Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility

5. Bollywood on the Train

· 130 ·· CHAPTER 5 · Bollywood on the Train One of the most pervasive symbols in Indian film is the train. This is true in both so-called art film and in popular cinema. Chapter 4 looked at the way art film director Satyajit Ray uses exterior and interior scenes of the train in the “Apu Trilogy” to explore the relations between the rural and the urban as India entered a period of national development programs. It also considered Ray’s scenes of a traveling train carriage in Nayak as a way to examine the changing nature of the public sphere in India. However, it is in the popular Hindi, or “Bollywood,” films, produced in Mumbai (formerly Bombay), that the train gathers momentum as a cultural symbol. Bimal Roy, for example, employed the setting and shrieking sounds of the train carriage to suggest the mental wanderings and anguish of his lovelorn protagonist in Devdas (1955). From the melodramas of the 1960s and 1970s like Mere Huzoor (directed by Vinood Kumar; 1968) and Pakeezah (directed by Kamal Amrohi; 1971), to thrillers like Sholay (directed by Romesh Sippy; 1975) and The Burning Train (directed by Ravi Chopra; 1980), to the blockbusters of the 1990s, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (directed by Aditya Chopra; 1995) and Dil Se (directed by Mani Ratnam;1998),tothe2007globalreleaseofTheTrain(directedbyHasnain Hyderabadwala and Raksha Mistry; 2007) and Jab We Met (directed by Imtiaz Ali; 2007), Bollywood is fascinated by trains. Filmmakers use the space of the train to expose the fraught relations of love and desire in India’s modernity. This is particularly true in the cinematic romance genre. Love stories in popular Indian cinema rely on broader cultural understandings of modern space. In using the train as both setting and symbol, these films represent the gendered nature of such spaces by relating the public space of the railway to the private space of the home. They construct a notion of modernity in which men and women are given different versions of what it means to be modern. Furthermore, filmmakers present the phenomenological experience of the train—its BOLLYWOOD ON THE TRAIN 131 rhythmic sounds, panoramic views, and cadenced vibrations—as a way to reflect the dynamics of desire. Malika Arora dances erotically atop a train to its mechanical beat to Farah Khan’s award-winning choreography in the sequence “Chaiyya Chaiyya” in Dil Se (1998); more demurely, Sharmila Tagore’s character stares sideways out the train window at her love-object in Aradhana (directed by Shakti Samanta; 1969). In these popular Hindi films, the train becomes the means to transgress social conventions. Even as it mirrors social order, the train offers itself as a way to move across society’s lines through a version of modernity presented in the guise of mobility. Gendered Public Space Masculinity and the Cinematic Train Although this chapter concerns itself primarily with melodrama and the constructions of femininity, it is worth pausing to describe the way the train is used to depict certain notions of masculinity in the action genre of popular Hindi cinema. In the 1970s and especially in the early 1980s, films like Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay, Ravi Chopra’s The Burning Train, and Manmohan Desai’s Coolie, used the setting of the railway as a way to depict the nation in crisis during and following Indira Gandhi’s prime ministry.1 Appropriating the technological narratives that elevated mobility, speed, mechanical power, and invention, they offered a way forward that was invested heavily in colonial and nationalist rhetorics of modernity. This was a gendered resolution, in the sense that the same technology seen as progressive also provided a space in which men could cultivate relationships with each other and prove their prowess through mastery of the machine. Hindi action films borrow from the Western, gangster, and war films in which, Lalitha Gopalan argues, “[v]iolence structur[es] the bonds between men.”2 Ramesh Sippy’s film Sholay, known as the classic “angry young man” film in reference to the character of the protagonist, played by Amitabh Bachchan, places the train in a prominent role. In an extended flashback in the early part of the film, a former officer narrates how two petty thieves, his prisoners, once came to his rescue on a train besieged by horseback bandits. The train in Sholay certainly cements the reference to the Western, offering the familiar trope of a shootout between train 132 BOLLYWOOD ON THE TRAIN...