In The Great Indian Railways, Arup Chatterjee recounts the romantic Indian's fascination with trains and all they stand for
Arup Chatterjee's book, The Great Indian Railways, is not just about Indian Railways. It is about how the railways are deeply embedded in the psyche of the Indian mind and how railway premises in India are a reflection of the society. Among the several books presently on the subject in India, some on history, some specialised, statistical, anecdotal, archival documentation or simply photographic, this book, now into its second edition, fills up the vacuum of railways' cultural contribution to the society by comprehensively chronologically documenting how the railways, as the author puts it "with or without our knowing, have come to define manifold aspects of Indian culture".
And it begins with a perfect example on how one of the author's grandfathers as someone originally from Benares — although a Bengali — used to keep his homesickness away, simply by visiting the railway station. "During his lunch hour, each day, he would visit Howrah Station and wait for the train from Benares, if only to catch of a glimpse of the people arriving from his hometown and return with a spring in his step."
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Starting chronologically from 1843 to the 1990s, the six chapters, with the prologue and introduction, take one on a kaleidoscopic journey of literature, life, reel and real stories, also weaving in numerous events as India moved from the times of the East India Company to the world wars, its fight for independence and from Lal Bahadur Shastri to Dr E Sreedharan. While on this journey, the author writes of people and nuggets of history, including the genesis of tea and railways, the association of Wheeler and Higginbotham's book stalls and the railway catering controversy of the 1950s.
When I say the book takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey of literature and films, it includes not just fiction, but major works from the era as the chapters move ahead, right from various archival railway accounts by early planners, travelogues to the slices of fictional train journeys in popular works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and RK Narayan and even Shah Rukh Khan. The mention of the travels of Sherlock Holmes on those old-English teakwood trains pulled by steam puffing engines, to the quaint Malgudi station that gives us a sense of isolation, and numerous little railway plots in Bollywood and Hollywood — all take the narrative ahead.
Chapters like Tracks of Panic (1843-1883) discusses the debates and plans of Englishmen who introduced the railways into India, the political compulsions and the trade requirements; and The Longest Bridge to the Third
Class Phenomenon (1907-1947) is about expansion, and imagining new routes. Had World War I
not interrupted plans of the
South Indian Railway, it would have built its proposed 19-km-long bridge all the way to Sri Lanka — much like Ram Setu in Indian mythology — between Dhanushkodi and Sri Lanka. The author concludes by describing how the Indian Railways — which have since the late nineties started killing the nostalgic narrow-gauge lines — live on into an age of its irrelevance.
The mention of the travels of Sherlock Holmes on those old-English teakwood trains pulled by steam puffing engines, to the quaint Malgudi station that gives us a sense of isolation, and numerous little railway plots in Bollywood and Hollywood — all take the narrative ahead
The Great Indian Railways has been published by Bloomsbury and is priced at Rs 388. Available on Amazon.in
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