cinema. It also had the unsuspecting support of Bengal’s great auteurs including Ray himself who, in fact, baptised the venue. 

What now seem to be halcyon days of the nineties, the almighty Party, unfettered as it was in its onward march, was accused of accruing, half-jokingly, two assets in the state, since it took over the Writers’ in 1977: Nandan and Chandan — the latter being the ‘entrepreneur’ son of Comrade-in-Chief Jyoti Basu. This implies a lot as does the fact that Nandan turned 25 this September 2, a day before Uttam Kumar, much as he is undead, turned 84. The link between the Congress-minded Megastar of the pre-Left era and CPM’s swaggering centre of Kaalture at the heart of the city is, as we will see, transcendental.

Despite its dogged origins, Nandan was destined to attain glory. Kolkata lapped it up like a local boy would do to Hubley toys. Those were the pre-Lapsarian days. There was no mall or multiplex. Neither were world movies being beamed by satellite television. Global (non-Hollywood, non-Pinewood studios) cinema was more talked about (by very learned looking, bearded, grave sounding men) than seen. Even when it was shown, it was mostly in dingy, sweaty makeshift tents half-veiled in white clothing where cinema societies projected their collective Bergmans. Nandan gave air-conditioning to world cinema, made watching Costa-Gavras and Wong Kar-wai a ticketed, even chic experience. In fact, Nandan, lest we forget, was Calcutta’s first multiplex. There were not one, two but four auditoriums of varying sizes and intent, an archive and library that together made Nandan. 

In the decade since Nandan was founded, I must have taken hundreds of walks from my college down Wood Street and Middleton Street and then left, down a tiny stretch of Chowringhee Road down the Cathedral Road, past the St Paul’s, the Parish Hall and the Academy of Fine Arts, which together with Rabindra Sadan and Sisir Mancha was Calcutta’s very own, though very inappropriate, West End. 

Entering the chottor (premises) we stood in front of the white, angular hexagonal building with flanks on either side and a fountain at the entrance which only seemed to work when Party apparatchiks walked in! But all that did not matter. What mattered was in minutes, we would be inside the auditorium to experience another masterwork of world cinema. We had a quick look at the roaster and ran for the tickets. Nandan always had 1.45 pm, 4.15 pm and 6.45 pm shows and in college days, the ‘matinee’ slot at 4.15 was the best one since it meant much less explaining to do at home. There was always time to catch up with some coffee and a smoke. And then the time had come. 

Three ushers stood guard in Nandan — three men who separated you from your next Tarkovsky. The man at the entrance varied, but the big, portly, bald man who stood at the first-floor entrance seems to be standing guard to an entire lifetime of watching cinema. Inside the auditorium, the duties were separated between two men, the lower half being assigned to a small, bespectacled man and the upper to a lanky fellow with back-brushed hair. I have graduated from the lower to the upper with time and have seen a generation do so, as they could increasingly afford the 70-rupee ticket to the balcony. 

Nandan had no trailers or intervals and within seconds of the light going out the movie would start playing in the gigantic 70mm in front of us. I would enter my own Neverland Ranch… far from the traffic at Chowringhee Road and the ceaseless tide and flow of coteries of poet-minions, jaywalkers, salesmen, students, pairs looking for shady corners and wannabe antels who crowded the Nandan chottor every evening. 

Of course I do not remember every film I saw but among the most notable are Scorsese’s Hoffa, James Ivory’s Surviving Picasso, a director’s-cut Ten Commandments, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, four films from a Bernardo Bertolucci retrospective including the numbing Sheltering Sky, maiden view of Forest Gump, a whole lot of Latin American, West Asian, Asian and European cinema and even some unsparingly monotonous Bengali fare when Nandan was still the window for ‘art films’ of yore. 

Nandan has one yearly carnival – the great Kolkata Film Festival every November, which has been running, to assorted stupefaction of the state’s political Opposition and natural-born doomsayers, for fifteen years now. However, that is the only time that the usually convivial Nandan premises became forbidden — full of repulsive security, stickered cars, card-carrying Leftist intellectuals with their entourage, distraught government babus and a crowd of unsavoury faces licking their lips waiting for a full frontal in the next Polacko film! Cinema is hardly the priority. But there is this group of young people who would queue up from the morning in all seven days of the festival every year just to get one pass to the retrospective section. Had it not been for this section we would never have seen a whole lot of Passolini, Godard, or Angelopoulos so early in life. There were also some luminescent November evenings when I discovered unexpected gems like Wolgang Baker’s Goodbye Lenin¸ Lars Von Triers’ Dogville or Camilo Luzuriaga Between Marx and a Naked Woman. 

But CPM, being the Party ‘of the people’, could not let pass the chance of appropriating the footloose public space that grew up autonomously around Nandan into its own. No sooner had Nandan become a habit and bit of open space for those who cared for cinema had it started bombarding the premises with all sorts of homegrown and politically tailored kaaltural jamboree that was full of schlock value. Moreover, Nandan started playing usual Bollywood fare and even the occasional chartbuster. No wonder the hang-out zone for good cinema in an otherwise stifling mediocrity and vacuity of the post-Ray, post-Uttam Kumar era, has become another irritating, crowded, lousy, pretentious pass over, much like most other places in this city of dooms.

Ironically, CPM, despite having a kaaltured chief minister who visits the premises thrice a week, never managed to clean up the ugly rubbish vat at the northwestern corner near the ticket counter in the twenty-five years since Nandan has come up.

Now as it plans a catharsis within the Party it might as well start with buffing up Nandan itself. That would give itself and its once-showpiece kaaltural centre some much-needed potency. But to decide upon that, it may need another term in office, which in all likelihood it will be denied.