Taxi Number No Do Gyarah Full Movie Picture

The pre-release line in Bombay Chronicle said, �Dev Anand plays a dashing young man on his way to inherit his uncle�s fortune, and Kalpana Kartik is a sprightly girl who has run away from home� Filled with mirth, mystery and music the picture has an excellent supporting cast led by Shashikala, Jeevan, Lalita Pawar, and Helen. Dances composed by Zohra Sehgal and Surya Kumar are among the main attractions of the film, which is due to arrive in town towards the middle of next month.� ²³ These lines encapsulate the quintessential Vijay Anand style � an amalgamation of adventure, thrill, mystery and entertainment, a formula he held on to in almost all the films he made. What the review misses is the director�s unique approach to cinematic travel.

A straightforward thriller, Nau Do Gyarah unabashedly borrowed its style from Hollywood. Inspired by Frank Capra�s film It Happened One Night, Anand�s film starts as a road movie and then locates itself in the picturesque location of Mahabaleshwaram. The film is woven around the protagonist Madan (played by Dev Anand) and his search for a missing will. The search takes Madan to Mahabaleshwaram where the film�s climax takes place. In the course of the journey to Mahabaleshwaram, Madan meets up with Kalpana Kartik who has run away from home trying to escape an arranged marriage.

Structured like a travel film without the rubric of instruction, but as experiential and performative, Nau Do Gyarah combines descriptive passages with the visceral experience of cinematic turbulence. Jeffrey Ruoff notes that �cinema may not be "objectivity in time" � but it is a medium of space in time; travel has been the way filmmakers have explored this nexus� since �cinema is the art of travel.� ²⁴ Vijay Anand plays out this creative dynamic vividly in the film to offer another kind of cosmopolitan logic.

The story begins in Delhi. An unemployed and penniless youth, Madan suddenly receives a letter from his uncle about his inheritance. Overnight, Madan changes his clothes, dressed now as a debonair and stylish gentleman. Borrowing money from others he leaves in a truck for Bombay. En route he discovers Kalpana Kartik who has run away from home to avoid an arranged marriage, sitting in the back dressed like a young Sikh man. Like Taxi Driver, the cross-dressed Kartik plays this role admirably. Madan only discovers later that the boy is a woman and subsequently falls in love. Kartik is impish, feisty, assertive and sharp.

T he road journey displays the director�s desire to use songs, locations and geographic scale to describe the developing romance. The entry into Bombay is presented as a montage of traffic, skyline architecture and people. From here the narrative shifts to Mahabaleshwaram where the two meet with all the crooks who are trying to steal the inheritance. Kartik and Madan pretend to be husband and wife for the owners who have hired Anand as a manager of the estate. The flirtatious relationship between the two is one of the highlights of the comic track which unfolds within a narrative of intrigue and double-crossing.

Like Taxi Driver, the film boasts of a wanderlust aesthetic as it opens with vivid images of Delhi, celebrating its monuments, its modern architecture and wide roads. The city unfolds as a film within the film with the credits placed over the projected image. Travel, curiosity and discovery are central to its style. The mode of travel shifts from walking to road transportation and deploys the cinematic eye to generate a desire to see through movement. Roads, people, petrol pumps, mountains, valleys, forests and architectural density are vividly structured in this travel narrative.

Ruoff notes how �automobiles freed travellers from the standardization of railroad timetables and established routes, breaking the railways monopoly on cross-country tourism. �²⁵ The automobiles, episodic travelogue style with detours, chance encounters and adventure, created a different kind of imagination, deployed creatively in films. While the modern road movie genre addresses this squarely, Nau Do Gyarah (often referred to as a road movie) creates connectivity between three sites � Delhi, Bombay and Mahabaleshwaram. The road movie�s generic play with film as travel, film as freedom from the constraints of time and space is established consciously by Vijay Anand at the outset and transportation provides a mode of viewing that continues even in the interior spaces of the palatial home in Mahabaleshwaram.

M adan literally gives the spectators a tour of Delhi before he makes his exit on to the road � a metal bridge, the Parliament House, India Gate, the Red Fort, Connaught Place � everything is mobilized as an image through his moving truck. Once he leaves Delhi, the landscape changes. The journey is structured around several little events and an accident. The journey is a romantic one with songs, flirtation and comic acts played out between Kartik and Madan.

The entry into Bombay is presented as a montage that begins with the train and transitions on to city images with traffic, apartment blocks and people. This montage is superimposed onto the wondrous expression on Madan and Kartik�s faces. This is the city of spectacle, adventure, excitement and thrill. The film then briefly enters Madan�s friend�s apartment and subsequently takes us to a nightclub, a dance by Helen, and a robbery scene. The city of crime is established and our two protagonists then move towards Mahabaleshwaram. On the way, we see Madan curve up a steep mountain, the camera providing the viewer with imagery that plays out the excitement of being close to death. The thrill of the voyage derives part of its pleasure from the use of such sensational travel imagery. The experience of danger is offered as pleasurable entertainment because it is illusory. The spectator enjoys the experience from the comfort of the theatre. ²⁶

L ike Taxi Driver, but in a somewhat different mode, the travel in Nau Do Gyarah not only establishes a network but allows us to see both departure and arrival in city spaces. It is the journey that structures the narrative which makes way for interesting song picturizations, romantic travel and little events. The travel narrative overwhelms the story, bypassing the focus on familial space, questions of tradition, social and sexual morality.

The film is light and breezy. The only family that exists is the strange and dysfunctional one in the palatial Mahabaleshwaram home. The layout of the home is, however, explored vividly as Vijay Anand turns the walls, railings, nooks and crannies of the home into a web of mystery, psychological intrigue and sensations. The camera is restless. Anand generates movement within the static space of the home to navigate its mysterious psychic world. The dynamic use of the camera, foregrounding techniques, careful editing and music turns this space and its location into a dense maze of chimneys, corridors, the staircase, a hidden secret room, open mountain space, and a dense forest. The restlessness of the camera highlights the travel and discovery form which moves from outdoor to indoor space.

I f Taxi Driver locates its narrative in Bombay, Nau Do Gyarah moves from Delhi to Bombay to Mahabaleshwaram establishing a geographical network using the travel form. Like Taxi Driver, travel generates an adventurous curiosity, fulfilling a desire to wander through space. The search for the missing will is the plotline that is placed within a spectacular photography of space. The film�s tension filled action climax ends with the couple back in the truck with the two children from the home, now orphaned, sitting at the back. We don�t know where they are headed but they are again on the move. Dev Anand�s account of the shooting of Nau Do Gyarah substantiates the desire to foreground travel over plot and story.

�The film began with me at the wheel of a truck going from Delhi to Bombay, the camera sometimes following me, sometimes running ahead of me and making a photographic survey of the countryside, from state to state, as we travelled along� We went over the highways and through tunnels, through forests of eye-pleasing Gulmohar trees and dangerous looking dacoit infested ravines, through sunshine � with the burning heat of June scorching us� It all made for a great road show of mirth, gaiety and revelry, as we kept on canning footage for the movie. It was a long drawn out picnic of great joy and creative satisfaction � a three week long adventure.� ²⁷

The exploratory narrative remains the prime signature in both Taxi Driver and Nau Do Gyarah as events become secondary to this primary desire for cosmopolitan travel, visual cartography and the desire to generate urban vignettes. The family and its iconography have to concede to the pleasures of adventure and tourism. Familial morality and the epic conflicts of the new nation are conspicuously marginal. The nation itself is absent in both films and there is remarkably no discussion of �tradition� or �Indianness�. What we see instead is a parade of urban types, a navigation of locations and a quintessential modern sensibility.

Created at the intersection of new technology, a fascination for city spaces, Hollywood crime films, geographic travel and urban types, both Nau Do Gyarah and Taxi Driver escape the discourse of nationhood to evoke a different sensibility. It is the fluid mobility in the films, their wanderlust aesthetic and their desire to get consumed by a travel narrative that allowed the films to articulate a cosmopolitan imagination with the wayward women placed at the centre. Small wonder that these memorable films of the 1950s have been marginalized by the cacophony of the pantheon that identifies the decade of their production as the �Golden Fifties�.

Footnotes:

1. In December of 2007 I met Dev Anand and his son Suneil Anand in their office at Pali Hill. Dev Anand felt that despite Navketan�s successful track record, the studio had been neglected in historical accounts of the 1950s. Suneil Anand attributed this to their �westernized� themes and felt the films were ahead of their time. Dev Anand disagreed and insisted that the films were not �western� but �modern�. I found this discussion illuminating.

2. The Times of India, 21 February 1954, Sunday, p. 3.

3. Bombay Chronicle, 10 November 1957, Saturday, p. 10.

4. Bombay Chronicle, 21 September 1957, Saturday, p. 8.

5. Ibid.

6. Dev Anand, Romancing with Life: An Autobiography, Penguin, Viking, 2007, p. 137.

7. Ibid.

8. The French New Wave (or Le Nouvelle Vague) was a film movement in France that dealt with urban life, youthful exuberance and angst and the transformation of the filmmaking process itself. The movement originated in 1958 and continued till the mid-sixties. Shooting on location, long takes, direct sound and natural lighting were some of the characteristic features of the movement.

9. Dev Anand, Romancing with Life: An Autobiography, op cit., p. 137.

10. The Times of India, 21 February 1954, Sunday, p. 3.

11. Bombay Chronicle, 20 February 1954, Saturday, p. 3.

12. Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006, p. 8.

13, Bombay Chronicle, 27 February 1954, Saturday, p. 3.

14. Uma Anand and Ketan Anand, Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film, Himalaya Films Media Entertainment, 2007, p. 57.

15. For Madhava Prasad films that lay out the city like a series of snapshots invoke the experience of �arriving in Bombay�. See his �Realism and Fantasy in Representations of the Metropolitan Life in Indian Cinema�, in Preben Karsholm (ed.), City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience, Seagull Books, 2004, p. 86.

16. Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman, Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, BFI/Oxford University Press, revised edition, 1999, p. 339.

17. The sequence has an uncanny resemblance to the well-known chase sequence in Ramgopal Varma�s Satya that climaxes with Guru Narain�s murder on a bridge. For an account of the chase in Satya, see chapter IV of my book, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2007.

18. filmindia, May 1954, p. 82.

19. Ibid., p. 81.

20. Ibid., p. 82.

21. Uma Anand and Ketan Anand, Chetan Anand: The Poetics of Film, op cit., p. 59.

22. Bombay Chronicle, 10 November 1957, Saturday, p. 10.

23. Bombay Chronicle, 21 September 1957, Saturday, p. 8.

24. Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2006, p. 18.

25. Ibid.

26. Tom Gunning, �The Whole World Within Reach: Travel Images Without Borders� in Jeffrey Ruoff (ed.), Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, op cit., p. 38.

27. Dev Anand, Romancing with Life: An Autobiography, op cit., pp. 156-157.

Taxi Number No Do Gyarah Full Movie Picture

Source: https://www.india-seminar.com/2009/598/598_ranjani_mazumdar.htm

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