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 thᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚe 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.
