What was once the residence of Amar Chowdhury, who directed the first talkie film in Bengali.
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement
When German filmmaker Win Wenders visited Kolkata recently, he, like many celebrated guests do, visited the Bishop Lefroy Road — home of Satyajit Ray, one of the most famous residences in the city. But not many in Kolkata know that Ray also lived in a few other homes in the city, or that the houses where some of the biggest names associated with Indian cinema lived still stand in time-worn neighbourhoods.
Now a digital archive has painstakingly located the homes of numerous icons, Bollywood or Bengali, associated with Kolkata. The search was conducted during the pandemic when streets were mostly deserted and created a directory of sorts, complete with related information, for the benefit of those interested. Be it Amitabh Bachchan or Utpal Dutt or Bappi Lahiri, now you know where exactly they lived during their years in the City of Joy.
Digital platform
“What’s remembered, lives. What’s archived, endures. Despite our collective nostalgia and passion for cinema, efforts to document the history of Bengal’s 20th-century films have been insufficient. The pandemic served as a wake-up call. As a group of passionate film enthusiasts, we created a digital platform to inspire both artists and audiences,” said a spokesperson of Bengal Film Archive (BFA), a bilingual online repository of information related to Bengali films and documentaries.
“Most remain unaware that Ray resided in at least four houses prior to the one on Bishop Lefroy Road. He was born on Garpar Road, and the family subsequently relocated to Bakul Bagan Road. Pather Panchali was made when he lived on Lake Avenue. The Lake Temple Road flat where he subsequently lived for a while also had actor Soumitra Chatterjee as a tenant later,” the BFA spokesperson said.
This information about houses is just one segment of the website — which also features trivia, articles, interviews, biographical sketches — and was created, according to the enthusiasts who built the archives, to make up for the lack of attention paid to archiving Bengal’s film heritage and legacy. “Abroad, residences of legends are meticulously preserved and frequently serve as prominent tourist attractions. However, in Bengal, only a handful are cognisant of the dwellings of our luminaries,” the spokesperson said.
One now knows, thanks to Bengal Film Archive, that the young Amitabh Bachchan, when he lived in Kolkata, working with Bird & Co., initially stayed with Pandit Vijay Kichlu, his father’s student at Allahabad, at National Towers on 13 Loudon Street. Mr. Kichlu later arranged a paying guest accommodation for Mr. Bachchan on the floor below.
Where they lived
Director Hrishikesh Mukherjee, who always came to Kolkata during Durga Puja, lived on Rupchand Mukherjee Lane, just next to the Bharati cinema, in south Kolkata. Singer Bappi Lahiri, born in Kolkata, spent his early childhood in Bansdroni; the house is in a dilapidated condition today. Director and screenwriter Ritwik Ghatak was initially a neighbour of actor Suchitra Sen, before moving to producer Pramod Gangopadhyay’s house located behind Muktangan. After Surama Ghatak came to Kolkata, the couple started living in this house on Gangapada Mukherjee Road. It was this house that served as the location for Bhrigu’s residence in Komal Gandhar.
During the search, the “most heart-wrenching” experience for the creators of the archive was the discovery of the one-time home of Amar Chowdhury, the director of Jamai Sashti, the first talkie of Bengali cinema released in 1931. “His house on Gangaprasad Mukherjee Road stands in a decrepit and ramshackle condition. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation has affixed a ‘dangerous building’ board upon its façade,” the spokesperson said
When the team members of BFA reached Tala Park and started making enquiries about late director Tapan Sinha’s one-time address, they were asked by the locals to wait because Tapan Sinha was out on work and would be back in a couple of hours. It turned out they were talking about a namesake who was a wholesale dealer of potatoes and lived in the same neighbourhood.
Published – February 25, 2025 11:50 pm IST
