Trisha Gupta Profile picture
Writer, critic. Professor of Practice, Jindal School of Journalism and Communication https://t.co/qwNKEgDcsj

Jun 4, 2021, 7 tweets

Thread: For my weekly cinema column in Mirror/TOI Plus, I've been writing a series of pieces on #trainsinIndiancinema. First came this column, which opens with the Lumiere Brothers but zooms quickly into Avtar Kaul's strange and vivid award-winner #27Down: trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/04/why-ou…

For the second piece in the series, I looked back at what the railways meant to British colonial India - and Anglo Indians - through the Ava-Gardner-starrer #BhowaniJunction: trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/04/home-o…

Third column in my #trainsinIndiancinema series suggested that in the #1950s work of filmmaker #BimalRoy, trains were a lifeline -- but simultaneously harbingers of doom. trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-life…

For the fourth piece, which coincided with #SatyajitRay's birth centenary, I looked at trains as a changing motif in his films, from the Apu Trilogy to Sonar Kella (naturally via Nayak). trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/05/satyaj… #trainsinIndiancinema

Fifth: my column on the Hindi cinema of the 1970s, when trains started to embody India's technological fantasies: trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-tr… (The image is from the underwatched Amitabh Bachchan thriller, Parwana.) #trainsinIndiancinema

Sixth column in my #trainsinIndiancinema series: a different '70s vision, #Gulzar's classic #Kitaab, which gave us the railway network as a microcosm of the world, and the middle class child encountering it as a sort of latter-day young Siddhartha. trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/05/a-chil…

For the seventh column in the series, I made an exception and looked at television instead of cinema: because #ShyamBenegal's 1986 #Doordarshan series #Yatra may be our most dedicated depiction of the long-distance Indian train ride yet: trishagupta.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-be…

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