ENIGMA OF EXILE: (From top) Tannishtha Chatterjee as Nazneen in the film Brick Lane; a still from the film; director Sarah Gavron

When Tannishtha Chatterjee went in to audition for Brick Lane, she didn’t know the name of the film. She had just flown in to Mumbai from Paris, and was jetlagged and sleep-deprived. She walked in a T-shirt and jeans to find that she was auditioning for the part of Nazneen, a very traditional Bangladeshi immigrant in Monica Ali’s acclaimed novel. “I know I didn’t look the part,” she says with a laugh. Sarah Gavron, the British director and her crew, also wondered if she didn’t look too young to play the mother of three kids.

When she was called back, Chatterjee wore a sari and tied her hair in a bun. A month or so later she was offered the part.

Nazneen, says Chatterjee, was a challenge for her. In real life the NSD graduate is an extrovert — Nazneen, on the other hand, is shy and an introvert. “I wondered how I could pull off a character who never expresses anything,” says Chatterjee. “Hers is a nuanced journey.” She says her mother, one of her harshest critics, was amazed she could even portray such an internalised character.

But getting in the head of Nazneen wasn’t the only problem the film faced. The book’s portrayal of Bangladeshi immigrants to London had stirred up some controversy. Some critics and community leaders thought Monica Ali, the daughter of a Bangladeshi father and a British mother, was peddling stereotypes. And she didn’t even speak Bengali! As soon as word got out that a movie was being planned, the protests gathered steam.

Gavron, a first time director, knew that Brick Lane was one hot potato. So she’d covered her cultural bases. She’d gone into the Brick Lane community. She’d hired Bangladeshi consultants. She’d taken on locals as extras on her cast and crew. “When we were halfway through the filming we heard this threat that if we filmed on Brick Lane itself some people might be hurt,” says Gavron.

She quickly realised it was a small but vocal minority that opposed the film, which is a British production. Most people hadn’t even read the book. But they worried about rumours that the film would show a leech falling into a pot of hot curry. Brick Lane is lined with desi restaurants and has become London’s curry destination. And the restaurateurs were worried what a scene like that would do to business.

“I knew the book was controversial but didn’t expect this,” says Chatterjee. “What had appealed to me about the film was that it didn’t succumb to stereotypes whether about battered women, or Islamophobia or even arranged marriages.” Nevertheless, the shooting relocated for a period. When they returned to Brick Lane they came with a scaled down crew.

But Chatterjee says she still had a wonderful time playing Nazneen and exploring the lives of women in Brick Lane. Though Bengali by birth, she grew up all over the world before settling in Delhi. Playing Nazneen was a way for her to connect to the heritage of her grandparents who were originally from Rajshahi in East Pakistan.

“It was a very emotional experience,” says Chatterjee. “I grew up with stories of ilish from the Padma. And you know what, you don’t get Padmar ilish in India, but you can get it in Brick Lane.”

In fact, she and co-star Satish Kaushik spent a lot of weekends going down to Brick Lane to try out the Indian restaurants. Kaushik plays Nazneen’s much older husband Chanu, a rather awkward and overbearing man, who is struggling to find his place in British society. Gavron says while Chatterjee was among the first to be cast, Kaushik was among the last.

“Actors on the whole tend to be slim and good looking,” chuckles Gavron. “It was hard to find someone who fit that role as described in the book.” When someone suggested Kaushik, she Googled him and thought, “He looks physically perfect but can he act?” But then she heard he’d recently played Willy Loman in an Indian adaptation of The Death of a Salesman, a very Chanu-like everyman role. They flew over to Delhi in a mad dash and Kaushik showed up in a suit made specially for the audition. Afterwards, he took them out to his restaurant, called Food Unlimited. “He really did embody Chanu,” say Gavron. “Except for the fact he was a very successful man.” When Monica Ali saw the film she told Gavron that Chanu especially was very much the man she had written.

Gavron says the film was a collaborative process between her cast and her crew and herself. “I was really very reliant on the Bangladeshi members of the crew,” she says. They were constantly correcting Kaushik’s accent. Chatterjee remembers telling Gavron in a crucial scene that she didn’t think the girl playing her daughter would kick her. “Even if she grew up in the West, her family values would be from Nazneen and Chanu,” says Chatterjee.

The trickier part was filming the childhood scenes which are set in Bangladesh. When Brick Lane came out Ali wasn’t able to go to Bangladesh. Though she says a “photocopied version sold like hotcakes at traffic lights where the boys sell cigarettes and water”, she herself was turned down for a visa after she wrote in her application that she was a writer by profession. The Brick Lane crew decided to film the Bangladesh scenes in a village in West Bengal. “It had a name like Harry Potter,” recalls Gavron with a laugh. “We thought it was funny. But the villagers didn’t.”

Villagers walked into a scene so often that they used some of the shots in the film. Language was a problem, there were snakes in the field, and it was “overwhelmingly” hot. “But it’s a film-maker’s dream,” says Gavron. “Because the light is so beautiful and the vistas are so wide and wonderful.”

The contrast between the beautiful greens of the Bengali village, and the drab rabbit warren homes in gray London are jarring. But Gavron says in both places, the film is really about the search for home. And therein, she says, lies the universality of Brick Lane. “I suppose everyone in this new world has had an experience of displacement of some kind. What’s so hopeful for Nazneen’s journey is, in the end she does find home in a place that has for so long been so alien.”