Early on in his book, The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey, Amitava Kumar says that the Indian Railways are perhaps the country’s only truly unifying element — more than cinema, more than even cricket. The trains that crisscross the country not only stitch this far-flung land together — they are also part of its cultural zeitgeist, a microcosm in motion of what India is all about at a given point in time.
“If you want an insight into the real India, get on its trains” is a piece of wisdom that has held true from the time Mahatma Gandhi traversed the length and breadth of the country by train after he returned to India in 1915. Inspired by a similar idea, Kumar takes the Himsagar Express from Jammu Tawi to Kanyakumari, hoping to talk to his fellow passengers and ask them questions such as how has India changed since independence, or what does freedom mean to them, or have the achchhe din promised by the current government arrived for them as yet.
In the event, the author, who was born and raised in Bihar and now teaches English at Vassar College in the US, does not get around to posing any of these profound queries. Overwhelmed by dirty toilets and loud fellow travellers engaged in louder TV shows that they watch on their smartphones, Kumar quietly abandons the project over the four-day, 2,335-mile journey. Still, he manages to snatch a few moments of illuminating conversation — with migrant workers from Jharkhand going to the more prosperous states in the south, an elderly couple from Maharashtra who extol the virtues of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and so on.
The Social Life of Indian Trains is a slim volume — more like an expanded essay than a fully-fledged, book-length work. Kumar, a master of spare, elegant prose, moves easily between recollections of the train journeys of his youth and references to the way trains are woven into our history, our culture, our economy, indeed, our very consciousness as Indians. From the trains that bore witness to the bloody carnage during Partition to the train that was set on fire in Godhra in 2002, sparking a murderous spiral of violence in Gujarat, from the gut-wrenching Partition stories by Khushwant Singh (Train to Pakistan) or Bhisham Sahni (Amritsar Aa Gayi Hai) to the romanticism of Apu-Durga seeing a train for the first time in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, from a potted history of the genesis of the Indian Railways to dwelling on the argument as to whether such initiatives by colonial rulers led to further plundering of the colonised, from the trains that peddle Bollywood escapism to the brute reality of disaffected Railway job aspirants torching a train in Bihar in 2022, Kumar cuts a wide, if somewhat thin, swathe to suggest the abiding pervasiveness of trains in Indian life.
Don’t come to this book looking for the energy of, say, Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar. This is a quiet piece of writing, one that stirs memories of the past while attempting to find answers to the present.
Shuma Raha is a journalist and author
The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey
By Amitava Kumar
Aleph
pp. 152; Rs 399
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