The Railways, Mobility and Colour in 1960s Bombay Cinema

Dr Ranjani Mazumdar

Jawaharlal Nehru University

Marie Curie Fellow in Indian Film at the University of Westminster, London  

This paper explores the intersection of the railways with colour stock and domestic tourism in the 1960s. Experiments with colour date back to 1937 with Imperial Films’  Kisan Kanya  (1937). However the overall move to colour in India was slow and painful and it was only in the second half of the 1960s that the industry made a full transition. In the absence of colour stock production in the country, the industry relied on imports from Technicolor and Eastman Kodak. The move to colour and the almost simultaneous arrival of lighter cameras and new sound technologies created a desire to travel and explore the landscape of India. The train thus became a significant presence in the films of this decade, emerging as the site where romance combined with the exploration of scenic and heritage sites. The expansion of railway passenger traffic in the 1960s gave rise to the typical “summer vacation” captured in several advertisements of that period. In 1965 almost 45 crore people (450 million) were on the move. It was during this decade that the drive to use posters and billboards at the railway stations of the country to publicize films was termed “railway publicity” by the film industry. The industry believed that railway publicity allowed them to target a mobile and expanding middle class audience. The train was literally in the image and outside of it as an imaginative force, propelling the transformation of cinema.  

Ranjani Mazumdar  teaches Cinema Studies at the School of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She is currently Marie Curie Fellow in Indian Film at the University of Westminster, London (2013-2014). Her publications focus on urban cultures, popular cinema, gender and the cinematic city. She is the author of  Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City  (2007) and co-author with Nitin Govil of the forthcoming  The Indian Film Industry  (2014). She has also worked as a documentary filmmaker and her productions include  Delhi Diary 2001  and  The Power of the Image  (Co-Directed). Her current research focuses on globalization and film culture, the visual culture of film posters and the intersection of technology, travel and design in 1960s Bombay Cinema.

Transition

Les recherches sur la transition s'intéressent aux processus de modification radicale et structurelle, engagés sur le long terme, qui aboutissent à une plus grande durabilité de la production et de la consommation. Ces recherches impliquent différentes approches conceptuelles et de nombreux participants issus d'une grande variété de disciplines.

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