‘Because it is the Indian Railways that makes India.’ When I have a loquacious personnel officer declare this in my novel, Railsong, I am tapping into an idea as old as the railways in India. To be clear, there was no entity called the Indian Railways back in the mid-nineteenth century. But the British could envisage all too well the possibilities of this revolutionary infrastructure to extract the most from this productive colony.
Gandhi argued that the railways aided not only the consolidation of British rule, but famine, plague and unholiness
Raw material, such as cotton, destined for the mills of Manchester, could be conveniently chugged off to the docks. Goods manufactured in Britain could just as conveniently be circulated for profit in India. Troops could be swiftly mobilised to quell unrest. In terms of administration, according to one authority in the 1890s, the introduction of the railways had effectively shrunk the territory to ‘one-twentieth of its former dimensions’.
The undertaking was by no means straightforward. To Christian Wolmar, the railways in India were ‘the biggest public works project since the construction of the Pyramids.’ Take the treacherous hill sections in the Western Ghats near Bombay. According to the railway historian Ian Kerr, the work involved cutting through 54 million cubic feet of rock, which came at a cost of £70,000 per mile – and some 25,000 lives. An official report from the time found reason to rue the Indian casualties: ‘The labourers are generally of such feeble constitution, and so badly provided with shelter and clothing, that they speedily succumb to those diseases and the benefit of the fine weather are, thereby, temporarily lost.’
From the very start, the populace received the railways with tremendous enthusiasm. The opening of the first passenger line in 1853, a 21-mile run from Bombay, occasioned a public holiday, musical bands, a 21-gun salute, dignitaries from afar, and massive, curious, exultant crowds along the way.
Not everyone was convinced. In his 1909 pamphlet Indian Home Rule, Gandhi argued that the railways aided not only the consolidation of British rule, but famine, the bubonic plague, unholiness; indeed, ‘the evil nature of man’. Yet, only a few years later, after moving back to India from South Africa, Gandhi immersed himself in railway travel to understand his country. There remains no better way even today.
While the earliest railways in India were financed by British capitalists, who were guaranteed profit (typically 4-5 per cent) on their outlay, in time the government of British India went from guarantor to proprietor. It also encouraged the numerous princely states across India to build their own lines. Around the time of India’s Independence, in 1947, there were as many as 42 railway systems in the country, across a remarkable multiplicity of track length and gauge.
Much as the provinces and the princely states were amalgamated into the Republic – a breathtaking experiment in plural democracy – the disparate railways were reconciled under the rubric of the Indian Railways, a bureaucratic behemoth with its own ministry. This mighty workforce is among the world’s largest – at its peak strength, in the 1970s and 1980s, numbering over 1.5 million. My protagonist, Charulata Chitol, is one of the million and a half. She finds work in the personnel department, first as a clerk, then as a field worker, by which she is able to enter an array of lives that give us a representative idea of Indian-ness.
I spent years researching this fascinating organisation. With Stanislavskian zeal, I delved into its zillions of rules that would feel over-the-top in Yes, Minister – clauses and their endless sub-clauses, for instance, on warm-clothing advance pay for employees posted in various categories of hill stations, with its sanction in the hands of no less a personage than the head of the divisional railway system.
One obscure convention I learnt of connects the colonial era to the republican via the ordinary, anonymous worker. By this convention – unwritten as far as I could tell – those in railway employ since before Independence in 1947 had no superannuation age. They had a job, literally, for life; they were seen in this sense as freedom fighters. The convention applied to workers in the lowest rank, Group D, the labourer category.
It would be nice to think of this as a form of symbolic reparation for the callousness towards labouring lives described above. Yet while the colonial enterprise is no more, the oppression of Indian caste structures remains. My most affecting research was among ‘manual scavengers’ – sanitation workers, drawn from the lowest castes, who spent their professional lives handling faecal waste on the tracks at stations, and in the orderly ‘railway colonies’, without the aid of protective equipment.
The disparities of Indian life are to be found in railway travel too. Nothing is concealed: the spirit of accommodation, the squalor, the squabbles, the joy.
The railways are, in all respects, the people’s carrier. As many people in India travel on trains within a fortnight as fly in an entire year. The large numbers of ticketless travellers indicate something other than casual law-breaking alone; they reveal a taking-for-granted-ness, a natural claim. No need to pay to walk on a road or swim in a river, so too to ride the train. The daily passenger count, at least 20 million, would make up a medium-sized European country.
But the officer’s proclamation quoted at the start of the piece is defensible not only in literal terms.
The rail lines fan out like neural networks across the country, its junctions operating as synapses. When Indians travel by train in their staggering diversity and numbers, they carry with them their gods and goddesses, their customs, their languages, hundreds and hundreds of them, packed in small tiffins their personal histories, in their well-worn baggage their prejudices and vulnerabilities. We carry these into the melting pots of the great railway stations, to the intimate spaces of sleeper coaches, thence into the cities and towns outside.
