THE RHYTHM OF BOLLYWOOD

FROM THE RAILROAD THRILLER MISS FRONTIER MAIL 1936) TO SHAH RUKH KHAN DANCING ON A TRAIN IN DIL SE' 1998), TRAINS HAVE GIVEN UNFORGETTABLE SONG SEQUENCES TO MANY HINDI FILMS

- UTTARAN DAS GUPTA

ON 7 JULY 1896, AS BOMBAY WAS recovering from the plague, Marius Sestier, a French cinematographer, screened six short films at the "whites-only" Watson Hotel. Among the films shown was "L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat" (Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat), a 50-second, silent documentary showing a steam engine pulling a train into La Ciotat, a town near Marseille in France. Reports say several audience members panicked and ran for the exits when they saw the locomotive hurtling towards them on the screen. Though it is anachronistic to read too much into such events, the coincidence of cinema—a miracle of the modern industrial age—descending on the Indian subcontinent as a scary train is too delicious to ignore. Historian Ram Guha, in an article for "The Telegraph" in 2004, identified the railways and Hindi cinema as two of the eight reasons India has survived despite challenges. Both have fed, in many ways, into the national imagination.

THE CITY AND THE FRONTIER

One of the earliest films to exploit the adventure of train travel was the 1936 thriller "Miss Frontier Mail." Directed by Homi Wadia, it starred Fearless Nadia (Australian-Indian actor Mary Ann Evans) who had already established herself as an action star in "Hunterwali" (1935), also directed by Wadia. But even before its release, "Frontier Mail," as it was initially called, ran into trouble with B.B. and C.I. Railway, the company that operated the train, which ran from Bombay to Peshawar. The company had allowed Wadia to shoot on their train, and he had put a picture of a train crash on his poster.