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.
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