The Great Indian Railways: A Cultural Biography

By Arup K. Chatterjee

Following an experimental railway track at Chintadripet, in 1835, the battle for India's first railroad was fought bitterly between John Chapman's Great Indian Peninsular Railway and Rowland MacDonald Stephenson's East India Railway Company, which was merged with Dwarkanauth Tagore's Great Western of Bengal Railway. Even at the height of the Mutiny of 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar promised Indian owned railway tracks for native merchants if Badshahi rule was restored in Delhi. From Jules Verne to Rudyard Kipling to Mark Twain to Rabindranath Tagore to Nirad C. Chaudhuri to R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond-the aura of Indian trains and railway stations have enchanted many writers and poets. With iconic cinematography from The Apu Trilogy, Aradhana, Sonar Kella, Sholay, Gandhi, Dil Se, Parineeta, Barfi, Gangs of Wasseypur, and numerous others, Indian cinema has paved the way for mythical railroads in the national psyche. The Great Indian Railways takes us on a historic adventure through many junctions of India's hidden railway legends, for the first time in a book replete with anecdotes from imperial politics, European and Indian accounts, the battlefronts of the Indian nationalist movement, Indian cinema, songs, advertisements, and much more, in an ever-expanding cultural biography of the Great Indian Railways. Dubbed as 'one of a kind' this awe-inspiring saga is 'compulsive reading.'

'In this fascinating cultural history, Arup K Chatterjee charts the extraordinary journey of the Indian Railways, from the laying of the very first sleeper to the first post-Independence bogey. It evokes our collective accumulation of those innumerable memories of platform chai and rail-gaadi stories, bringing alive through myriad voices and tales the biography of one of India's defining public institutions.'
– Shashi Tharoor, Author, M.P., Lok Sabha
'The Great Indian Railways is a fascinating and well-researched cultural biography of the Indian Railways-those intricate arteries of the soul of India, as have been experienced, written, filmed, and dreamed. We cannot all travel by rail to know India, as Gandhiji did, but we can and should read this book!'
– Tabish Khair, Author, Professor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jan 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789388414234

Arup K. Chatterjee

Arup K. Chatterjee is an Associate Professor at OP Jindal Global University. He is the founding chief editor of Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures, which he has run from 2011 to 2018. As a writer, he has authored of The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (2017), The Great Indian Railways (2018), Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India (2020) and The Great Indian Railway Saga (2020).

Book preview

THE GREAT INDIAN

RAILWAYS

A CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY

THE GREAT INDIAN

RAILWAYS

A CULTURAL BIOGRAPHY

ARUP K CHATTERJEE

PRAISE FOR

ARUP K CHATTERJEE

This is a rare and unique perspective on the cultural history of an organization as perceived by writers, critics, films, colonial rulers and local citizenry from the 1840s till today… The most powerful chapter is the one on Partition, where the Railways become the ‘Dumb Waiters’ and purveyors of destiny of two nations. The horrors of Partition generated a large number of books, short stories and films, reminding us of the bestiality and violence on a scale rarely seen in history, while the national leadership looked on helplessly. Here, the author draws from Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Krishan Chander’s Peshawar Express, a story where the train itself is the narrator of events that took place on it, Bhisham Sahni’s Amritsar Aa Gaya, Sadat Hasan Manto’s Kasri Nafisi and many more…Arup K. Chatterjee vividly captures the debates about its impact and on its changing cultural influence over time…Chatterjee is a professor of English; his command over language and facility with it, apart from his unique perspective on the railways, makes this exceptional book compulsive reading.

– Outlook

Arup K. Chatterjee... traces the 156-year-history of the Indian Railways from an unusual angle—how the railways influenced the cultural milieu of India through not only literature, films and songs, but also catalyzed revolutionary changes in the country’s political and social canvas. It was the beginning of a new India after the first passenger train ran in Bombay on August 15, 1853. Railways are yet to reach all nooks and corners of India. The changes therefore are continuing.

– The Hindu

For the author, the railways is not just an actually existing entity, but is, rather, a myth of tremendously Indian proportions, invoked and evoked in all forms of the national and popular imagination…This book attempts not just to create a new genre, but to set down new tracks for thought, method and writing in the area of culture studies…The perspective Chatterjee brings to this subject is a new and courageous one: rather than drafting a catalogue of novels, films, diaries and journals that have the railways as their theme, which would be expected in such a work, he investigates how the railways themselves affect the form and content of their own representations…The greatest achievement of this book is that it gathers and collects the myths, narratives and histories of the Indian Railways from sources as disparate as colonial archives and popular movies. Chatterjee successfully conjures up the magic in a lucid style, while maintaining the gravity and solemn tone reminiscent of a train journey.

– Scroll

Chatterjee’s courage in undertaking such a vast endeavour is laudable…the book is thoroughly enjoyable, even if it is just for its rich trivia.

– The Telegraph

Chatterjee moves with ease, from literature to history to politics to cinema, in a juxtaposition of exciting styles and frames of reference, and in a language which he calls symbolic of the railways themselves: ‘Why should not the language of a railway book pay homage to the institution, the times and eras in which its changing narratives belong?’… From the first proposals for the Indian Railways, to Dwarkanath Tagore and Rowland Macdonald Stephenson’s economic alliances over building them, the Great War of Independence to the age of Kipling, from the Civil Disobedience to the Quit India Movement, to the reconstruction of the Pamban Bridge and the burst of Eastman colour on celluloid screens in the 1960s, the Indian Railways emerge as a palpable protagonist in Chatterjee’s work.

– Sunday Guardian

There are several books on Indian Railways (meaning mostly the history), but there is nothing quite like this. Described as a cultural biography, it is one of a kind.

– Bibek Debroy, in Business Standard

Chatterjee really hits his stride as he chronicles half a century over intense cultural presence of railways from the stories and films of Satyajit Ray, to a whole yard of Bollywood films, and the novellas of Ruskin Bond. There is hard to find any cultural manifestation he has left out…it is a repository of rare treasures about our lives’ intersections with railways down the years— which will survive phasing of steam engines and meter gauge lines.

– IANS

Long years before Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the idiomatic tryst, India’s destiny had been set in motion on iron wheels, from Bombay in 1853. ‘The day was a public holiday. At 3:30 pm, as the 21 guns roared together, the first train carrying Lady Falkland, wife of Governor of Bombay, along with 400 special invitees, steamed off…’ Ninety-four years later, the city was one of the farthest points, from the new nation of Pakistan, from which refugees were forced to leave: leaving one independent nation behind, to live in another. From there, those who took The Purveyors of Destiny—the partition-trains—went up to Amritsar. Many from India reached Jatto, Mughalpura, Lahore, Karachi, or Rawalpindi; some miraculously alive. Others became part of the rubble on railway platforms, at premature destinies.

(The Dumbwaiters of Partition and The Great Indian Railways)

BLOOMSBURY INDIA

Bloomsbury Publishing India Pvt. Ltd

Second Floor, LSC Building No. 4, DDA Complex, Pocket C – 6 & 7,

Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY INDIA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published 2017

Reprinted 2018

Copyright © Arup K Chatterjee, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes

ISBN: TPB: 978-93-88414-23-4

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3

Created by Manipal Digital Systems

Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Prologue

Introduction

Of Chai, Restaurant Cars, Lamb Curry and Wheeler & Co.

I. Tracks of Panic

Early Colonial Writings on the Railways (1843-83)

II. Conciliatory Carriages

Rousselet, Verne, Háte, Wheeler, Kipling, Steel and Twain (1874–1907)

III. From the Longest Bridge to the Third-Class Phenomenon

Hind Swaraj to Quit India (1908-1947)

IV. The Dumbwaiters of Partition and the Purveyors of Destiny

Independent India’s Railways (1947–1964)

V. Reeling on the Rails

Trains in Monochrome to Eastman Colour (1964–90)

VI. Derailed to Diaspora?

The Bridal Train to Europe and Post-Railways (1990—)

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

I am aboard the Purushottam Express, which has just crossed Sasaram—once part of the historic kingdom of Kashi, and the birthplace of Sher Shah Suri, who was a ruler of Delhi, and the architect of the Grand Trunk Road.

Today, Sasaram is known for its quaint Urdu-Hindi-Bihari accent, rock quarrying, and perhaps a few other notorious attributes. I know of the town chiefly from my experience of living in an unnecessarily snobbish bungalow-colony in Tatanagar, where a lot of domestic labour and construction workers used to hail from Sasaram—that is until at least twelve years ago. My experiences and theirs were made possible chiefly with the Great Indian Railways chugging along, quietly in the background.

I might be beginning to be unreasonably oblique. Frankly, I do not mind if some maverick reviewer were to put this book in the list of toilet paperbacks. In the interest of a national service, I do hope lavatories in the railways keep running water, and toilet paper. The ones adjacent to my compartment have clearly run out of those supplies of basic human necessity, weeks ago.

The occasion of writing a preface to a second edition certainly seems exaggerated. What might have been the reasons for The Great Indian Railways going into a second edition, anyway? Perhaps the first print run was too small, and it ran out soon enough—in nine months, no more. Or perhaps, the author and publishers had discovered some form of alchemy of turning the book to an encyclopaedia, to which year after year some bits may be added, and new pages passed off under new covers, as new indeed. Indians as we are, we seem to be ordinary folks. As an author does not quite understand how much their work of writing has been subsidised by the success of other books, we who are passengers do not quite realise how many of our journeys have been subsidised by journeys that goods take in this country. In many ways, our joys, our anguishes, our comforts and our strains are also subsidised by that of those travelling with us.

When I woke up today morning, one of my shoes went missing. I wondered if there was a hound at large somewhere in the train, to whom the scent of my flesh had been fed. Perhaps a nemesis from my past. Alas, no Baskerville Hall awaits me at Jamshedpur, save a middle-class apartment.

As I begin coming to terms with this loss, the train arrives at Kanpur. The well-meaning elderly folk from yesternight depart, and a family of eight arrives to take two parallel rows of the compartment. There is mewling and puking all morning. I feel like stewing my residual leather shoe and asking one of the caterers to feed my co-passengers, en famigle. To make matters worse, a waitlisted passenger comes and sits by my feet, and begins to ask questions—in short, getting on my delicate nerves. He gets off at Dehri-on-Sone. Before leaving the platform, he knocks on my window from outside, and points out to the small netted carrier, by my feet.

He has left a packet of potato wafers, there for me. It is unopened. Along with that there is a balloon. He may have thought I was going home to a daughter or son. Perhaps he too was. I feel much sobered now. The Great Indian Railways does have that effect of you. You cannot be misanthropic on them, for too long.

To borrow a phrase my wife uses often nowadays, it ‘purveys your destiny.’ By ‘purvey’ she of course means a cross between ‘transport’ and ‘alter.’

I myself never explained what I really meant by ‘purveyors,’ nor was I asked by anyone except her. Perhaps you will recount, or lay your hands upon, the short story, ‘The Purloined Letter,’ by Edgar Allan Poe.

A French philosopher of the last century, Jacques Derrida, wrote a pleasurably esoteric essay on it, titled, ‘The Purveyor of Truth.’ Inter alia, he took issue with the reading of the story by another French thinker and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Derrida seems to have been intrigued by things similar to what had always puzzled me, since much before I chanced upon his essay. For instance, the all-important incriminating letter! No one actually intends to know or disclose the contents of it— neither the characters in the story, nor the critics who wrote about it. The purveyor of truth was actually the concealer of truth. This is how Derrida’s ‘Purveyor of Truth’ became my ‘Purveyor of Destiny.’

Train journeys were not—as I came to realise—only meant to transport people to their destinies. Or merely imaginary realms of legendary romances. They were also meant to conceal the journeys—those quiet and palpable personal histories—lost in the milling and the madding crowd at a railway platform.

‘To purvey’ also means ‘to cater.’ It is very unlikely that a caterer will frankly tell you what and what state of ingredients they have actually served you. As with railway food—and our somewhat primitive desire to be served luncheons or suppers on a train—so with railway technology, and even more, so railway economics, we seem to be—as I have said—ordinary folk. As an author might only expect higher royalties notwithstanding the road to perdition his book may be on, railway passengers such as we can only clamour for enhanced subsidies to the railways by the government, regardless of how grossly understaffed the organisation is, or how many unmanned crossings and train derailments plague the establishment.

The Great Indian Railways too is a beneficiary of that ordinariness. It is also the beneficiary of the voice of the railways. Ask any of the spirits of bygone caretakers of the ‘black beauties’—the erstwhile steam engines of the Indian Railways—and they will tell you how human the trains are. Christian though the architects were who build the railways, like a Jew, the trains have ‘hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions…hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.’

***

History vouches to be reborn at Gomoh, where my train has just reached. The station, renamed after Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, was where he was last seen in India, by his family, before escaping to Kabul, and beyond. The Bose family and other historians have fondly preserved the memory of the great hero, and legends from that journey. But whoever chronicled the life of the railways, from that adventure?

About three hundred kilometres from here is Jamalpur, the site of the oldest locomotive factory in India. And of Rudyard Kipling’s beloved ‘railway folk.’ In Kipling’s days there was discipline, respect for the crown, civic sense, quaintly arranged bungalows, and of course the coach factory, and the railways. One apparently does not find those things anymore. The coach factory is gone, replaced by operations at Chennai and Kapurthala. The romance of steam is spent like a penny novel found at a small provincial railway platform. But the railways will breathe still, if you breathed into them. They will talk to you, even much after your journeys have ended. They will chisel your fragile ego, just a little bit each time, as they have mine.

The Great Indian Railways will tell you that much of Indian culture, literature, cinema, its postage stamps, numerous advertisements, telly serials, and love stories would not have happened without the railways. Tatanagar, the town I shall reach later tonight, would not have been built without the railways—the quest to transport iron, coal and steel, as part of a larger industrial plan first conceived by Rabindranath Tagore’s grandfather, Dwarkanauth Tagore.

Besides that, none of me would have been here either. Though born in Calcutta, I might have been conceived in Tatanagar, after all. That is where my parents first lived. I do not know very well; one railway journey my parents took, either way, has distanced me from that history.

And without the railways, one of my grandfathers would have squandered away his life due to homesickness. As someone originally from Benares—although a Bengali—, Calcutta was alien to him. During his lunch hour, each day, he would visit the Howrah Station and wait for the train from Benares, if only to catch of a glimpse of the people arriving from his hometown. On days when the train was late, he returned to work, morose and empty handed. When the train was on schedule, he went back to his clerical desk, with a spring in his step and his tiffin carrier—a contended though anonymous yeoman in that vast populace of clerks that the Macaulays and the Dalhousies had bequeathed upon India…supposedly through the betrothal of the English language to the Great Indian Railways.

***

Between Bokaro and Purulia,

December 17, 2017.

At Monghyr platform over telephone

A father bellowed to his son—

The mother was boarded without a ticket—

A police constable, returning from election duty

Without a badge, thus without a name

Here a name is a paltry deed

Seldom a Masjid is without a name

Seldom a nameless burning Ghat

Prayed and burned in nomenclature.

Yesternight, from a bridge, upon Allahabad

The faint glimmers of faith arose

Aloft the temple spire, and a man’s shadow

Walked uphill the temple stairs

Below, the fishing boats hibernated,

Their ablutions deferred till the evening conch

Blown in breath and wrinkles unknown

Flurrying through an eight ‘o’ clock bazaar

Chain pullers with bottles for Gangajal—

There was no one in a terrace apartment

The bed-cloth was dishevelled on the bed

Television gleamed in that corner room

And smoke rose from a faraway factory.

The last to appear was a belled buffalo

Squatting in a narrow lane before

A flame from an anonymous earthen lamp

Not all veneration is worth a name

Nor the train had the time to wait

I saw it all from the lavatory window

And when I came out I wrote

Namelessly.

PROLOGUE

In January, 1943, British actor and biographer, Hesketh Pearson, walked up to Sir George Bernard Shaw and said that he wished to write the biography of Oscar Wilde. His biography of Shaw had been published just the previous year—in addition to those of Arthur Conan Doyle, William Shakespeare, William Hazlitt, and Pearson’s ancestor, Erasmus Darwin, in that decade.

Shaw’s response was discouraging. He was of the opinion that European literature had had enough of Wilde. That, besides the aesthete’s own stock of legends and writings! Pearson persevered, notwithstanding the opposition.

On reading his The Life of Oscar Wilde (1946) it appears that neither the English nor the French were truly deserving of Wilde’s genius. One of the lesser known reasons for this was that his French was charged with ‘atrocious pronunciation,’ by English ears. The French on the contrary found it fluent, but must have been incredulous, all the same. I fear, this cultural and literary biography of the Indian Railways is about to tread a ground rather similar—both to Pearson’s biography of Wilde, and the public reception of the life of an aesthete.

Pearson found a highly influential censor in Shaw whom he chose to overlook. I, for one, was not blessed with the disapproval of any contemporary doyen. I can only hope that the reader does not wish that I had one indeed.

My choice to introduce Pearson, Shaw and Wilde into a prologue written for a railway book might appear bewildering and obscure. But there are two decisive reasons for the choice. First is, of course, reading and literature almost always complete a train journey. In fact, so deep is the connection between reading (and writing) and the trains that very often one might not even read the book they purchased at a railway station, but rather construct their own metafictions on the selfsame narrative, during the course of the journey. But buy a book they absolutely must. The second reason—and this leads to the underlying rationale of the book—is that the trains are not always experienced directly. Our railway experiences are not confined to railway journeys. They work through associations. These associations may come through commodities such as food, cutlery, furniture, upholstery, varnishings, earthenware, chains, locks, keys, suitcases, newspapers, recycled-newspaper-bags, books, and many others. They may also come through narrative voices, tropes and characters such as in romantic plots, fruit or tea vendors, ticket inspectors, uniforms, lavatories, vestibules, railway tracks, and so on. Railway experiences, therefore, are very likely to extend beyond railway compartments— such as in a world of representations—in detached spaces of psychogeographical portability.

The Great Indian Railways straddles two worlds of writing— the open-ended galaxy of nonfiction and the closed universe of academic writing. And yet, the book is passionately different from both. Undoubtedly, a lot has been said and written about the Indian Railways, and there has been persistent interest in the subject among readers and spectators.

Nonetheless, no book has so far tried to visualise the vast wealth of another industry that the railways gave birth to—the industry of thinking or representing the railways. In fact, as the book observes, this industry began much before the railways, themselves. It might even outlive the trains—for it has certainly outlived the steam engines.

Perhaps the academic might find fault in the lack of adequate citations—despite there being over six hundred of those, anyhow. Writers and readers of easy-breezy nonfictions might argue the language is too contrived for them. I do not wish to drive home a strong case against either of these critics. I cannot yet decide who is French or English, between the two. Nor do I hold any disregard for their opinions. But I am confident of the fact that the handling of a subject as the railways requires two things, chiefly, that both might miss at first.

First is the abandonment of an excess of probity, proof or empirical data. Two of the finest instances I can remember of my own childhood’s railway experiences were not of any railway journey but that of encountering the trains in proxy. One was at the Benares railway station, at the age of five.* I am told I was rather enthralled by a miniature toy-train inside a glass cabinet. I distinctly recollect imagining its interiors to be more luxurious and spacious that the real train I was to board. I had not been exposed to an adventurous railway setting prior to this. Yet the toy-train promised an adventure infinitely greater than the Kalka Mail that was yet to arrive at the station. If I was asked to prove how this is so, or cite satisfactory sources, I might just succeed today, at a time when I can only reflect and fabricate. Back then, however, when the experience was much more tangible and absolutely authentic, an academic interrogation would have traumatised the young witness and have him fail miserably.

The second requirement in writing about the railways is the writing itself. My second great rendezvous with the railways came in Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, in the train that Doctors Watson and Mortimer, and Henry Baskerville, take from Paddington to Dartmoor, Devonshire; and later, the one that Watson and Holmes board from Dartmoor to Coombe Tracey. The book where I first read the story was an abridged and illustrated version of the novel—a boon, for I could therefore read about and see how a first-class carriage looked. It was a lot like I had imagined the miniature toy-train at the Benares station to be from inside. At that time, I did not know much distinction between the British and the Indian Railways. It was purely in the language that a train—or for that matter any mode of transportation—was described that it either became a mobile boudoir or a prickly bullock cart.

Trains are not a brisk affair. Nor are they continuously strenuous. There are stories and legends and labours that form the sleepers of the tracks. There are battalions of unflowery perspirers that render our railway experiences luxuriant. With each turn and every change of track, history is wound back and forth. Each railway journey offsets human time and chronology. Why should not the language of a railway book pay homage to the institution, the times and eras in which its changing narratives belong?

The present book tries to reveal, as Pearson’s biography of Wilde did, the human aspects of its protagonist. In each of the stories and histories that follow, the Indian Railways are a character. As such, they deserve a personal biography, of which nothing exists so far. There are of course numerous histories—political, economic, and even popular—which have been painstakingly written on the subject. Ian J. Kerr, Marian Aguiar, R.K. Bhandari, Laura Bear and many others have tried to explore India’s railway history through several lenses. While Bear is an anthropologist, Bhandari was a senior-railwayofficial-turned-historian. Neither of them—though staggering their works are—was concerned with literature or films that depicted the railways. Kerr and Aguiar have dealt with both, but not as extensively as The Great Indian Railways. To be fair to them, neither of them had great access to the Indian languages. Here, the question of Indian brings me to a disclaimer of my own. In many ways I too am disqualified from talking about all the representations that have been produced on the Indian Railways. Apart from English, I am familiar with only two other Indian languages—Hindi-Urdu and Bangla. While there is a reference to Tamil cinema, it is not my original comment. Like in others’ writings, this too has been borrowed from elsewhere. So, to say that this book is the first exhaustive biography of the Indian Railways would be a great overstatement. Such a thing can only exist as an encyclopaedia in several volumes.

It was my desire to recreate the railways as a talking human presence—not simply the passive transporter of passengers and goods. It is more than possible that many interesting and rather obvious instances of railway anecdotes or representation have skipped my notice. Or, I have avoided using them in this book. I have done so either out of concern for an equitable distribution of texts and ideas in each chapter, or because I did not quite know what to say about them that might not already strike the reader in the process of reading this book. There are instances of some recent films, or even literary examples, which the reader might like to point out as being absent here. It would delight me, nonetheless, to see them carrying out such an exercise, and interpret those texts in their personal analyses.

And then, there are several others—artifacts, legends, histories, mansucripts, and other memorabilia—that I have, quite obviously, missed, or have just happened to chance upon. An instance would be a letter written by one Okhil Chandra Sen to the divisional railway office at Sahibganj, in 1909. I had almost overlooked it until very recently when the artifact returned into circulation, from newspapers to text-messages, and it seemed— in a comical way—too historically momentous to ignore. It is falsely supposed that this letter led to the building of the first lavatories in the native sections of the Indian Railways—the second- and the third-classes.

As most instructive anecdotes, I consider this apocryphal, without hankering after its veracity. But Okhil babu’s writing does seem to be a very credible voiceover for the otherwise silent railcars.

I am arrive by passenger train Ahmedpur station and my belly is too much swelling with jackfruit. I am therefor went to privy. Just I doing the nuisance that guard making whistle blow for train to go off and I am running with lotah in one hand and dhoti in the next when I am fall over and expose all shocking to man and female women on platform. I am got leaved Ahmedpur station.

This too much bad, if passenger go to make dung that dam guard not wait train minutes for him. I am therefor pray your honour to make big fine on that guard for public sake. Otherwise I am making big report to papers.

Okhil babu makes no bones about his fascination with the English language and English manners. At the same time, he signs his letter as ‘humble servant,’ in the manner of M.K.

Gandhi. The awkward writing must have had its own rewards. If nothing at all, it must have bemused the divisional manager into action, if the legend of Okhil Sen may be believed for the sake of mythology.

Binoo John, in his book, Entry from Backside Only makes an interesting discussion of, what he calls, ‘Gazette English,’ in relation to the Indian Railways. Legislations, infrastructural developments, and the language in which they were to be promulgated were all very bureaucratic, in colonial India. No opportunity was lost to inflate clauses and prepositions—not one sentence was spared where ten could suffice. The problems that the petitions and letters presented and argued, ranged from hygiene and cleanliness in the railways to the removal of human refuse from the stations. There is almost no evidence in this kind of literature that the discussants are even aware how scatological the whole affair might have seemed to postcolonial readers. They simply go about their business, adapting the language at their disposal to the railway scenes and situations they are faced with. Take, for example, a letter dated May 4, 1876, where the writer argues for two carts instead of one to carry away human refuse.

There should be two carts for night soil instead of one as the new spot for trenches is far off. The cartmen now have their cart standing on the road to fetch the refuse and dirty water and sometimes the bullock start on their own accord along drains and fences, damaging the cart which have therefore to be constantly repaired…

It must be considered that Okhil babu’s was not the only kind of hybridity in place. The British and the Indians were both colonial subjects. Colonial hybridity was an asset to either class. The railways too were a hybrid institution. At a later point in the book, I discuss the notion of hybridity and mimicry of the colonial subject. But whether Okhil babu’s language truly signifies a language of the Indian Railways is something I leave to the judgment of the readers who have managed to press on till the end.

Also, I leave this as a rare case of a reference going uncited in this work. Meanwhile, like a compliant student, otherwise, of the works of the writers mentioned above, and innumerable others, I have borrowed from each of them, indiscriminately and unabashedly. As Pearson says of the books on Wilde that preceded his, I too ‘have done more than touch this material’ pre-existing mine. ‘I have grabbed it,’ and embraced it to the core.

* Some readers of this portion have ironically forced me to include a footnote—an undesirable over-explanation—in a chapter where none was intended originally. A part of this incident really happened at the Mughal Sarai Railway Station, which is about 12 miles from the Benares. The miniature toy-train was indeed at the Benares station, where we were awaiting the arrival of one of my uncles. From there, we went to Mughal Sarai, which in fact is the proper stoppage for the Kalka Mail. As one of my impatient critics recently pointed, the Kalka Mail has never passed through the Benares Railway Station in its hundred-and-fifty-year-old history. However, he had quite conveniently ignored two things. One was— as may be self-explanatory—that the incident happened around a five-year-old child, whose recollection after twenty-five years may well have undergone some psychogeographical transformations. The second, Mughal Sarai and Benares are sister towns, and their railway stations are often considered extensions of each other, even today, among the towns’ older generations.

INTRODUCTION

Of Chai, Restaurant Cars, Lamb Curry and Wheeler & Co.

My love is as swift as the vapor of dew

At her feet is Eden’s rendezvous

From tendril to tendril, from bower to bower I seek in the gust, her throbbing trail.¹

‘Railways may do for India,’ wrote Edward Arnold in 1865, ‘what dynasties have never done—what the genius of Akbar the Magnificent could not effect by government, nor the cruelty of Tipu Sahib by violence—they may make India a nation.’²

Clearly the foundations of the railways were pitted against tradition, supposed bigotry and older forms of imperialism—in the guise of nation-building. How efficiently the railways did, or did not, nationalise India has occasionally come under scrutiny. But what has been of perennial interest, in the life of the Indian Railways, is the wealth of culture, literature, cinema—in short, representational media—that have frequently conjured the railways.

What gave Indians their first collective wisdom of a nation were its railways—an institution otherwise meant to civilise the country’s noble savages. Whoever possessed the railways, would henceforth possess India, for ‘the Railways had come to possess India and to make her hugeness graspable.’³ But it was only after a neat fifty-years of Victorian loot following the direction of the railroads, that the colony truly realised its potential to nationhood—in its unity of economic and political abjection. Of course the railways helped to imagine the boundaries of a new nation. But they also led to the depletion of natural and human resources from its vast landscape. The railways were primarily tools of economic exploitation and policing. As Hyde Clark, an eminent railway historian and economist of the nineteenth century observed, ‘the excitement of railway construction in India, will, of itself, cause an increased demand for English goods, so that at each step one operation will be found harmonising and cooperating with another, like a well-planned and highly finished train of wheel work.’⁴

Even then, modern life without the markers of railways would indeed be miserable. So many literary and cultural representations of nationhood would have been lost without the railways. Consider what Russel McDougall wrote of the railway representations if they suddenly