On a rainy night, forest officer Salim Khan (Raaj Kumar), clad in dashing hat and coat, jumps on to a moving train and finds himself in a wood-panelled zenana compartment (ladies’ compartments were introduced in 1870), festooned with its occupant’s elegant belongings - a delicate jug, an enamelled metal paan box. A legendary example is director Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah (1972), set in Lucknow at the turn of the 20th century. Over the decades, trains and railway platforms have had starring roles in love stories in film after film. In Pakeezah, a zenana carriage allows for an intimate encounter between a forest officer and a courtesan. Toy trains circling hills and mountains, thundering express trains traversing plains, plateaus and desert - the Indian rail network is at once a mammoth entity and a vibrant character in our popular culture. For decades and decades, the most memorable moments of love in Hindi cinema - first meetings, chance encounters, tragic farewells, epic reunions - occurred in that most mundane of Indian settings: the long-distance train.įrom the time the first passenger train chugged its way from Bombay to Thane in 1853, the railways have knit the country together and opened windows to unseen parts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |