Dilip Kumar exemplified an idea of India we've lost

My Mirror/TOI Plus column dedicated to the actor Dilip Kumar, who passed on this week:

Born in Peshawar and brought to Bombay, he was the true child of a country that revelled in its linguistic and regional variety, rather than craving to homogenise it.

Like the country it claims to represent, the public culture of Bollywood has a tendency towards hagiography. We like to anoint heroes, inflating even their minor talents into grand achievements, and painting an unrealistically spotless picture of their greatness. Bhakti leaves no room for considered evaluation of a person’s strengths and flaws, or even for placing someone in the context of his time, looking at how he may have responded to his professional and historical milieu. It is as if we have never got our heads around the relationship between the individual and society: Either the individual’s achievements are credited entirely to his being from x community or y institution, or else he is pronounced sui generis in some unbelievable way.

The actorly legend of Dilip Kumar is no different. The stories of his dedication abound - of his being a ‘method actor’ before Marlon Brando, or learning to play the sitar in reality from Ustad Abdul Halim Jaffar Khan for the 1960 film Kohinoor, or refusing the role that eventually went to Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia. Some of these narratives say less about Dilip Kumar than about the Indian desire to lay claim to an actor who was the equal, nay superior, of anyone Hollywood could throw at us.

That path of global comparison, though, feels to me like a red herring - not because Dilip Kumar was not a fine actor, but because the style he developed was so specifically Indian. He may have been understated, using a mixture of gently caustic dialogues and brooding silences and dropping his booming voice to a whisper in the throes of love or pain, but there was never any doubting the intense ebb and flow of emotion under that surface. Dilip Kumar was drama – just conducted with dignity.

Still, it is true that he was among the first Indian leading men to step away from our previously theatrical histrionics – and I mean theatrical here quite literally; the exaggerated gestures and loud oratory were characteristic of the spectacular Parsi Urdu theatre, from which early Bombay cinema emerged. Actors like Motilal and Ashok Kumar were his predecessors in this change. Ashok Kumar, in fact, was the first actor he met at Bombay Talkies, telling him to “just do what you would do in the situation if you were really in it” – and young Yousuf took the big star’s naturalistic instructions to heart.

Despite a rocky start with the lost 1944 film Jwar Bhata (in which the outspoken FilmIndia critic Baburao Patel called him “the new anaemic hero” whose “appearance on the screen creates both laughter and disappointment”), by 1947, Dilip Kumar had made the screen his own.   

But to me, what made Dilip Sahab a true legend (and he was always called Dilip Kumar Sahab, making the PM’s condolence tweet calling him “Dilip Kumar ji” sound strangely off) was not his acting, or even his perfectionist attention to detail, or even his undeniable mastery of both voice and language. Though that last quality was shaping, both of him and the film industry he strode like a colossus for decades. Born in Peshawar in 1922 and brought to Bombay as a toddler by his fruit-merchant father, Dilip Kumar was a true child of that polyglot city -- and of an India that revelled in its regional and linguistic variety rather than craving to homogenise it.

Other than his renowned flair for Urdu (he told a young Tom Alter that the secret of good acting was “sher-o-shairi”), he was fluent in Hindi/Hindustani, Pashto, Punjabi, Marathi, English, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindko, Persian and the Awadhi and Bhojpuri dialects. You can watch the words roll off his tongue in old YouTube interviews, or read the many remembrances in which he made people feel deeply at home by speaking, literally, in their language. For 10 years from 1960 on, a special train ran annually from Bombay to Poona on which people bought tickets for the sheer pleasure of travelling with Dilip Kumar – but it seemed he took enormous joy in it too, talking to people in Tamil, Telugu, Konkani and all of the languages mentioned above. 

Which brings me back to the qualities that really seem to define Dilip Kumar: His warmth and integrity and feeling for people, across the bounds of religion and background and age. You didn’t need to know him personally to be able to see the strength of his relationships. It is enough, for instance, to read Rishi Kapoor talk about his father Raj Kapoor’s lifelong camaraderie with “Yousuf Uncle” - extending from their shared Pashto-speaking childhood to the superb playing-off of their personas in the hit love triangle Andaaz (1949), through the many schemes they hatched to raise funds for national causes, all the way to Dilip Kumar addressing an unconscious Raj Kapoor in his hospital bed just before Kapoor passed away in 1988 – as filmi as it gets, and yet real and deeply felt.

It is enough, also, to watch Dilip Kumar reach out, mid-speech on stage and hold the hand of the much younger Shah Rukh Khan, turning what might have been just another filmi commemoration into something memorable and intergenerational and true. Or Dharmendra, visiting for his birthday a few years ago, clasping his hands with a fraternal love you could not stage – or cradling the late thespian’s head after his death, tweeting “Maalik mere pyaare bhai ko Jannat naseeb kare”.

Dilip Kumar came of an age in a film industry that was, as anthropologist William Mazzarella points out, then in a rare period of organic synch with the nation-state. If filmmakers between the ’30s and early ’60s seemed to voice the hope and popular enthusiasm of the new nation, the nation could also see itself in the cinema. In 1955, the chair of a Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar could welcome Prime Minister Nehru as “the Director of one of the greatest films in history – the film of New India’s destiny…”.

Dilip Kumar was a great admirer of Nehru, whom he called Panditji, like so many of his generation. In his memoir, he speaks fondly of Nehru singling him out on a rare visit to a film set, and in later years, giving his 1961 film Ganga Jumna a hearing against decisions by Nehru’s own information and broadcasting minister BV Keskar. Screenwriter Salim Khan, writing at the end of Dilip Sahab’s memoir, makes the fascinating argument that the legendary pauses in his dialogue delivery were modelled on Nehru’s Hindi speeches, where the pauses were because he was translating from English in his head.

In 1962, Nehru only had to say the word for Dilip Kumar to agree to campaign for the Congress Party, for the great VK Krishna Menon. Kumar later served for a year as Sheriff of Bombay and as a nominated INC member to the Rajya Sabha from Maharashtra from 2000 to 2006. This was also a man whom Pakistan had awarded the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, leading Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray to cast public aspersions on his nationalism. And yet Dilip Kumar’s book makes a point of mentioning not only his hurt, but also the Thackerays’ later invitations to him and his wife Saira Banu.

In his grace and his depth of feeling, for India and the cross-subcontinental culture he spoke for, Yousuf Khan had few equals. Dilip Kumar exemplified an era, and his life and character seem to sum up what was best about it. He could only have emerged in a time and a place where we believed in stitching things together – not tearing them apart. Long may his memory live.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 10 July 2021.

How cinema uses the horror of train accidents to tell a story

My TOI Plus column: the last in my series on trains in Indian cinema.

 

Through Indian film history, trains have often delivered not just the thrill of danger, but all the terrifying finality of death.  

A screenshot from Do Anjaane (1976), in which the train holds the key to trauma -- and to release

Over the last few weeks, this column has touched on some superbly-realised visions of the Indian railways as bringing people together, including Gulzar's Kitaab, Satyajit Ray's Nayak and Sonar Kella, and most recently, Shyam Benegal's 1986 television series Yatra. But perhaps one reason why trains appear so frequently in cinema is that their visual and aural power can be harnessed as metaphors for both one kind of experience and its opposite. Trains may often produce a sense of comfort, continuity and kinship with strangers. But they are equally capable of evoking fear, horror and a sense of rupture. The railway accident is not just about physical trauma, but the terrible finality of endings.

The metaphor-laden vision of the train accident - the train as something that causes death – appears in Indian cinema as early as 1936. Achhut Kanya, made by the German director Franz Osten for Himanshu Rai's studio Bombay Talkies, featured established star (and Rai's wife) Devika Rani as the 'untouchable' heroine Kasturi, whose relationship with the Brahmin hero (Ashok Kumar, then an industry newbie) ends in tragedy on the railway tracks. An annotation on the archival film website cine.ma describes Achhut Kanya as “[a] circular story told in flashback, in which eternal repetition is only interrupted with death in the form of the relentlessly linear railway engine”.

The film uses the train in multiple ways. It begins, for instance, with a husband and wife in a car, who are stopped at a railway crossing by a guard who insists that the hour before the train arrives, is a time of ghosts. Soon after, the couple find a little shrine to Kasturi nearby, and a local ascetic tells them the story of how she lived and died here – ie, the story of the film. Kasturi was the daughter of a railway crossing guard, and an early scene evokes her childish pride in her father's power to stop the train by waving the red flag. Stilted though the staging seems 85 years later, there's an undeniable pathos to the fact that the same railway guard's daughter dies trying to stop the train. One could extend that thought: If the train represents modernity, the 'achhut' girl's belief in it - and in her hold over it - fails her miserably.

The figure of the approaching train continues to be an agent of death, as I have written in previous weeks, in the films of Bimal Roy and Satyajit Ray. More than the accident, it is the possibility of suicide that appears in these narratives and many others throughout the middle decades of the 20^th century. Over and over again, young people driven to hopelessness by the harsh, relentless city, find themselves walking towards the train tracks, or climbing the stairs to a railway bridge to fling themselves off it.

By the 1970s, as I've argued earlier, the association between trains and violence becomes an increasingly common motif, at least in Hindi films. Trains conjure up both the excitement of speed and the horror of accidental death, making them a thriller staple. The technological fantasy suggested by a film like Parwana reached a kind of acme (or nadir) in The Burning Train (1980), an action thriller-disaster film about the creation and sabotage of “the fastest train in India”. But the violent train scene from that decade that has stayed with me from watching it as a child is Dulal Guha's Do Anjaane (1976), in which the duplicitous Prem Chopra pushes his friend (Amitabh Bachchan) off a moving train, to aid his romance with his friend's ambitious wife (Rekha).

Watching Do Anjaane again this week (while trying to ignore its deeply misogynistic take on women's ambitions), I found that the film is actually built around train-related trauma. It starts with a rather smug Bachchan drinking and driving alone. Suddenly, out of the darkness, a train approaches. It seems to be coming right at him. He lets out a scream and swerves wildly, hitting a tree. As he is revived after the accident, we learn that he had lost his memory from the previous trauma of his brush with death. The encounter with another speeding train triggers its return six years later – and leads to a complex revenge plot, in which that murder attempt is recreated for a Bengali film called Raater Train ('The Night Train').

In 2007, Sriram Raghavan made a thriller called Johnny Gaddaar, crammed with cinematic references, including a long quotation, from Parwana: The train scene. Like Bachchan in that film, Neil Nitin Mukesh in Johnny Gaddaar commits a crime whose success depends on getting on and off trains, cars and planes. But in Johnny Gaddaar, the crime itself involves treacherously pushing his friend Shiva off a train - unlike Parwana, but like Do Anjaane.

 

After Shiva's disfigured corpse is found, the gang wonders how a strong man like him was physically overpowered and killed. Or was he killed at all? In the 1957 classic Pyaasa, a beggar's disfigured corpse on the train tracks is taken for the hero Vijay (Guru Dutt), letting him stage his demise. No-one cites Do Anjaane or Pyaasa in JG. But first the murderer's fear and then the others' suspicion that Shiva isn't actually dead suggest a long film-steeped history -- for the characters, and the filmmaker.

Sometimes, as in Achhut Kanya, the train feels like destiny – you rush towards it, imploringly, but it does not stop. And sometimes you manage to turn away at the very last instant -- as with Kishore Kumar in Naukri, or the incredible Pyaasa scene where the world-weary Vijay ponders the train tracks, but then crosses over safely, unlike the ill-fated beggar behind him. The train passes, only the wind stings your cheeks, and it feels like fate has not yet come for you. 

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 6 Jun 2021 and TOI Plus, 5 Jun 2021.

How Benegal turned an '80s train ride into a journey of self-discoveries

For my weekly column in Mirror/TOI Plus, the seventh piece in a series on trains in Indian cinema: 

Shyam Benegal's thought-provoking television series Yatra gave the Indian Railways a stellar role, as the thread that stitches the country together

 

Yatra, the 15-episode series telecast on Doordarshan in 1986, may be the most dedicated depiction of the Indian train journey on screen. Directed by Shyam Benegal, the profoundly memorable show was based on a screenplay by his longtime screenwriter Shama Zaidi and theatre director and playwright Sunil Shanbag. It was sponsored by the Indian Railways, which gave Benegal the use of a 10-bogey train for the 50-day shoot.

Benegal decided to have the show unfold – consecutively -- on two of the longest journeys you could make by rail in India at the time: On the Himsagar Express, which ran from Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, to Jammu in the north; and the Tripura Express, which ran from west to east, from Jaisalmer to Guwahati. We begin the journey with the Himsagar Express, in Kanyakumari, where Lance Naik Gopalan Nair -- Om Puri playing a Malayali armyman posted in Jammu -- misses his train. Gopalan and his wife's frenetic taxi ride to catch up with the train at the next station (and when they miss it there, the next one) is one of many delightful narratorial devices in Yatra -- among other things, enabling Benegal's brilliant cinematographer Jehangir Chowdhury to shoot the train from the outside.

  

Inside, on the moving train, we meet a cast of characters as varied as the country -- many of them revealing to us an aspect of the country's troubles, small or large. The telling is gentle, but the stories are powerful. An old Marathi couple who have just lost their daughter to dowry murder find themselves taking care of a young Punjabi woman (a marvellous Neena Gupta) who is escaping ill-treatment by her mother-in-law and trying to get to her natal home in Jalandhar before she delivers a baby. A theatre troupe that has just lost a crucial actor to Bombay is trying to get the play back on track before getting to Delhi for a performance scheduled at the National School of Drama. An ageing, unwell Hindu ascetic is being accompanied to Jammu by his devoted disciple (played by the wonderful Mohan Gokhale) because he wants to see the Himalayas one last time. A Muslim husband who has been wanting his doctor wife to give up her medical practice finds himself unexpectedly affected by helping her deliver a baby.

As a child of the 1980s, I remember being entranced by Yatra, recognising its difference from the cinematic content around me without being able to name that difference. The beautifully-captured train journey allows you to travel vicariously through the country. And many of the things that Benegal brought into the narrative were not things that found space in mainstream, popular culture. As the train moves from the Andhra region towards the jungles of Madhya Pradesh, for instance, we are introduced to an activist for minimum wages for adivasi labourers who has attracted the ire of landlords in Nellore district. Now a whisteblower on the run, Venugopal is taking some documents to Delhi – but there's a bunch of goons who know he is on the train. Even to a child who knew nothing of the world, it was somehow clear that these goons – perfectly ordinary looking, mostly unspeaking, not particularly large or muscular – were more dangerous than the henchmen the villain sent out in Hindi cinema. Even today, it is chilling to watch the scene where Venugopal gets dragged out of the train while everyone else is distracted by a theft.

There is a lovely unpredictability to Yatra's narrative, however, in which such moments of gravity and fear can segue into humour and joy – and sometimes the opposite. And as often happens when you spend some time together, people you might have dismissed at first glance begin to seem human, vulnerable, perhaps even worthy of admiration. Benegal achieves some of this empathy through Om Puri's Gopalan, who serves as a conscientious but opinionated narrator. Thus the ailing swamiji, whom Gopalan thinks is all talk, turns out to have once fought in Subhash Bose's Indian National Army. The theatre troupe, whom the Armyman dismisses as having no serious work, is actually the only group of people who are working throughout the train ride. Their frazzled stage manager (the dependably superb Harish Patel) seems like a drunken buffoon who can't possibly be coached to act – but after an accident brings him to his senses, the whole compartment watches him transform into Ashwatthama.

But as in life, so on the Indian Railways: Everyone has their own journey to complete. The characters get on the train, learn something of each other's lives, and then part when their destinations arrive. Yet something meaningful is often forged in that fortuitous intersection of time and space. A young man heading to a job interview becomes besotted by a pretty young co-passenger, wooing her silently in the presence of her oblivious parents while making up verbose dream sequences with her in his head. The Marathi couple are so clearly taking care of the pregnant Neena Gupta that the railway doctor and others constantly mistake them for her parents. Later, Om Puri's Gopalan, trying to follow up with the railway authorities on the disappeared Venugopal, is asked the same question. “Aapke koi rishtedaar thhe?” Puri pauses, and his silence contains multitudes. “No,” he responds quietly. “We only met on the train.”

Published in Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune Mirror/TOI Plus, 30/29 May 2021.

A child's view of the world through a train ride

This is the sixth column in my ongoing series on trains in Indian cinema. (Periodic reminder for new readers of this blog: I write a weekly column on cinema which appears in TOI Plus, as well as in Bangalore Mirror, Pune Mirror & Mumbai Mirror.)

-- In Gulzar's Kitaab, the railways are a route and a rite of passage for a child trying to find his place in the universe --

There are probably few films in any language that have been titled 'book'. But lest you think a film called Kitaab might be bookish (which in the eyes of many movie-viewers translates to boring), Gulzar's 1977 screen adaptation of Samaresh Basu's story begins in breathless motion. Gusts of black smoke rise into the sky, a train whistles, and the familiar “chooka-chook” of the moving carriage takes over, interspersed with a child's voice. He is making up a chant to match the train's rhythmic sound: Kidhar ja, kidhar ja, kidhar ja? Bhaag chala, bhaag chala, bhaag chala [Where d'you go, where d'you go, where d'you go? Running away, running away, running away].

It is only after this that we see him: Master Raju, ubiquitous and irreplaceable child star of 1970s Hindi cinema, squatting on the train's floor, in the space between two lower berths. Above him, in the upper berths, two children pass a notebook to each other, conducting a silent game of knots and crosses. Even before we know anything of what the film is about, Gulzar has communicated how marvellous train journeys could feel for the middle-class child -- the adults asleep below, while you looked down from the deliciously unsupervised space of the upper berth, the holidays stretching ahead of you. The train journey was a time out of time.

As it turns out, Gulzar is only pointing to that sense of sweet interregnum, secured at both ends by middle-class cushioning, as a contrast. What makes Kitaab memorable is the real-life adventure on which it launches its boy hero – but here, too, the railways are crucial. Bored with school and misunderstood at home, Babla runs away from the city home he shares with his didi (Vidya Sinha) and brother-in-law (in an odd bit of casting, Uttam Kumar!). He gets on the train to go back to his mother in the village. But when shoved out for being ticketless, the 12-year-old suddenly finds himself in the real world he's been so impatient to enter.

In flashback, we see Babla and his best friend Pappu bunking school to wander the city, entranced as much by the street magician as by the halwai making jalebis. Again and again, they try to apprentice themselves to these men, who greet their enthusiasm with mostly indulgent disbelief. On the surface, these scenes evoke laughter: The boys, it seems, will do anything to get out of having to go to school. But the camera's attention to the men's practiced movements and the boys' rapt gazes tell a different story: These artisans are indeed masters of their craft. The children, watching them, grasp that fact instinctively – and any craft so consummately carried out seems worth learning. If classroom education has failed to engage these young minds, Kitaab suggests, it has also not yet infected them with the casteist, classist belief that manual work, no matter how skilled, is unworthy of admiration.

It is people like these that adopt the runaway boy -- the railway engine driver and his assistant, the station's resident midget, and Shreeram Lagoo playing a blind singer of the sort that could once be met on every train in India. Asking very few questions, they simply add him into their lives. The middle class passengers ignore the unclaimed child in their midst, but the engine driver gives him the last of his tiffin, the blind beggar buys him tea and food. The instinctive humanity with which they share what little they have is moving – yet Gulzar doesn't let things turn maudlin. We smile at little things and big ones: The little boy and the dwarf literally sizing each other up; the hackneyed phrases people use for emotions. When someone says “Bechara anaath hai [He's a poor orphan]”, Babla adopts the phrase, trotting it out for a quick dose of sympathy, often to hilarious effect. “Bechara anaath hoon [I'm a poor orphan],” he tells one ticket checker -- just before saying he's headed to meet his mother.

 

Much of the bittersweet pleasure of Kitaab comes from watching the child watch the world go by – and learning from it as he does. And although Babla was curious, observant and sensitive at school and at home, it is the train that offers him a sense of what the world is really like. The network of trains and railway stations is like a pathway through the world, and a microcosm of it. As Babla negotiates his way through this network, he encounters old age and disease, blindness and deformity -- and death. Like a latter-day Siddhartha, the protected middle class boy is confronted with the sight of suffering, and is shaken by it.

Unlike Siddhartha, though, the experience doesn't lead him to renounce the world – but to return to it richer. One could read Kitaab as a cop-out: Issuing a challenge to middle class pieties and normative barriers, but turning back before risk turns to danger. But one can also see it as an expansion of the child's universe, an initiation into life that acknowledges the inevitability of sorrow -- while not undermining the value of the safety net. As the blind train singer puts it, “Gaadi chhutne ka gham mat kariyo, baalak. Station na chhutne paaye [Don't mourn the missed train, child. Just don't let the station get away from you.]”

Published in TOI Plus, and three editions of Mirror -- Pune, Bangalore and Mumbai.

The train ride as a technological fantasy

My TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror column:

In popular 1970s Hindi cinema, the train became central to an imagined world of infrastructural achievement and finesse. Sadly, we're still content to live in the dream.

Amitabh Bachchan prepares to get off a train in a screenshot from Parwana (1971)

In the 1960s and 1970s, the train in Indian cinema starts to appear as a space of sophistication and luxury. Whether in 'art films' like Satyajit Ray's Nayak (which I mentioned last week), or a full-on commercial Hindi film like the racy Rajesh Khanna starrer The Train, the upper class railway compartment represents high standards of comfort and hospitality. This is true despite the fact that Ray, ever the realist, has a senior Calcutta executive in Nayak express annoyance that he can't even get a beer on the AC Deluxe Express (precursor of the Poorva Express, the train between Calcutta and Delhi before the Rajdhani Express came along three years later in 1969). (The fellow isn't entirely to blame for hoping, given how much the train pantry car echoes the atmosphere at one of Calcutta's Anglophone clubs, where no evening would flow without alcohol.) He gets a Coke instead, though the waiter only comprehends when told “Coca Cola”. Still, the service on these filmi trains is polite, English-comprehending and very classy -- restaurant-like, in an era when few people ate out often. There is also a degree of fascination with waiting rooms and railway restaurants: places you could only access as a passenger on the long-distance train network. The murders on the Calcutta Mail in The Train hinge on one passenger being seduced away from the coupe by the prospect of a meal at the railway restaurant with a sashaying Nanda.

MK Raghavendra and others have marked that the train in the 1950s and 60s often mapped onto the idea of India – such films as Bimal Roy's 1955 Devdas, whose nationwide journeying hero I have mentioned in another context, but also nationalist films with train songs depicting children: 'Aao bacchon tumhe dikhayein jhaanki Hindustan ki' from Jagriti (1954) and 'Nanha-munna rahi hoon, desh ka sipahi hoon' from Mehboob Khan's Son of India (1962).

It is true that even in those decades, trains were occasionally linked to crime: murder in Shart and smuggling in Aar Paar (both 1954), not to mention the goofy Half Ticket (1962) with Kishore Kumar as the comic hero who becomes an unsuspecting mule for stolen diamonds on a train to Bombay.

But as Akshay Manwani suggested in a 2015 article, it was really in the 1970s, with films like The Train, Shor (1972) and Do Anjaane (1976) that the thriller element begins to dominate Hindi cinema's portrayal of trains. Speed, danger and the accident ally with the sense of danger that comes with being isolated in a train compartment, often miles away from the nearest outpost of the law. You can easily kill a man on a train – or, as in Do Anjaane, push him off it – with no witness, and the police will only arrive much later, in another place. The moving train is a world unto itself.

For me, though, the film that exemplifies this marvellous sense of excitement about trains comes right at the start of decade: the 1971 Parwana, directed by Jyoti Swaroop (who also made Padosan and ought to be much better known). It is perhaps best remembered for Amitabh Bachchan's performance as one of Hindi cinema's earliest jealous lovers: his tall, serious Kumar is scarily believable as the brooding artist whose romantic obsession crosses over into violent vengefulness. But it also displays some unusual detailing for a commercial Hindi film of its time, not just in its liberal characters, but with regard to things like characters' surnames, dates and place-names. The camera often zooms into print on screen, from a wedding cards to a 'No Photography Allowed' sign at Nagpur Airport (yes, cheeky!).

The train-related plot on which the film hinges involves a court case in which the wrong man and the heroine's true love (Navin Nischol) is charged for a murder that Amitabh Bachchan -- the jilted lover and real murderer – apparently could not have committed. Why? Because he was on a train at the time. The film's revelatory flashback sequence – with a stylish Bachchan striding through streets and stations and staircases in his coat, dark glasses and muffler (here the detailing goes for a toss, since this is meant to be Bombay in August) – shows just how he did it (spoiler alert). He used the train – but he also used a plane.

Watching Parwana in the midst of India's horrifyingly mishandled Covid-19 second wave, when the breakdown of our sorely limited health, transport and digital infrastructure is on full display, I was struck by the film's deep belief in functioning infrastructure. Parwana's murder plot is planned and executed flawlessly because -- in the film – trains run exactly on time, flights land and take off smoothly, taxis and public telephones can be found exactly when and where they are needed. The reference to television in a light early scene is as much a part of this vision – remember this is 1971, and TV transmission had not even reached Bombay till 1972.

Parwana, like many Hindi train films of the 1970s, is really a fantasy about technology and infrastructure. Tragically, our tendency to believe in the fantasy of our technological achievements remains alive and well in 2021, at the great human cost of reality.

Published in TOI Plus/ Mumbai Mirror, 16 May 2021

Satyajit Ray’s world of trains

My column for Mirror/TOI Plus, the fourth in my series on trains in Indian cinema:

On the filmmaker’s birth centenary, a look at how the train is a motif in many of his films, including the Apu Trilogy, Nayak and Sonar Kella

A still from Satyajit Ray's Nayak (1966), starring Sharmila Tagore and Uttam Kumar.

Satyajit Ray, whose 100^th birth anniversary was May 2, is associated with one of the most famous train sequences in all of cinema: The children, Apu and Durga in Pather Panchali, standing in a field of fluffy, white kaash flowers, listening for an oncoming train. I've always thought that what makes that sequence unforgettable is the rural Bengali landscape ruptured by the sound of the machine before the sight of it. The children hear the train's vibration in a pillar before the great beast rumbles past.

The train remained a motif throughout the Apu Trilogy, acquiring more layers of darkness with each film. What Ray had originally framed as the link between the village and the city became, in Aparajito, a marker of the distance between the two, and then in Apur Sansar, a site of potential death.

The eternal train scene in Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray's 1955 debut feature

But there are two other films in which Ray put the train to less melancholic use. The first of these was Nayak, released on May 6, 1966, in which he cast real-life Bengali matinee idol Uttam Kumar as a film star called Arindam Mukherjee. When we meet Arindam, there are two items about him in the day's papers: One, a National Award he's being given in Delhi, and two, a brawl in which he was involved the night before. It's a succinct if simplistic summary of the film actor's life -- popularity and critical achievement, but alongside infamy.

Some mention is made of Arindam having left it too late to get a seat on a plane, and Ray thus successfully places his famed and shamed hero on a long train ride that exposes him to a microcosm of the Indian upper middle class – which, 55 years ago, was snootier about film stars than it is now. From the corporate head honcho who sniffs at the brawl to the old gentleman who disapproves of films on principle, the train isn't exactly filled with Arindam fans.

But what really feels completely unreal in 2021 is the degree of unguarded interaction that the train affords between the film star and his public. Arindam is kind to little girls, signs some autographs, and then gets drunk in a train toilet. When he stumbles back to his compartment, the upper middle class housewife in it is humane enough – and female enough – to help him to bed rather than, say, take a picture of his disarray. Even the snarky journalist (Sharmila Tagore) that Arindam ends up confiding in over a long pantry car conversation, decides he is deserving of her humanity and tears up her notes. The train serves, in many ways, as a filter – Arindam is on display and yet somehow he isn't quite out in the open.

On the sets of Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), 1974.

But by far the most sprightly use of the train in Ray's cinema is in Sonar Kella (The Golden Fortress), the first film adaptation to feature his famously-popular detective, Feluda. Released in 1974, the whole film practically unfolds as a series of overlapping train journeys.

The very beginning of the adventure in Calcutta involves Feluda, played by the late Soumitra Chatterjee (who died after a battle with Covid in November 2020), silently removing from his bookshelf a hardbound copy of the Railway Timetable for November 1973. On the other side of events, we are introduced to the film's villains by being shown their names on a railway reservation chart: M Bose (Lower) and A Barman (Upper). Bose and Barman are hot on the trail of the originary set of train travellers – a six-year-old child constantly making crayon sketches of a past birth, and a parapsychologist taking him to Rajasthan in the hope of identifying the golden fortress of his drawings.

The train is also where Feluda and his nephew Topshe first meet the man who will become the third member of their trio: The mystery writer Lalmohan Ganguly alias Jatayu. He boards their compartment at Kanpur station with his red 'Japani suitcase... imported', and proceeds to speak several sentences in rather grandiloquent Hindi before realising that his companions are Bengalis, too.

It is a remarkably orderly world that Ray maps out, in which precise calculations can be made based on train timings. If a set of people hasn’t arrived at Jodhpur in the morning, they can be assumed to arrive by the evening train instead. And if the expected villains haven't shown up on the day they should have, Feluda speculates that they may have failed to get a train booking.

Trains in The Golden Fortress are the route to excitement, transporting these parties of Bengalis into the 'dacoit-infested country' of western Rajasthan. But trains are also the possible way back to order and civilisation: In one pre-climactic moment, Feluda offers Lalmohan Babu the option of getting off at Pokhran, from where he can catch a train back, rather than proceeding to Jaisalmer with them.

In one of Sonar Kella's most memorable scenes, the intrepid Bengalis get on camel-back, and try to wave a train down across the desert. It's the one time in the film that Feluda's plan doesn't succeed. The train keeps on going.

Published in Mumbai Mirror (9 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (8 May 2021).

A lifeline, but also a harbinger of doom

The third column in my series on trains in Indian cinema, for Mirror/TOI Plus:

In the cinema of Bimal Roy, the train is often a site of unfolding tragedy

Fiction necessarily derives its motifs from reality. There’s a reason why the road movie is a thing in Hollywood, while it barely existed in India until quite recently. Trains, on the other hand, have been integral to our cinema as sites of romance, drama and - more often than you might expect – sorrow.

When Sanjay of 27 Down launched himself on an endless train ride to combat his melancholia, he was following in the footsteps of Indian cinema's original tragic romantic hero, Devdas. The original Bengali novel, published by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1917, has been adapted for the screen many times. The classic, in my opinion, remains the 1955 Bimal Roy version, starring Dilip Kumar and Suchitra Sen as Devdas and Paro: Childhood friends whose romantic union as adults is prevented by their caste-minded, convention-bound families -- and by their own stubborn, childish miscommunication. Paro anchors herself in the duties of her arranged marriage, while Devdas' anchorlessness is depicted in his constant wandering. We see him sometimes dramatically departing for Calcutta in a horse-drawn carriage, then almost immediately returning. Later, having turned alcoholic, he wanders the village shooting birds with an air gun. Bimal Roy makes elegant cinematic use of several modes of transport: The unending bullock-cart ride at night, or the beautifully conjoined shots where Paro is urged to ascend into her wedding palanquin just as Devdas is being urged to descend from his – at the house of the tawaif, Chandramukhi. But it is the train sequence that is iconic, with our still-youthful but sunken-eyed hero lolling about in his compartment as the train transports him across the country.

Trains possibly work best for Devdas' character because they let him move while having to expend no energy. And he never seems to actually get off the train, though we see the names of stations that mark the country's biggest cities, other than Calcutta, where he started: Delhi, Madras, Bombay, Lahore. (It's interesting that Roy puts Lahore in there, because it marks the setting of his film as before Independence and Partition. It's even more interesting when one watches the 1935 PC Baruah version of Devdas and finds that the train sequence there has a similarly aimless Devdas traversing a slightly different geography: Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Banaras.)

The spoilt son of a rich zamindar, Devdas naturally travels first class, accompanied by a trusty feudal retainer. Poor old Dharamdas retires to some less comfortable class of compartment by night, leaving Devdas his privacy – but also leaving him vulnerable to being lured back to drink by his thoughtless friend, Chuni Babu. In one of Roy's much-applauded visual juxtapositions, the train's engine is stoked by a shovelful of coal just as Devdas' cycle of self-pity receives fresh alcoholic fuel.

The train appears in many of Bimal Roy's other films. In Do Bigha Zamin (1953), the railway is the link between the city and the village, as it must be. But it is also the site of dramatic meetings and equally dramatic separations. When Shambhu sets out for Calcutta to try and earn money, he discovers his little son has secretly stowed himself away on the train. Later, when Parvati sets out on another train to search for Shambhu, she is separated from her travelling companion Ramu – to tragic effect. Madhumati (1958), which begins with a car journey disrupted by a landslide, ends with a train accident. There are a few tense moments before we see that it is to be the site of a happy reunion.

It is in Naukri (1955) that Roy puts the tragic potential of trains to full use. The film's job-seeking hero Ratan (played by Kishore Kumar, before he was relegated to purely comic roles) tries to keep his spirits up - and there is at least one bit of silly humour on a train ride, where he gets on without knowing the name of the firm that has offered him a job.

But in the city, Ratan finds himself living with a bunch of similarly jobless young men, placed in a section of a lodge called 'Bekar Block'. It is in this dispirited world that we first see the train as a harbinger of doom. Three suicides are attempted in the film, all of them by unemployed young men throwing themselves on the railway tracks. In Naukri, two out of these three young men are saved.

Still, I couldn't help but think of an odd little scene in Do Bigha Zamin, where Shambhu is listening to two men on the train pontificate about how we need to return to India's villages to save our people. “Each and every one will die!” comes a loud voice from behind them. It turns out to be a man selling a pesticide to kill bed bugs. But there's something rather dark about the scene's humour, given how Do Bigha Zamin turns out. Even as they take you closer to something, trains in Bimal Roy's cinema always foretell possible tragedy.

Published in Mirror (2 May 2021) & in TOI Plus (1 May 2021)

Home on the Train

My column for TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror:

What the 1956 Ava Gardner starrer Bhowani Junction tells us about the British, Anglo-Indians and the railways in colonial India 

In last week's column, I drew on Awtar Kaul's film 27 Down to evoke the way that India's train network can sometimes stand in for the country itself. But of course, the Indian Railways were not always so Indian. Along with cricket and the English language, trains are often spoken of as one of the 'gifts' of British colonialism. Such imperialist phrasing remains fiercely debated, as it should be, given that the British certainly didn't create the railway network to connect Indians with one another, or even primarily for passengers. The railways were built to help transport raw materials and finished goods, to speed up the opening of the Indian market to the colonial economy -- and British private investors were guaranteed returns by the government, based on Indian revenues.

But what was created was something that endured, and became the lifeline of the empire. It isn't surprising, then, that the British colonial imagination identified deeply with the railways. One of the films to display this most vividly was the 1956 MGM extravaganza Bhowani Junction, directed by George Cukor (Gaslight, The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady) and based on a bestselling 1954 novel of the same name by John Masters.

Masters, who had served in the British Indian army, set his narrative just before Independence, crafting a classic colonial story in which the noble British are only trying to pull out peacefully while the Congress leadership is intent on the non-violent but continuous disruption of peace, and a violent Indian Communist organiser is trying to make sure there is a “bloodbath” when the British leave – so that “Moscow” can take over. And fascinatingly, almost all the action in the film revolves around trains. Some sequences make only incidental or dramatic use -- such as a passing train hiding a murder. But in most, the railways have a starring role: The action involves either letting a train through (to rescue dangerous explosives), rescuing victims from a deliberate train accident (caused by the villainous Communist straw man), or preventing a train from blowing up with Gandhi on board (an artfully colonial postcolonial narrative, in which it is a British colonel who keeps the great Indian alive).

Whatever one thinks of this portrayal of India (with not a single Indian in the primary cast, of course, and white actors in blackface spouting a bizarre range of accents), Masters had enough experience of India to get some things right. He knew that colonial policy had staffed the railways, especially at the lower rungs, with Anglo-Indians – a mixed-race community that was equally a creation of empire. And so Bhowani Junction's heroine is an Anglo-Indian. Played by the striking Hollywood star Ava Gardner, Victoria Jones makes her cinematic entry getting off a train -- in uniform, but on leave. After four years at headquarters in Delhi, she's coming home – to her sleepy old town, her Anglo-Indian engine driver father and her waiting Anglo-Indian boyfriend Patrick, who also works in the railways.

But 'home' seems harder and harder to define. The British are preparing to leave India for good, leaving the Anglo-Indians vulnerable to both political and social upheaval. Their unspoken position in the social hierarchy is articulated in the film in Patrick's rather sad sense of racial superiority -- below the colonial masters, but striving to be somehow above the vast mass of Indians. Meanwhile, there are European villains -- British men who see Anglo-Indian girls as fair prey game; Western in tastes and dress, but not deserving of the same moral niceties as a genuine English memsahib. Victoria – despite her unsurpassably colonial naming for the late queen -- doesn't identify with the British, but she doesn't feel Indian either. So she spends much of the film trying to become 'truly' Indian, which seems to involve exchanging her skirts for diaphanous saris and contemplating conversion to Sikhism to marry her seriously dull suitor.

Victoria doesn't succeed. But what's incredible is how much Bhowani Junction, despite its impeccable Hollywood credentials, feels like an Indian melodrama. The slipping sari pallu, of course, but also a film told entirely in flashback by the hero – on a train; and sequences like the one in a gurdwara, where Gardner's character, with a dupatta on her head, has a dizzy spell while replaying all the film's previous important dialogues loudly inside her head, complete with imaginary echoes, in a way that would have fitted right into Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki.

Running (literally) from this crisis of identity, where does our Anglo-Indian heroine go? She turns up at the railway yard, to fall gratefully into the arms of her estranged engine-driver father – whom she calls Pater – and climb into the driver's cab with him. Like 27 Down's Sanjay, 20 years later, Victoria is a child of the railways. The trains she once childishly imagined as taking her to England, are now her safe space. India may be complicated, but the railway is home.

Published in TOI Plus/Mumbai Mirror, 11 Apr 2021.

Why our enduring romance with the railways makes for great cinema

My Mumbai Mirror column:

Awtar Krishna Kaul's 27 Down, which won two National Awards in 1973, remains a visually arresting reflection on India's train journeys 

The connection between films and trains dates back to cinema's origins. One of the Lumiere brothers' first films was of a train arriving at the station in La Ciotat, a small French town near Marseilles. Arrival of a Train, shot in 1895, is central to the mythology of the movies. The claim (made in several film histories) is that early audiences leapt from their chairs in alarm as Lumiere's locomotive seemed to race towards them. Even in soundless, jerky black-and-white, the story goes, the power of the moving pictures was such that people – almost -- couldn't tell them apart from life.

 

In recent times, film historians have cast doubt on this narrative, some pointing to confusion with a later stereoscopic version that Louis Lumiere exhibited in 1934. But what is indubitable is that there was something endlessly watchable about this simplest, single shot of a train. Trains had screen presence.

 

Both the railways and the cinema arrived in India soon after their invention, swiftly becoming integral to our social and cultural life. So it's no surprise that trains are a fixture in our films: The staging ground, as much for crime and thrills as romance and recreation.

 

But perhaps the most devoted train film we've ever had is Awtar Krishna Kaul's 1973 feature, 27 Down. Kaul, who had left his diplomat job to study filmmaking in New York, returned to India in 1970 and became part of the Indian New Wave: A spectrum of directors ranging from Basu Chatterjee to Mani Kaul, beginning to make their mark in an era popularly defined by Bobby and Yaadon Ki Baraat. 27 Down was Kaul's first feature, made with the encouragement of Filmfare editor BK Karanjia, who was then chairing the Film Finance Corporation.

 

Based on a Hindi novel called Atharah Sooraj Ke Paudhe, the film stars a young MK Raina as the ticket-checker protagonist Sanjay, and Rakhee as his girlfriend Shalini. Filmed in atmospheric black and white by cinematographer AK Bir (who had just graduated from FTII at the time and never shot a film before), it won National Awards for Cinematography and Best Hindi Feature -- days after Kaul died tragically in a drowning accident.

 

The film begins with the familiar drone of the Indian Railways announcer: “Number Sattaaees Down platform number teen se jaane ke liye taiyyar hai”, and is shot very substantially on trains and in stations. Often assembling his shots to accompany a meditative monologue, Kaul's work seems closer to the more experimental end of the New Wave. 27 Down starts off ploddingly, in a self-consciously literary voice: “Phir koi pul hai kya? Shaayad pul hi hai [Is it a bridge again? It's probably a bridge],” Sanjay thinks to himself, lying supine on a berth as the train moves. “It feels like I'm constantly crossing bridges...”. But there are playful moments, too. The song Chhuk chhuk chhuk chalti rail, aao bachchon khelein khel adopts the train's rhythm to create a visual and aural paean to it, with shots of the locomotive moving through tunnels juxtaposed with children lining up to form a train.

 

Son of an engine driver, Sanjay's life seems to keep circling back to the railways. Born between two stations, as a child he is insatiably curious about trains. He tries to study art in Bombay, but his father urges upon him the stability of a railway ki naukri. As a ticket checker, Sanjay discovers anew his love of trains. He starts to eat and sleep on trains, even when not on duty. Neighbours, landlords, even his father finds his peripatetic existence strange. “Tumhare liye toh train hi ghar ho gayi hai,” his father writes him.

 

It is on a train that he meets Shalini, who lives alone in a rented room in Kurla and works in the Life Insurance Company of India. It is a railway romance: She takes the train to work, he takes the train as work. When his life plans are again forcibly aborted by his father, Sanjay surrenders himself to the trains again – in metaphor and then in reality.

 

“I wanted a long path, instead I got these iron roads, where the direction is already decided,” Sanjay muses sadly. A minute later he's grateful for the effortlessness of the journey: “Chalti train hi sahara hai [The moving train is my only support].” But then, there's the sense that he isn't really getting anywhere. “Main guzar jaata hoon, aur jagah khadi reh jaati hain [I move past, and places stay where they are].”

 

Then he gets on a train to Banaras, looking to beguile himself with women and wine, his beard getting scragglier. The sequence echoes so many tragic Indian heroes, and yet it feels distinct. He looks at an old man on the train, the old man looks intently back at him, and we imagine (wordlessly, like Sanjay) that he is Shalini's long-lost father who may have become a sadhu in Banaras. In a more conventional melodrama, Sanjay's echoing of Shalini's father's escape from an unchosen domesticity would end in discovery, reunion. Here, it ends in a dream of death.

 

Perhaps what 27 Down's languid melancholy really captures is the duality of the long-distance Indian train ride: You're in a crowd, yet alone; relentlessly moving, but not of your own accord. And yet, the solidity and predictability of India's trains makes them feel like something to believe in. Get on a train, and the country seems to stretch out before you: Distant, but somehow accessible. When Sanjay says, “Mera train aur bheed se vishwas uthh gaya hai [I've lost my faith in crowds and trains]”, we know it's over.

 

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 4 Apr 2021.

Awtar Krishna Kaul’s 27 Down, which won two National Awards

Read more at:
https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/opinion/columnists/why-our-enduring-romance-with-the-railways-makes-for-great-cinema/articleshow/81893897.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst