Level Crossing (Railway Journey's in Hindi Cinema)

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About the Book Level Crossing: Railway Journeys in Hindi Cinema is a study of the representation of the railways as a cultural, perceptual, temporal and metaphoric paradigm of modern life in Hindi cinema. It examines the relationship of movement and stasis in late nineteenth-century literary accounts and in Hindi cinema from 1935 to 1974, and asks how the three most important aspects of the modern-machine, speed and vision-shaped literary and film discourses.

As railways became a part of the social fabric of the subcontinent in the late nineteenth century, railway compartments, rail tracks, and railway stations became new sites for staging action and articulating the aspirations, disappointments and struggles of a generation coming to terms with a rapidly modernising world. Mobility, speed, displacement, encounters with technology, urbanisation, new people, new worlds, new ways of being and perceptions became the subject matter of stories, novels and films.

Through an analysis of texts as diverse as wall murals in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, Bhartendu Harishchandra's travel accounts, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, O. Chandu Menon's Indulekha, and films such as Jawani ki Hawa, Achhut Kanya, Miss Frontier Mail, Station Master, Railway Platform, Bhuvan Shome and 27 Down, this volume examines railways as the technologic force that had a deep impact on our cultural life and imagination. It also shows how the railways functioned to integrate physical and social spaces mediating the experience of modernity, and how cinema itself worked to integrate railways into the consciousness of the subcontinent by circulating images of the 'new' twentieth-century world.

The volume is addressed to students and scholars in the fields of cinema, culture and media studies and film history.

About the Author Vijaya Singh is Assistant Professor of English, Regional Institute of English, Chandigarh, India.

Introduction inema first arrived in India on 7 July 1896. One of the actualities Cshown that afternoon in Watson Hotel, Bombay, by Marius Sestier, the camera operator of Lumiere Brothers, was the famous Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Soon after in 1898, Professor Anderson made a similar actuality called the Arrival of a Train at Churchgate Station. Though Anderson's film is not with us anymore, it is important to begin a story about train travel in Hindi cinema by invoking the names of Lumière and Anderson. It is not just a coincidence that the cinema and the railways are brought together, as if married to one another, under one roof, first in a café in Paris, then in a hotel room in Bombay for an audience that had gathered to watch this modern marvel of moving images.

**Contents and Sample Pages**