A hurtling mass of finality

Trains have long been a significant element in Indian cinema, symbolising urgency, escape and opportunity, and sometimes invoking a sense of inevitable finality

Trains are heavy machines. Unlike airplanes, their passengers can actually feel this weight when on board. The swaying and shuddering of the mechanical juggernaut subsume its passengers into a singular body of immense mass, moving through space and time at incredible speeds. As the aerial visuals of the recent three-train tragedy at Odisha’s Balasore took over our screens last week, the full weight of those 800-1,200-tonne mass of metal, wood, fabric, flesh, and bones, must have been palpable to even those sitting on their feathered sofas. The sight of bogies strewn around like a child’s plaything — with hundreds buried underneath — was at once humbling and spine-chilling. 

The images also made me think of how trains traditionally appear on our screens, and the narratives they come wrapped in. There’s the narrative of urgency, of course. Countless scenes in Hindi films from the classic DDLJ to Jab We Met have characters running after them, almost missing their trains, or getting left behind at the station. Here, trains become metaphors for opportunities and escape.

There’s also the narrative of intimacy. Trains are tiny confined spaces, hurtling nonetheless through boundless expanses. Characters find new characters as in Gulzar’s Kitaab, and Satyajit Ray’s Nayak. Or, they stumble upon old ones, as in the episode “Hungama Hai Kyun Barpa” from Ray. A few rediscover themselves, as in Mr. and Mrs. Iyer.

Countless movies and TV series have routed new beginnings through trains. These beginnings can be painful, as in the many Partition-related train journeys, or unerringly emancipating, like that iconic water-boy scene from Swades.

Trains often generate a sense of familiarity and continuity with strangers. But they also evoke a sense of rupture, terror, and claustrophobia-fuelled anticipation. Indian cinema loves obsessing about this dark, scary aspect of railway travel through the plot trope of “train accidents.” Here, the damage done goes beyond bodily harm, invoking an inevitable and unalterable finality.

We see this as early as 1936, in Achhut Kanya. The story of an “untouchable” female-lead Kasturi, played by Devika Rani, and her Brahmin lover (Ashok Kumar) is jinxed with this inevitable finality. Their cursed romance ends, as the film begins, on the railway tracks.

Kasturi, the daughter of a railway crossing guard, takes immense pride as a child in her father’s power to stop the train with a mere wave of a flag. The film is thus the tragedy of an “achhut” girl’s strong belief and reverence for the powers of modernity, here represented by the train, which ultimately fails her. Kasturi dies trying, and failing, to stop the train.

The pain of Kasturi’s failed tryst is somehow lost by the time Hindi films enter the 70s. The violent pleasures of a train’s speed, and its accompanying mass, are now harnessed to a unique style of violent ends. Trains emerge as a staple in action-thrillers. And a decade-long accumulated inertia of action sequences set in, on, or around trains, in Sholay, Parwana, Do Anjane etc, finally culminates in The Burning Train (1980). A disaster-drama about the sabotage of “India’s fastest train”, the film is full of spectacular stunts and burning bogies, but neither attempt manages to invoke the pathos related to train accidents.

Nor do we find this pathos in Sriram Raghavan’s 2007 thriller Johnny Gaddaar, which remains fettered to an array of pop culture texts, including the train-thrillers from 70s and 80s. In both instances, the same sense of finality that characterises Achhut Kanya is re-packaged for mounting cinematic spectacles.

This obsession with the train as a mechanical spectacle, in fact, misses out on a more innate human conflict surrounding the modernity of trains, which shines through from time to time in the films of Guru Dutt, Satyajit Ray, K Balachander, and others. The hefty dynamicity of the train clashes, on camera, with the human search for stability, giving birth to a variety of cinematographic tropes.

At times, the director lets the hero lean out from the doors of a moving train. As he peers down, the camera glides over the tracks and rubble in a blur of motion. The ever-present ground, made menacing by the train’s blinding speed, screams out the hero’s impending fate.

At other times, a smash cut connects the shot of an incoming train with that of the aftermath — a hurriedly rescued character, or a mirror shot of the train hurtling away from the screen — making the narrowly avoided fate palpable.

The inevitable finality, therefore, is not really inevitable. In the years since Achhut Kanya, filmmakers have tried to give pause to this inevitability. And in this pause, the hero has tried to escape. In films like Kahaani, Life in a Metro, or Pyasa, they even manage to do so — either saved as a warning or veered away by fate.

At other times, as in Pakeezah, the distant whistle of an engine is enough to let finality crash down on characters with the weight of a locomotive.