Bollywood is scared of intelligent actresses, says Tannishtha

Tannishtha Chatterjee, who plays the lead in Brick Lane, and Shadows of Time  which releases next week, talks to Meenakshi Shedde.

Actress Tannishtha Chatterjee's professional arc is soaring. Flush with the Best Actress Award (Indian Competition) for Bibar at the recent Cinefan film festival, she is now playing the protagonist Nazneen in the film Brick Lane based on Monica Ali's eponymous book (working title Seven Seas).

She's also the lead in Shadows of Time (Schatten der Zeit), a film in Bengali by Oscar-winning German director Florian Gallenberger. The film, which recently released in Kolkata, is scheduled for release in Mumbai and Delhi on September 29, after showing at the Berlin and Toronto film festivals.

In a six-year career, she's done four international productions, including the Indo-French co-production Let the Wind Blow. Finally, Indian audiences are getting to see her onscreen.

“Nazneen in Brick Lane has been my biggest challenge so far, because she's not Indian,” says Chatterjee. “She's is a Bangladeshi immigrant who becomes a British national. She  ages from 17-35 and has three children. My grandparents came from Rajshahi in Bangladesh, so I absorbed details like the food or the way you nazar utaro (ward off the evil eye).”

Nazneen is a poor teenager in Bangladesh who marries the older, London-based Chanu, then has an affair with Karim, a radical British Muslim fundamentalist—but eventually struggles to break free of both men. The film, directed by Sarah Gavron, was spiked by controversy as local Bangladeshis opposed the shooting as being derogatory to them; Germaine Greer wrote that “the community has the moral right to keep the filmmakers out” and Salman Rushdie attacked Greer for being “philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful.”

What did all this mean to an actress for whom this film could be the Big Ticket? “I’m South Asian myself. The Bangladeshis objected to the book saying it had a Bangladeshi woman waitress whose lice fall into the food. Nonsense!
There is nothing like it in the book or film. The film is topical because it addresses contemporary politics like second generation British radical Islam, but it is not judgemental,” she says. “Yet, we were forced to move the shooting from Brick Lane to Chapel Street. But the English are so tolerant. It’s like the camel and the tent with the British and the Bangladeshis. The Bangladeshis can criticise the book or film, but not prevent filming. This is fascism.”

Regarding both Brick Lane and Shadows of Time, isn’t  there usually pressure among local communities that films-or culture-must be somehow be PR for them? “But I met so many Nazneens in London. No Bangladeshi woman there has protested, because Brick Lane is their story,” says Chatterjee.

“And while Shadows of Time addresses child labour, poverty and prostitution in India, it still shows a worker in the carpet factory becoming the malik and a prostitute marrying an IAS officer. Finally, it’s an emotional story.”

The film, backed by Kaleidoscope in India, traces an Indian couple’s star-crossed relationship from childhood to old age. While not altogether convincing, the film has some moving passages, especially the childhood story, with a heart-breaking climax.

Of Florian Gallenberger, a German shooting in Bengali, a language he barely knows, she says, “His approach was very different. He didn’t allow us to act at all. He just wanted us to be our roles.”

What explains her international appeal? “I trained at NSD. I’m the girl next door, but I can play a sex bomb too,” she says. She’s not sure if the international appeal makes it easier to enter Bollywood or tougher. “I’m not a beauty queen. And Bollywood is scared of intelligent actresses. But Provoked can’t sell even with Aishwarya Rai,” she shrugs.