Walking down the memory lanes of Bankura’s Cinema Road

The Cinema Road in West Bengal’s Bankura district has a unique nostalgic appeal among the cine-goers of yesteryears. This Cinema Road, located in the district headquarters town of Bankura, once housed three single-screen theatres, Chandidas Chitramandir (popularly known as only Chandidas), Beena Pani and Basanti, all owned by Nagendranath Dutta, a prominent film exhibitor who came from a zamindar family.

Thanks to these cinema theatres, Cinema Road became the heart of entertainment of Bankura in the early decades of the 20th century, particularly the period between the 1920s through the 1940s. Basanti was the first cinema theatre to be established in Bankura town in the 1920s, followed by Beena Pani in 1929 and Chandidas in 1940. 

The name Chandidas, derived from the medieval Vaishnav Bengali poet Baru Chandidas, was given by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore when he came to inaugurate the 700-seater theatre that later was extended to 1200-seater. The perpetually busy Cinema Road located right in the heart of Bankura town was not only a place for film exhibitions, but a meeting point for the young and old to engage in adda over endless cups of tea and nicotine, as it developed into a vibrant cultural centre.

But times have changed. The old has given way to the new. With time, these theatres lost out to newer technologies and spaces of film exhibition, as all of them closed down at some point or the other. The first theatre to close down was Basanti in the 1960s. Three decades later in the 1990s Beena Pani too folded its operations. And more recently in 2018, the Chandidas Chitramandir was shut down by its new owners, the Modi family.

Today, Gandheshwari Theatre located in the Jangalmahal area is the only single-screen cinema hall at Bankura. Its present owner, Subhankar Dey, is not happy with the state of affairs of film exhibitions in rural Bengal. He buys the exhibition rights of only those select films that have the potential to do good business in the rural market.

“We run the theatre only during screening a Pathaan, or a Jawan, films that have done great business across markets and the public response is quite encouraging. For the rest of the year, we just keep the theatre closed, since it is difficult to sustain the operations and pay hefty electricity bills.’ Subhankar says, his father established the Gandheswari Theatre in 1979, when first-class tickets cost a mere three rupees and balcony tickets went for 5 rupees.

Today, despite facing substantial losses, he continues to run the theatre, since it is his father’s desire to keep the theatre alive. “I will continue to run the theatre as long as my father is alive. Once he is no more, I will close it down, it is no longer a profitable enterprise.”

According to Bankura local boy and documentary filmmaker Arjun Chakraborty, in the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of people thronged the single-screen theatres on Bankura's Cinema Road every day. He says, Beena Pani, the second-largest single-screen theatre at Bankura, even organised special film exhibitions for the Gujarati community in the town every year during Diwali, since Nagedranath opened this theatre in partnership with a wealthy Gujarati merchant.

Chakraborty states that in 2001, the ownership of Chandidas changed hands from the Dutta family to the Modi family, and the new owners ran the theatre from 2018 until it finally closed down for good. Arjun Chakraborty recalls, that a year prior to its final closure, the Chandidas theatre screened house-full shows of the Rajamouli-blockbuster sequel Bahubali-2 for over two months and did brisk business before the candle finally burnt out.

Bankura old-timers still remember with nostalgia, the puchkawalas, singhara vendors, and ice-cream sellers, who would congregate at 3 in the afternoon during matinee time right in front of Chandidas theatre. They recall the very popular Bengali film Beder Meye Josna (1989) that ran for two continuous months at the Chandidas theatre. 

Today, a signboard with the words ‘Beena Pani Picture Palace’ continues to be displayed above the gates of the now-defunct theatre that closed down in the 1990s. The residents of Bankura lament the loss of the theatre, their cherished island of imagination, even as they reminisce about past times, such as how the Uttam Kumar-starrer Sagarika played to full houses here in 1956. Such is the tyranny of time.