Bow Barracks will be Forever

There is hope in sight for residents living in the century-old Bow Barracks in central Kolkata, now in the limelight for the eponymous film by Anjan Dutta running in theatres in India.

The barracks, constructed to house American soldiers in Kolkata after World War II, has inspired the film and swivelled the spotlight on its crumbling edifice, declared unsafe by the Kolkata Improvement Trust (KIT).

West Bengal Urban Development and Municipal Affairs Minister Ashok Bhattacharya said Wednesday that the state government would demolish the barracks and develop an enclave in the same place.

After a meeting with representatives of the Anglo-Indian community in the state secretariat Writers’ Building, the minister said the new Bow Barracks Enclave would comprise three residential towers – each six-storeys high, a community hall and an open space used as playground and for hosting social programmes.

Located in a lane off Chittaranjan Avenue in central Kolkata, the barracks is home to 133 families – Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Goans, Gujaratis, Biharis and Bengalis.

Bhattacharya said all the residents would be provided temporary shelter till the new buildings were ready.

‘The present renovation plan has already been endorsed by 111 of 131 families living in Bow Barracks. We will soon float an expression of interest to select a developer for the project,’ the minister said, adding that the government wants to hand over the land to a private developer who will develop the new estate.

Of the total 83 cottahs of land, the new buildings will come up on 43 cottahs. The rest would be handed over to the developer to build a commercial complex, a local report said.

Barry O’Brien, nominated Anglo-Indian member in the West Bengal assembly, said: ‘We are planning a children’s park on the premises and a permanent stage where festivities like Christmas can take place.’

Utmost care would be taken to conserve the traditional structure of the barracks so that its typical ambience was retained, he added.

Anglo Indians Defy Stereotypes by Soutik Biswas BBC News, Calcutta

Calcutta has a large Anglo-Indian community

Tumbledown Bow Barracks, a near century-old red brick housing block in a back alley in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta, has not changed much for its third generation resident Kimberley Gomes.

Many of its Anglo-Indian residents still feast on pork vindaloo, listen to Engelbert Humperdinck on the few remaining turntables, and swap tales on lazy afternoons sitting on their slatted verandas.

But for younger community members like Ms Gomes, college-going daughter of a travel manager father and a secretary mother, there is little time for such leisure.

After finishing college, she plans to become a stewardess in India’s flourishing airline industry.

So these days mum is pushing her daughter to join the local gym to lose the extra pounds to be shipshape in time for the job interview.

“A couple of girls in our housing complex have become hostesses with leading airlines. They are very happy,” says Ms Gomes, 22.

The flight attendants of Bow Barracks have defied a stereotype about Anglo-Indian women – who are generally teachers, secretaries or telephone operators.

‘No discrimination’

Across the narrow street of the colonial barracks turned Anglo-Indian ghetto, 24-year Leon Nathaniel, son of warehouse manager father and a telephone operator mother, is also demolishing a stereotype.

He works in a 24/7 call centre at the info-tech hub of Salt Lake on the city’s eastern outskirts.

In another time, Leon Nathaniel, archetypal Anglo-Indian young man, would have been working for the Indian railways, or a well-known local energy utility company. Other standard occupations were working as musicians or as waiters in city restaurants.

Ms Gomes wants to become an air-hostess

“I haven’t faced any discrimination. And there are more opportunities for us than ever before,” he says, taking a break from a Bow Barracks street cricket game where soft-drink crates double up as wickets.

On India’s 60th anniversary of independence, Anglo-Indians, a dwindling community of mixed Indian and English ancestry who speak in English, are redefining themselves.

They are taking advantage of the country’s economic boom in services, moving to jobs where proficiency in English is a bonus and out of ghettos into mixed neighbourhoods. They are gyrating to Bollywood pop, celebrating Hindu festivals, and dating outside the community.

Today, in Calcutta, Anglo-Indians own restaurants, beauty salons and property firms. They work for call centres, newspapers, airline companies, and hotels.

Cultural crossover

“We are imbibing local cultures, and local cultures are imbibing ours. The Anglo-Indian is happy to be a part of the new India,” says Barry O’Brien, a lawmaker in the West Bengal assembly and social activist.

He belongs to a well-known Anglo-Indian family which, in many ways, mirrors the community in India – making good of opportunities at home and abroad, and becoming a part of the mainstream.

His father Neil taught English, published books, and single-handedly made quiz shows popular in Calcutta. Barry’s elder brother Derek worked as a journalist before making knowledge shows a sizzling little industry. Today, Derek is also a voluble member of a regional anti-Communist political party where speaking in English can actually be a liability.

Leon Nathaniel works in the city’s info-tech sector

Barry has been a journalist, run a school, and is now an educator and activist. He, like Derek, has also joined politics, as an Anglo-Indian legislator in the West Bengal assembly nominated by the Communist-run government. (Most state governments in India nominate one member of the community to the local legislature.) The other brother, Andy, a well-known sports journalist, has migrated and lives in Australia.

“In the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of Anglo-Indians were asking themselves, ‘Do we belong here?’ Let us go home.’ Wherever they thought home was,” says Barry O’Brien.

‘Asserting identity’

So there were waves of community migration mainly to imaginary homelands like Australia, New Zealand, UK and Canada. There are even about 1,000 Anglo-Indian families working in the Gulf countries, according to one estimate.

Today, the considerably diminished community, mainly concentrated in eastern and southern cities like Calcutta and Chennai, doesn’t have a clue about how many of them have stayed back home.

There are a little over 100,000 of them left in India, reckons Harry MacLure, who lives in Chennai and publishes a community magazine. Others don’t want to hazard any guess in absence of a community census.

But small numbers haven’t stopped the community from asserting its identity – the 132 families of Bow Barracks, upset by plans to demolish the derelict housing block, recently negotiated with the authorities to move into a new building for the families in the neighbourhood.

Some of them were also incensed about their “stereotypical” depiction in a new feature film by local director Anjan Dutt, and even called for a ban on the film.

This leads many community members to wonder whether they could do more to mingle with the mainstream.

“For one, we could easily be more inclusive,” says Derek O’Brien.

“My dream of Anglo-Indian inclusiveness,” he says, “will be the day a member of the community enters the parliament on his own by winning votes rather than being nominated.”

That could be a difficult task on India’s increasingly fragmented political scene where caste and community groups root for their “own” parties, whereas, as Barry O’Brien quips, “I don’t even know how many people I represent!”

Bow Barracks Forever – Demands that the film be banned

Kolkata, Aug 1 (IANS) ‘Bow Barracks Forever’, a film on Anglo-Indians, has run into controversy for alleged portrayal of the community in a poor light even as a nominated Anglo-Indian legislator has demanded a ban on it.

The film, directed by Anjan Dutta and produced by Pritish Nandy Communications, portrays the joys and angst of Anglo-Indians living in Bow Barracks in central Kolkata, which had been constructed to house American soldiers in the city after World War II.

Barry O’Brien, the nominated Anglo-Indian MLA in the West Bengal assembly, has demanded that the film be banned unless it carries a statement that the story is a work of fiction.

‘The Anglo-Indian community has been shown in a poor light. The storyline about land sharks trying to grab Bow Barracks is far from truth,’ O’Brien told reporters here Tuesday.

He said the Christians and the Anglo-Indians have been portrayed as an idle community, but many of them work in the IT and corporate sectors.

Dutta, whose affinity towards the community is well known, tried to play down the controversy. ‘The story of ‘Bow Barracks’ is fictional. I have celebrated the love and affection for the Anglo-Indians in the film,’ he said.

Producer Pritish Nandy, however, sounded a tad belligerent. ‘There is nothing wrong in the representation of facts in the film. If there is an issue regarding insertion of a line (that it is a work of fiction), I will fight my case but will do nothing under pressure from a politician,’ a local report quoted him as saying.

The barracks, located in a lane off Chittaranjan Avenue in central Kolkata, is home to 132 families – Anglo-Indians, Chinese, Goans, Gujaratis, Biharis and Bengalis.

The state government is planning to reconstruct the barracks – which had been declared unsafe by the Kolkata Improvement Trust – under public private partnership with nominal contribution from the present occupants.

Bow Barracks Forever – Another Review

India’s shrinking Anglo-Indian community and its members’ changing lifestyles in Kolkata are the subject of a film shot over the past year that has just made it for its premier at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI).

Bow Barracks Forever, a 118-minute English-language film is the “story of survival of people in Kolkata and particularly of the Anglo-Indian community”, says director Anjan Dutt.

Dutt, who combines roles of actor, singer, musician, songwriter and filmmaker, has set his film in a century-old building that once served as the barracks for the US army.

When it left after World War II, the building was handed over to people connected with the Army, primarily Anglo-Indians as the mixed offspring of British and Indian stock are referred to in this part of the world.

“This was a community that gave Kolkata its police officers, its musicians and its hockey players. Over time, the place has disintegrated and it’s now seen as a dangerous area. It’s half Chinese, very much Goan and a very strange place,” says Dutt.

Dutt says he was motivated by architect Manish Chakrabarty, who was trying to convert Kolkata’s old buildings into heritage structures, so that they could not be demolished for new skyscrapers that spell big money in a bustling city.

“Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) has done nothing, and the (state) government has been ambivalent. It’s a huge red building that reminds you of Bow Street. It’s a huge place, where a large shopping complex could come up. Everyone seems waiting for it to collapse,” said Dutt.

“All characters are based on real people. They live very violently. Beat each other up violently. Make love violently. The (140 families) staying in the area believe that something good will come of the film,” said the director who has directed numerous telefilms for the ETV Bangali channel.

“Kolkata has never been just a Hindu Bengali city. It is multicultural, with an Armenian community, the Parsees, Chinese, Anglo Indians, and the Muslims,” Dutt says.

Dutt said that funds apparently sought to be sent to restore Bow Barracks, from an MP nominated to represent the Anglo-Indian community, had got caught in the channels and were not used.

During the shooting, which began on Christmas eve 2003, the director said he faced a problem with the local residents expecting to be paid more for their participation.

“I think they had a point. They were misinformed about our film, but to them making a cinema means making a lot of money,” said the director, whose film features in the Indian Panorama section of this year’s IFFI, currently on here.

Initially the film was to be called Aunty Lobo’s Wine, about the middle-aged Anglo Indian Emily Lobo, who lives by baking cakes and brewing red wine.

Dutt, when asked, stressed that attempts had been made to avoid stereotyping of cultural minorities, as often done by Bollywood.

“Bollywood has done damage. Always, the Nepali comes across as a joker, the Anglo-Indian is very brutal. It’s only Raj Kapoor whose ‘aunties’  (elderly Christian ladies) are very sweet and nice. Otherwise it’s only north Indians, specially Punjabis, who seem to be shown in good light,” he said.

Neel Dutt, who happens to be the director’s son and is music director for this movie, said doing the film was a “very enjoyable process”. This film’s cast includes noted actor Victor Banerjee, Lilette Dubey, Clayton Rodgers and Neha Dubey.

‘Bow Barracks Forever is a story of survival against all odds, a story that mirrors the spirit of the old and undying city, Kolkata,” says the director.

Bow Barracks Forever

Cast: Lilette Dubey, Victor Bannerjee, Moon Moon Sen, Sabyasachi Chakbraborty, Neha Dubey, Clayton Rodgers
Directed by: Anjan Dutt

Trust Pritish Nandy’s production house to give that crucial thrust to deserving cinema. Sure, Writer-director Anjan Dutt’s second release in two weeks (after the tepidly –received Bong Connection) is not as powerful and poignant a portrait of the rapidly-disintegrating Anglo-Indian community in Kolkata as Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringee Lane.

The earlier film had a hauntingly intimate quality to its tragic theme of a woman’s solitude and emotional exploitation. Bow Barracks Forever is more rumbustious raunchy and scathing. The spoken word is constantly harsh and the songs (composed partly by the director) cheer up only for a few seconds.

Largely the narrative scans the dilapidated tenement with ruthless directness. A lack of romantic yearning is also the presence of a captivating candour in the narration. The more the director looks into these desperate lives for anguished statements, the less representational they seem in their communalized seclusion.

What the saucy screenplay lacks is a kind of subtlety. The characters are as broadly bravura as they are uninhibited in their expressions of geo-political indignance. Perhaps the ‘ideas’ tend to swamp the emotions at times. The one tenement in Anjan Dutt’s plot seems to encompass characters of every shape and size, from the over-sexed rebellious housewife(Moon Moon Sen, in full-blown form) to the battered wife(Neha Dubey, more hysterical than required)….from the footloose moorless boy(Clayton Rodgers) who sneaks into the battered wife’s bed to his strong-and-dignified mother(Lilette Dubey) who continues to believe that her elder son will summon her to Australia although he hasn’t spoken to her for four years.

These are ‘real’ people given that cinematic tweak which separates the mannequins from the flesh-and-blood types. The cinematography by Indranil Mukherjee invests these derelicts with a life beyond the womb of the screenplay. The editing, though, could have been crisper. Some of the situations tend to get aggressively monotonous. And you wonder, is the monotony a symptom of the characters’ lives, or is that simply an imagined virtue?

And what pray tell, was the planted pre-interval murder in loo, if not a ploy to get the audience back in their seats quickly from the loo? Somewhere towards the end the gifted Roopa Ganguly shows up as an abandoned wife seeking solace from the abandoned husband. Such geometrical gyrations do not take away from the distinctly cutting edge in the plot.

The skyline of the screem-play is ceaselessly scattered with salacious tidbits. Love-making scenes come on with energetic emphasis to remind us derelict lives needn’t be dull. The juices and aromas from the kitchen and bedroom hit your senses in perpetual motions.

Standing tall and statately at the center of this awry universe of disoriented fringe- people is Lilette Dubey. What an actor! No Violet Stonehem from 36 Chowringhee Lane, Lilette plays her character with delicious abandon. And yet there’s a restrain and dignity in her gait and language, quite like what Shabana Azmi had created in her lonely Anglo-Indian character in Anjan Dutt’s Bada Din.

The other imposing performance comes from the irrepressible Victor Banerjee. After seeing him do his ho-hum two-bit in two Hindi films Tara Rum Pum and Apne it’s a joy to watch Victor emerge victorious as the twinkle-eyed sodden trumpet player who chuckles loudly in the face of adversity and asks the Lilette character for a li’l kiss (“No real smooch or anything”) just to remind you that life goes on….come what may. Another tale of inspirational deprivation? Not quite. Bow Barracks Forever takes the marginal stereotypes by the b…lls and turns them into something distinctly glorious, if not grand.

A must-see for those who love stories about tribulation and redemption. They don’t make films about such characters with such ironical integrity any more.