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DURAND Institute (Asansol)

India / Bangla / Asansol / Railway Station, 000
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DURAND Institute is a cinema located at Railway Station in Asansol. DURAND Institute - Asansol on the map.
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Coordinates:   23°41'23"N   86°58'2"E

Comments

  • mainak_hazra
    The oldest Railway Institute in India. Presently know as Vivekananda Institute
  • Bryan Ryder (guest)
    I remember seing my first 70mm big screen movie ("The Ten Commandments" and later "Ben Hur" at this renowned Railway Institute way back in the 60's. Such Memories!! Bryan Ryder (Burnpur) now retired in the Philippines by way of UK.
  • Tapan Kumar Mukherjee (guest)
    One of the enduring landmarks of Asansol and a legacy of the British rule in Eastern India, the Durand Institute, now renamed as Vivekananda Institute, lies in a delapidated condition and as a relic of the past.
  • Tony Burrett (guest)
    Until the 60s, when the Anglo-Indian diaspora accelerated, the Durand was the absolute centre of AI life in Asansol. It had a huge central dance hall, with a wide nave on one side for tables and seating. The dance floor was normally used for for seating for the cinema which had a Cinemascope screen installed in the mid fifties. A different movie showed each week. There was a lounge area, a bar, cloak rooms, a library, spacious toilets, a cycle room, tennis and badminton courts outside, and a separate two-table billiards/snooker hall. The way I remember it, it was racist in many ways. Indians off the street were allowed in only once a year on Independence Day, for the free movies. Otherwise a kind of dress code applied. No bare feet, reasonably tidy, and definitely no chewing or spitting paan. That was a big problem after the free movies when there would be huge red stains on the floor as a result of paan being spit. There was also the danger of being crushed in the uncontrolled rush to get into the hall grab a seat.Us kids used to love that. How the Anglo-Indians were allowed to get away with all that more than a decade after India became independent, is beyond understanding.
  • Ashis kumar Nandy (guest)
    How do you come to know that it is the oldest rly. institute?
This article was last modified 16 years ago