![dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lyQVlE8c9xo/U7JoysAVNbI/AAAAAAAACKw/432aczKIJjU/s1600/ddj.png)
She’s about to miss the train but he reaches out and pulls her in. But by the mid-1990s, we are in a globalised world, so Simran and Raj initially meet in a London station, on a train going to Europe. Simran (Kajol) and Raj’s (Shah Rukh Khan) first meeting becomes the mirror for their cathartic reunion at the end of the film. Let’s end with what has probably become the most defining moment of love involving the railways: the climax of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995). Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge turned the train into a symbol of both connection and freedom, with trains bookending the love story. In the 1980s, where else could an estranged middle-class couple meet and spend an entire night reminiscing and laying their ghosts to rest, if not at a railway station - neutral ground, a temporary stopover to onward journeys? Sudha and Mahinder part ways to the sound of a train leaving the station. But that thundery night has given them closure. When dawn breaks, there is the melancholic farewell, as Sudha leaves with her new husband (Shashi Kapoor). As the rain pours down and they sip hot tea (the eternal lifeline of train travel), they flash back to their failed relationship and marriage. Divorced couple Sudha (Rekha) and Mahinder (Naseeruddin Shah) run into each other in the waiting room of a deserted, small-town railway station on a stormy night. In Gulzar’s Ijaazat (1987), for a poignant, lost love. The modest railway platform could be a setting for love too. Unbeknownst to them, they are both bound for the same destination and this fiery first encounter will lead to love. She is going home after a trip to the city he’s on his way to a new job. They meet not in a zenana bogey but in a first-class compartment that she, a single woman, shares with a stranger of the opposite sex, on a long, overnight journey. In Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1957), a typically jaunty Nasir Husain romance, the hero (Shammi Kapoor) and heroine (Ameeta) meet on a train and sparks fly.
![dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hgZ13dhI1tM/maxresdefault.jpg)
And from then on, whenever she hears the whistle of a train, she goes, trance-like, to the window of her kotha, from where she can see them passing by, streaming plumes of smoke, symbolising her yearning for freedom and for the stranger she has never seen but has fallen in love with.īy the 1950s and ’60s, in a more modern, progressive India, first encounters on trains were quite different. And it is the trigger for the epic romance between Salim and Sahibjaan. This intimate encounter - chancing upon a sleeping woman, as if she were in her boudoir - couldn’t have happened anywhere but by accident on a train. (I saw your feet, they are very beautiful / Don’t place them on the ground / They may get soiled.)” He slips the colourful feather which is her page marker into his pocket and leaves a poetic note that has since gone into the annals of Hindi film history: “Aapke paon dekhe, bahut haseen hai / inhe zameen par mat utaariyega / mailay ho jayenge. Sahibjaan (Meena Kumari), a tawaif, is asleep on the berth, her body gently swaying to the movement of the train, a half-open book of Urdu poetry beside her.Ī bewitched Salim gazes at her feet, red with alta, the ankles encased in ornate payals. 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.
![dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe](https://instube.com/uploads/images/1553397126.jpg)
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.
![dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe](https://www.filmigeek.net/images/2007/04/20/ddlj.jpg)
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.
Dilwale dulhania le jayenge ayyare kotha kaipe windows#
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.