Published in an Edited For in The Week’s Special Issue on 75 Years of the Nationalization of the Indian Railways
If there is a single largest institution etched in Indian popular consciousness as a representative of the nation’s history, it is the Indian Railways. Even a cursory glance at any body of popular representations of the railways is akin to taking a look at Indian history. So powerful has been the impact of railway representations on Indian psyche that the train called Toofan Express became virtually rechristened in public memory as Toofan Mail, after the release of Jayant Desai’s Toofan Mail (1934) and Aspi Irani’s The Return of Toofan Mail (1942). And who can forget the unspoken fact that for Hindi cinema, as well as films made in other Indian languages, a shot of the Victorian Terminus (later the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) as a passing spectacle is enough to signify Bombay and India—around a stately building swarmed by hundreds of thousands of passengers, passersby, and coolies—not least because of the Manmohan Desai’s legendary film, Coolie (1983).
The first steam engine hissed into Thane, from Bombay’s Bori Bunder, on April 16, 1853, of which no photograph exists but memories still abound of the cinematic 21-gun salute that accompanied the wife of the Governor of Bombay, Lady Falkland and her retinue. Since then, the railways have carried the nation’s dreams on its iron wheels for nearly 175 years, knitting together far-flung regions and reducing boundaries, and even going on to unexpected cast reunions—especially in cinema—of estranged families and lovers. India may be divided by states, languages, and castes, but are united by railways.
Among some of the greatest moments of railway iconography that Indian cinema used for self-fashioning a national identity, set in and around trains, one is reminded of how Ramesh Sippy filmed one of the most breathtaking railway chase sequences in Indian cinema, in Sholay (1975). Like the famed bookstalls of A.H. Wheeler’s and Higginbotham’s, the dak bungalows of Rudyard Kipling’s plain tales, R.K. Narayan’s fictional town Malgudi (today commemorated as the Arasulu Junction) or Ruskin Bond’s countless fictional and semi-fictional towns in the Himalayan foothills, Sholay’s township, Ramgarh would probably have never existed or we might have never seen them without the railways.
And, since the virtually unforgettable trains of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)—first in Europe and England, and then in Punjab—began globalizing Indian consciousness, Indian celluloid and popular culture have indeed come far in recreating fascinating railway spaces—from everyday lives, such as in Shaad Ali’s Anil Sharma’s Ghadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), Saathiya (2002), Shree Narayan Singh’s Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017) and Raj Rachakonda’s 8 A.M. Metro (2023); in epical scenes, such as in Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2009), Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur: Parts 1 & 2 (2012) and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013); as monumental cornerstones, such as in Sanjay Khanduri’s Ek Chalis Ki Last Local (2007), Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007), Rohit Shetty’s Chennai Express (2013), Neeraj Pandey’s M.S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), and in idiosyncratic ways in Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court (2014), Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan (2015), R. Balki’s Ki and Ka (2016), among several others.
Even in recent times—when some are misled to think that the railways have been outmoded by airways—the Indian Railways and railway stations have been the leitmotifs of a large array of Hindi films that include Karan Tejpal’s Stolen (2023), Shiv Rawail’s The Railway Men: The Untold Story of Bhopal 1984 (2023), and the 2024 releases, Ashwni Dhir’s Hisaab Barabar, Dheeraj Sarna’s The Sabarmati Report, Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies, and Kunal Khemu’s Madgaon Express. Films made in other Indian languages include Ashok Teja’s Telegu film, Odela Railway Station (2022), S. P. Shakthivel’s Tamil film, Payanigal Gavanikkavum (2022), Arfaz Ayub’s Malayalam film, Level Cross (2024), Sachin Pilgaonkar’s Marathi film, Navra Maza Navsacha 2 (2024), and the Bengali series, Byomkesh (2017-), and Payal Kapadia’s multilingual film, All We Imagine as Light (2024).
If one looks carefully enough (as I tried to do in one section of my book, The Great Indian Railways, published in 2018) at this body of cinematic work featuring railway representations, one will find complex stories woven around intersections of gender, caste, community, faith, social hierarchies, psychological realities, and economic intricacies of India. Back in the nineteenth century, the railways were constructed to join India with Europe. As the Indian authors, Bholanauth Chunder and Gopinath Sadashiv Hate testified in their books, The Travels of Hindoo (1869) and Regeneration of India (1883), they surely joined India and made its geography not only more accessible but also comprehensible. Today, in the midst of rapid urban lifestyles, even people may not still have the time to see India on trains, like Chunder or Hate, or Jules Verne’s protagonist, Phileas Fogg, in Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), who travelled between Bombay and Calcutta on trains operated by the Great Indian Peninsular Company and East Indian Railway Company. But they surely experience the Indian Railways and its still-unfolding history through cinematic specimens. In fact, simulated experiences of railways, through popular culture—which includes not only cinema but also literature—have existed since, at least, as long as the railways themselves.
Going back in time, one finds the ubiquity of the railways, first as saloons of imperial leisure and then as theatres of Indian nationalism. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalist leaders, who, like Mahatma Gandhi, began as vociferous critics of the institution, actively used the railways for their campaigns of civil disobedience, swadeshi, and Quit India. What I elsewhere refer to as the Gandhian paradox of the Indian Railways is best observed in Gandhi’s once-banned book, Hind Swaraj (1909), which contained vituperative condemnations of railway authorities, getting morphed into his exuberant travelogue-cum-nationalist propaganda in Third Class in Indian Railways (1917). The two books offered two sides of the same anticolonial coin with which Gandhi and others were to buy out British imperial proprietorship over the Indian Railways (and the nation).
In independent India’s films of the 1950s through 1970s, trains took on symbolic roles, ones that still touched on national stories. Railway platforms and compartment seemed perfect for emotional realities, too. A runaway bride might board a train bound for a new life, or long-separated lovers could finally embrace on the platform. The song “Meri Sapno Ki Rani” in Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana (1969) famously staged around a slow-paced toy-train of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, shot in Mahanadi, Ghayabari and Tindharia in the Kurseong sub- division, and became an indelible tribute to Darjeeling’s Batasia Loop and its history. Later Samanta took the scene to the plains in Ajnabee (1974), in the song “Hum Dono Do Premi” featuring two lovers on a goods train.
Previously, Lekh Tandon’s Jhuk Gaya Aasmaan (1968) and later Pradeep Sarkar’s Parineeta (2005) had also featured iconic moments set in and around Darjeeling’s railway tracks—now a UNESCO World Heritage, along with India’s other mountain railways, in Shimla and the Nilgiris. Interestingly, Bhappi Sonie’s Brahmachari (1968), had the song, “Chakke me Chakka,” where the adopted children of the hero are seen taking a ride in the open carriages of a 4- 6-2 steam engine, plying on a 12” gauge. The toy-train here is endeared, secured from all the dangerous hilly twists and curves of the Darjeeling or Kalka-Shimla lines, and prescribed in every child’s imagination of an easily affordable thrill. And, in Nasir Hussain’s Zamane Ko Dikhana Hai (1981), a Nilgiri-Railway train, bound for Mettupalayam, became the setting for another love story, encapsulated by the song “Hoga Tumse Pyara Kaun.”
These are all part of a legacy of popular representations of the railways that invite us to imagine India as a whole based on these fragments. At times, they are subversive and threatening to the national story, as in Ravi Chopra’s The Burning Train (1980), a story of disaster relief, wherein the a railway train becomes our vehicle into the lives of several Indian stereotypes and the socioeconomic realities behind them. On other occasions, they lie in the crevices of big pictures, in the equally memorable trains of Basu Chatterjee’s Baton Baton Mein (1979) and Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox (2013), which facilitate heartwarming human relations in the guise of provincial realities.
Among Indian filmmakers who stand out for their unconcealed love of the railways as cinematographic subjects, Satyajit Ray arguably ranks foremost. Ray’s much-celebrated Apu Trilogy (1950s) uses the arrival and departure of trains to mark critical turning points in the lives of his characters. In much of Bengali imagination, Durga and Apu—the key children characters of Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhay’s novel (1929), Pather Panchali—still run through the tall grasses of kaash-phool, chasing a train that disappears into the distance, throwing thick clouds of steam into the sky. In Ray’s Nayak (1966), the whole cinematic action is staged through the memory of a celebrity during his railway journey, aboard a luxury train that functions as the site of modern Indian desires, symbolized by the interiors of the film’s first-class coupes that remain hidden behind dark railway-windows or sunglasses. And, if the railways were passages into human psychology, they might as well have offered a glimpse into the deep past and previous births, as in Ray’s Sonar Kella (1974), set in and around Jaisalmer’s golden fortress.
The highs and lows of India life have been extraordinarily captured by India’s cinema’s railway sequences. If first-class carriages dominated railway scenes from Vinod Kumar’s Mere Huzoor (1968) and Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1972), the winds were sobered by the partition’s trains one saw in M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa (1973) and Govind Nihalani’s Tamas (1988). And the bleakness was then tempered by Rajesh Roshan’s Julie (1975), Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom (1983) and Gulzar’s Kitaab (1977) and Ijaazat (1987), wherein the railways, railway stations, and railway colonies acted as beacons of optimism and new beginnings amidst ruptures of modernity.
Back in the June of 1853, Karl Marx had argued that the Indian railways would galvanize modern industrialism and foster ancillary industries in India. Seen in that light, the cultural industry of India’s cinematic and literary railway iconography has thrived beyond imagination, and becoming too vast for any exhaustive catalog to even partially cover.
Arup K. Chatterjee 