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

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Time warp: Banabhatta ki Atmakatha

MK Raina’s fascinating play asks questions of history and context, and of its audience as well.

MK Raina may not have directed a play at the National School of Drama for the last 12 years, but his association with the NSD goes back a long way – he graduated from the School in 1970 and taught there briefly in 1976-77. Among Raina’s students at the time was Amitabh Srivastava. That’s the other long-standing connection that’s made the current production possible – Srivastava, now an established theatre actor and translator, has adapted the novel Banabhatta ki Atmakatha, timed to coincide with the birth centenary year of its author Hazari Prasad Dwivedi (1907-79).

“The first time MK and I worked together was in 1985-86, when I adapted Jagdish Chandar’s novel Kabhi Na Chhode Khet,” remembered Srivastava. Since then, there have been several collaborations, including a play about the Hindi poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan in 2004. “It was staged in Allahabad, and in other towns where she lived. We had one show in Delhi too – but how many people in Delhi are interested in the lives of Hindi poets?” asked Srivastava.

The question is not merely rhetorical, but it doesn’t seem to have prevented Srivastava and Raina from taking on the challenge of staging Dwivedi’s highly poetic masterwork, which also purports to be the autobiography of the classical Sanskrit poet Banabhatta. Interpreting Banabhatta ki Atmakatha for a contemporary audience is no easy task, for the text demands not one but two leaps in time. First, it has to be approached as a text pre-occupied with the task of nation-building – Dwivedi wrote it in 1946, very much in the context of approaching independence. And second, it has to be read as a historico-philosophical take on the socio-religious tussles that characterised North Indian society in the seventh century AD, when the historical Banabhatta lived.

Banabhatta was the court poet of King Harshavardhana, who rose to power in North India after the decline of the Gupta Empire, ruling from Kannauj and Thanesar (now a small town in Haryana). In fact, Banabhatta’s lyrical-but-florid Sanskrit biography of the emperor, Harshacharita, is one of the primary historical sources for the period. And Banabhatta’s Kadambari, credited with being one of the first novels ever written, is so iconic of novel-ness that, Srivastava says, “Maharashtra mein novel ko upanyas nahi, kadambari ke naam se jaana jaata hai.”

Banabhatta, however, wrote no autobiography. Dwivedi’s novel is an entirely fictional account of a few months in his life. We do know that the poet’s parents died early, and that he left home when he was fairly young. It took Dwivedi’s leap of imagination, however, to make the young Bana a vagabond. “Dwivedi’s Banabhatta is a tramp. He runs a theatre troupe in Ujjayani, he becomes a fake sadhu and then an astrologer,” said Srivastava.

The play opens with Bana’s arrival in Thanesar, where he runs into Nipunika, a low-born woman who once acted in his troupe and used to be in love with him. Nipunika persuades Bana to help her rescue a princess named Bhattini, who is being held captive by one of the smaller chieftains of the area. Then begins a long journey through the Gangetic plain, punctuated by encounters with religious and political figures: Buddhist monks from a nearby vihara, Brahmins, Vaishnavs, tantriks, aghoris. For Raina, the text has many “anti-Brahminical beliefs” embedded in it. “In one scene, Bana hides something in an aghori Bhairav shrine, and the aghoris catch him. And they tell him, ‘tumhare shastra tumhe paakhand sikhaate hain’. No wonder, when this novel was released, the Brahmins of Banaras were up in arms,” laughed Raina.

And yet the novel is deeply imbued with allegories, many of which emerge from Hindu mythology. “Bhattini is an allegory of Sita, and of the mother goddess. She is kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned, and when she emerges into the open, it is really as if she has emerged from the belly of the earth,” mused Raina. “And she worships Varaha, Vishnu’s boar avatar, who saved the earth by going down himself.” Varaha is also symbolic of the need to save the nation through sacrifice – as Srivastava put it, “to bring it out of the daldal (quicksand).”

The play promises to be interesting in terms of stage design. “I’m using the classical Sanskrit stage, which is minimal. The stage is divided into two parts, the front portion or Rangshish, and the slightly raised back portion, or Rangpith. And two doors, through which the actors enter and leave. That’s it,” said Raina.

The other striking thing about the play is its strong female characters and their engagement with each other. “The bond between the low-caste Nipunika and the noble-born Bhattini is based on Bhattini’s experience of having been kidnapped,” said Raina. Srivastava elaborated, “At one point, Bhattini says the whole country is searching for the missing daughter of Tuvar Milind because she is a princess. But no one thinks of the fact that all the dasis working in these rajmahals are also someone’s missing daughters.”

Published in Time Out Delhi Issue 9 Friday, July 25, 2008