At 2.20 pm on a sultry afternoon, Batcha Theatre comes alive. A dozen people, mostly labourers and rickshaw pullers, have gathered for a show and get up busily when they see a white Activa pulling over in front of the cinema hall.
In the rider’s seat is SM Batcha, who has just arrived for the show that is scheduled to begin in 30 minutes.
He needs that time to sort things out. There’s an inebriated man lying on the steps that needs waking up. There are ticket boxes that need to be fished out from his office — an old-fashioned room that houses film reels and posters — and handed over to an assistant. There’s some cleaning work that needs to be overseen. And, a couple of cats strolling in the courtyard that need to be fed.
Five minutes before show-time, people start climbing the stairs and making their way into the hall. They pay whatever they have as they enter, and saunter in to find that one good chair among many broken ones.
The movie they’ll watch is the Sarath Kumar-starrer Suryavamsam , which released way back in 1997. They pay ₹20 (₹15 + ₹5 GST) for the ticket, but there are a handful who cannot afford even that.
It’s the only kind of entertainment they can afford — Batcha’s patrons belong to the lower economic strata of society and the hall itself is located in one of the many dusty lanes in Chennai’s bustling Broadway area.
A bygone era
If you’d been here a few decades ago, things would have been rather different. It would have been called Minerva Talkies and playing a few of the most popular English films of that time.
The nuggets about this theatre are mind-boggling: it was the first to get air-conditioning in the State. It was here that Sivaji Ganesan’s popular Parasakthi was censored, with the film’s writer M Karunanidhi overseeing changes sitting in its courtyard.
Much earlier, at a time when it was opened as National Cinema Theatre in 1916, it was described as the ‘The most up-to-date, coolest and comfortable Theatre in the Presidency’ in an advertisement in The Hindu.
Those words would be too far-fetched to describe the theatre’s present-day condition. It manages to run four shows a day, but the audience is usually about 30 people. It goes up to 70-80 people on weekends.
What’s playing?
“I don’t run this theatre for profit,” says Batcha, as he invites us into his nondescript office that has several film reel boxes and posters, “All the films we show here are ones that I have bought. It is not possible for a theatre like this to buy films from distributors and showcase.” Adds Dilli, who mans the projection room, “Such theatres are dwindling in number, but we are still committed to run the show every day.”
They have more than 200 films — ranging from ones starring MGR to Vijay — and keep showing them. “There have been times when the film we play here is being shown on television the same day.”
There is an audience for such old Tamil films “even in this day and age of Internet,” he insists. “Our theatre’s projection and sound is quite old-fashioned, but the audience do not bother much,” he says, “For many of them, this is the only entertainment they’d ever watch. Some even walk in inebriated. Bigger theatres and multiplexes will not even let these kind of people in.”
Batcha has hopes of updating his theatre in keeping with modern technology, but for now, he’s more than happy issuing ₹20 tickets and screening films as old as Suryavamsam and Kallazhagar. “As long as this kind of audience exists, my theatre will continue to survive.”
