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.

Arresting the Moving Image

Yesterday's Mirror column: 

The Film Heritage Foundation and the painstaking work of storing and restoring India's cinematic past.

Dhundhiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke, maker of the first Indian film, examines a strip of celluloid

On May 3,1913, when Raja Harishchandra first opened to an excited Bombay public at Coronation Cinema in Girgaon, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke established his claim to the title 'Father of Indian Cinema'. Over the next 36 years, some 1700 silent films were made in India. Of these, only five to six complete films and 10-12 film fragments survive in the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). Even Raja Harishchandra itself doesn't survive in toto. What we have are the first and last reels of a four-reel film -- and that, too, Phalke's 1917 remake of his original 1913 effort. 

The Madras film industry contributed 124 fiction films and 38 documentaries to the Indian silent era. Only one survives. In a darkened auditorium in Jawaharlal Nehru University's School of Arts and Aesthetics yesterday, I watched a couple of minutes of it. The audience was full of people who study and write about cinema, but the unabashed lovers' kiss in that 84-year-old clip still caught many by surprise. 

The fact that you can now watch the whole of Marthanda Varma (1931) online for free is the spectacular result of two allied processes of film archiving. One is the gathering, restoration and conservation of actual celluloid negatives. The other is the archiving of films in the digital medium: public-access online archives like the marvellous indiancine.ma, which aims to be the largest collectively annotated archive of Indian films: an encyclopaedic resource for researchers and film fans. And while the digital may seem like the future, it is not our most permanent record of the past. But more on that later. 

Both these processes are, unfortunately, still in their early stages in India. Filmmaker and archivist Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, whose documentary Celluloid Man (2013) was a deeply affectionate portrait of the octogenarian NFAI archivist PK Nair, estimates that by 1950, "India had already lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films, including our first sound film, Alam Ara." Dungarpur now runs the Film Heritage Foundation, acquiring as many film prints as he can from a country-wide network of antique-dealers he laughingly calls "refined kabadiwallahs". 

Theatrical prints he acquires are checked, cleaned, played and then stored in the Foundation's climate-controlled vault. But ideally, a film should be restored not from a print, but from an original camera negative (the film on which the original camera image is captured), a master positive (the first positive print made from the original camera negative), or a dupe negative (created from an original master positive). 

These, however, are hard to come by. And for many Indian films, may have been lost forever. Dungarpur's presentation at JNU was studded with anecdotes about the work of an archivist in India - some happy discoveries, but most of them heartbreaking losses. 

The causes of our present situation are multiple. There is the inflammability of the older nitrate film, leading to many infamous fires in film warehouses and labs: as far back as the Ranjit Movietone fire in the 1940s and as recent as the FTII fire in 2002. There is the general Indian apathy towards preservation of anything. For years, people in possession of old, unsuccessful or rusting cans of film knew only one way to make any money from them, which was to sell them to scrap dealers, who would strip the film reel for the silver content. There is the oft-repeated tale of filmmakers' descendants destroying pieces of our common heritage, if not wilfully, then under financial pressure. If PK Nair recounts how Ardeshir Irani's son Shapurji confessed to selling three reels of Alam Ara's camera negative for the silver, Dungarpur has his story of filmmaker Debaki Bose's son in Kolkata, who 'explained' to him that he had left the original camera negatives of his father's Ratnadeep (1951) out in the wind and weather for thirty years because he "didn't have space". 

Among Dungerpur's pet peeves is the fact that the move to the digital has blinded people to the fact that a CD or DVD has a life of 3-5 years, while celluloid, as a format, has a proven "life of 126 years and counting". "But no Indian labs engaged in restoration have photochemical facilities," he says ruefully. "Basic digital scanning and cleaning, done cheaply, is seen as the restoration!" 

Dungarpur's Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) is the second Indian film archive (after the NFAI) to be a member of La Federation Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF): an international network of archives which can be approached for versions of a film under restoration, if any are stored in another country. 

At one level, FHF could be seen as a rival to NFAI. But a private initiative like Dungarpur's, while less hamstrung by the lack of autonomy and funding issues that afflict NFAI, will take time to earn the trust of India's film fraternity. Dungarpur admits there have been instances when film families who have been in talks with him have eventually donated their collections to the NFAI. 

While the state may not be, as film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, either the best equipped or the most interested agency for the preservation of popular cinema (given its anti-cinema history), it is still the go-to place for many. Dungarpur is clear that he wants to collaborate rather than compete with the NFAI, and he is right. But in a country still far from understanding that film is an irreplaceable part of our cultural history, may a million archives bloom.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 13 Sep 2015.