Movies - Bhowani Junction

Home > Listing Index > Movies > Bhowani Junction

	Movies - Bhowani Junction

Bhowani Junction is a 1952 novel by John Masters, which became the basis of a successful 1956 film. It is set amidst the turbulence of the British withdrawal from India. It is notable for its portrayal of the Eurasian (Anglo-Indian) community, closely involved with the Indian railway system.

The film was directed by George Cukor, and was shot on location in Lahore, Pakistan. It starred Ava Gardner as Victoria Jones, an Anglo-Indian nurse in the British Army, and Stewart Granger as Colonel Rodney Savage, a British army officer.

The book is set in 1947, shortly before India achieved independence. Victoria is the mixed-race child of a railway worker. Patrick, also an Anglo-Indian, considers himself her boyfriend, but her feelings towards him are platonic. In self-defence, Victoria kills an English officer who has attempted to rape her, and is helped to avoid detection by an Indian, Ranjit, who hopes to marry her. She then becomes involved in an exercise to capture a local terrorist, along with her commanding officer, Rodney Savage, with whom she has an affair.

The main difference between the book and the film is that Patrick dies at the end of the film, but survives and marries Victoria in the novel.

As presented in the novel (and rather simplified in the film), Victoria tries to escape the suffocating and narrow-minded atmosphere of the (Anglo-Indian) community - serving with distinction in the British Army, becoming engaged to marry an Indian Sikh but escaping when finding out that this marriage would require her to give up her name (and essntially, her identity). She literally runs away, directly into the arms of the dashing British officer Rodney Savage and becomes both his lover and his unofficial adjutant in the last hectic days of British rule in India. But in the end she realises that she cannot escape her origins, and - rejecting both the Indian man and the British - chooses for Patrick, an Anglo-Indian like herself.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Bhowani Junction ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Bhowani Junction; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay