Railways and the Raj Read online

  Dedicated to Deborah Maby who has put up with me in good times and bad, and is the best possible travel and life companion.

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Foreword by Monisha Rajesh

  Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  1. A Railway for India

  2. Building for India

  3. Controlling the Railways

  4. Starving Off the Line and Fighting On It

  5. Life on the Lines

  6. Working on the Line

  7. Not Always Loved

  8. Establishment of the Railway

  9. Towards Independence

  10. Indian at Last

  11. … And Today

  Select Bibliography

  References

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  Picture Section

  By the same Author

  Copyright

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  SECTION ONE

  Lord Dalhousie (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  Alice Tredwell (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers)

  Inauguration of the East Indian Railway to Burdwan, 1855 (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)

  Construction of the railway through the ghats (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers /Mary Evans)

  Reversing station (Hulton Archive /Getty Images)

  Empress Bridge (De Agostini /Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Getty Images)

  Bridge collapse, 1863 (British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/ Bridgeman Images)

  Lahore station (© Corbis/ Getty Images)

  Victoria Station (SSPL /Getty Images)

  Bengal–Nagpur Railway worksite, 1890 (DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University)

  Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis / Getty Images)

  Khyber Pass Railway (Peter Jordan /Alamy Stock Photo)

  Rawalpindi station, 1910 (Mary Evans /Grenville Collins Postcard Collection)

  Cotton bales being loaded at Akola station in Maharastra, c. 1930 (SSPL /Getty Images)

  Victoria Station booking hall, c. 1930 (SSPL /Getty Images)

  Gandhi (Dinodia Photos /Getty Images)

  Nationalist protesters blockading the railway, 1945 (Universal History Archive /UIG via Getty Images)

  Indian refugees during the Partition of India and Pakistan, 1947 (Bettman /Getty Images)

  SECTION TWO

  Indian State Railways posters (Swim Ink 2, LLC /Corbis /Getty Images)

  Indian Railways logo (india view /Alamy Stock Photo)

  Indian railway scenes from the 1980s by Chris Gammell (Courtesy of Bernard Gambrill and Roy Dension)

  Locomotive on the Konkan railway (Dinodia Photos /Alamy Stock Photo)

  Nilgiri Mountain Railway (IndiaPictures /UIG via Getty Images)

  Mumbai commuter line (Pal Pillai /AFP /Getty Images)

  Accident at Kasara near Mumbai, September 2012 (Mahendra Parikha / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

  Cement bags being transported (Prashanth Vishwanathan /Bloomberg via Getty Images)

  Hawkers at Agra station (Robert Nickelsberg /Photonica World /Getty Images)

  Crowded train in New Delhi (Manan Vatsyayana /AFP /Getty Images)

  Protesters at Borivli station (Prasad Gori /Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

  Commuters at Chennai station (Alexander Mazurkevich /Shutterstock.com)

  Rush hour outside Sealdah station in Kolkata (Steve Raymer /National Geographic Creative /Bridgeman Images)

  Pictures of the author’s trip round India, February 2016 (Courtesy of Deborah Mabey)

  MAPS

  Indian Railway Network, 1871

  Indian Railway Network, pre-1947

  Indian Railway Network, 2017

  Great Indian Peninsula Railway, 1909

  North Western State Railway, 1942

  (NB: Place names on maps refer to the contemporary versions.)

  Indian Railway Network, 1871

  Indian Railway Network, pre-1947

  Indian Railway Network, 2017

  Great Indian Peninsula Railway, 1909

  North Western State Railway, 1942

  FOREWORD

  SINCE INDIA’S FIRST train clanked and puffed its way along the 21-mile track from Bombay to Thane in 1853, Indian Railways has captivated writers, charmed filmmakers, and fired the bellies of historians eager to trace the tracks back to the very first sleeper laid. Lovingly known as the Lifeline of a Nation, India’s railways are the arteries that keep the country’s heart beating. So much more than a simple method of transport, the railways are a microcosm of Indian society, carrying more than 25 million passengers every day, blasting through cities, crawling up mountains and skimming along coasts.

  To write about India’s railways is a challenge as vast, sprawling and complex as the network itself, which I discovered in 2010 when I spent five months travelling the length and breadth of the country to research my travelogue, Around India in 80 Trains. As a British Indian I was reminded on a daily basis by my fellow passengers that these trains had been the brainchild of the Brits, but to wind in the history and politics behind the birth of the railways would have doubled the length of my book, and I knew it was best left to accomplished railway experts, like Christian Wolmar, to accept the gargantuan task.

  The horrors of empire are left blank in the history books of British schools, and the trope ‘but we gave you the railways!’ is swift to emerge in discussions on legacies of the British Raj. Ignoring the fact that many countries developed a railway system without the devastation of colonization, apologists for empire remain blinkered to the British motivation. As India marks seventy years of Independence, this much-needed history seeks to demolish a number of infuriating myths. Wolmar expounds, with aplomb, how the building of the railways was hardly an act of benevolence towards the Indian people, more a fast-track plan to govern more efficiently, facilitate the plunder of loot, and line their pockets at the expense of the Indian taxpayer who footed the bill for the railways’ construction. But we also discover how Indians learnt to harness the railways and weaponize them against the very people who had put them in place.

  Eschewing the dryness of other books on the subject, Wolmar’s historical detail is pumped with colour and life. He recounts how the first trains were viewed by some as an ‘iron demon’ driven by magic and powered by children and young couples buried under the sleepers to provide sustenance for the ‘fire chariot’. We travel deep into the mountainous ghats where 6,000 daily explosions often sent workers tumbling into the ravines below, watch troops being evacuated during the Second World War, and gain a fly-on-the-wall look at Gandhi’s relationship with the railways. Tracing the evolution of Indian Railways, Wolmar rightly caps off his exploration of their role in today’s modern age by buying a ticket to ride along the Konkan Railway, the missing link that the British were too frightened to attempt building. Flanked by the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, this 460-mile feat of engineering excellence was left in the hands of Indian railway workers who completed construction of the line in 1998. And if we’re ever to trust a writer on India’s railways, it should be one who isn’t afraid to sit in the open doorway of a moving train, chai in hand, watching the country roll past in all its glory.

  Monisha Rajesh, author of Around India in 80 Trains

  INTRODUCTION

  AS WITH SEVERAL of my railway histories, Railways & the Raj is an attempt to set out a complex story in a clear and simple way, which few other authors have attempted. There are surprisingly few books about Indian railway history and none have covered the story of their creation, their influence and their enduring
legacy in one volume. Railways & the Raj is consequently an overview of a railway system that merits far more study and analysis than it receives. I have tried to touch on all the major events and the various ways in which the railway has been important for the subcontinent, but inevitably much has been left out.

  India is a vast nation and it has seen huge political transformation since the advent of the railways, changing from a country controlled by a company to being Britain’s most important colony and eventually an independent state. In the process, India has lost parts of its territory, which left me with something of a dilemma over what to include and what to leave out. My compromise has been to include the story of railways now in Pakistan and Bangladesh while they were part of India, but to mention them only briefly in the sections about post-Independence India.

  I have offered brief explanations of general historical background because the story of the railways is so strongly intertwined with the history of the country. Indeed, while railways played a key part in the history of nations covered by my other books, such as those on American railroads or the Transsiberian, few people could challenge the notion that India is the nation where the railways have been most influential in historical terms. But, after being so bound up with India for more than a year during the course of writing this book, I may be biased.

  Many place names have officially changed since Independence, however, I have used the contemporary version throughout the book in order to fit in with the events being described. Therefore, for events up to Independence, old versions of names are used, while new ones are only used after the change had been made (which happened at different times for various places). For example, Bombay is referred to until the book reaches the mid-1990s, when its name was changed to Mumbai, which it is called thereafter, and that is reflected in the index. Some names have been changed merely to reflect the use of Indian English, or sometimes to reflect the local language, and in these cases the more modern spelling has usually been used everywhere in the book. When states are referred to, the modern names have been used throughout because they have been added to help the reader locate the town or city on a modern map. Therefore, Karnataka is used rather than Mysore, and Tamil Nadu rather than Madras State. This process is still taking place: for example, the state of Odisha has been known as Orissa only since 2011. Apologies for any inconsistencies.

  Muslims were largely known as Mahommedans in the nineteenth century and again there were numerous possible spellings.

  There are a few linguistic and cultural oddities, too. India uses two numerical terms that are unique to the subcontinent: a ‘lakh’ is 100,000 and a ‘crore’ 10 million – consequently ‘million’ is rarely used. The currency is now just rupees, which presently hover around 90 to the pound, and there are 100 paise to the rupee. Under the British, there was a complex system of rupees, divided into 4 annas, which were further divided into 12 pies (or sometimes 4 paisa, not to be confused with the present paisa since there were 64 paise in a rupee rather than as present, 100). As a result there were 192 pies in a rupee until India decimalized in 1957.

  Another possible area of confusion is over who ran India. In the nineteenth century, India was ruled by a Governor-General appointed by the British government, but the title became Viceroy and Governor-General from 1858, usually shortened to Viceroy.

  The structure of the book is largely chronological, though when a few themes are covered, there is inevitably a bit of jumping about. Railways & the Raj is something of a primer which I hope will inspire readers to travel on Indian trains. That is an unforgettable experience and the railway journey my partner, Deborah Maby, and I took in early 2016 was very helpful in providing the backdrop. Consequently, the book ends with a description of the first section of our trip partly written by her. Despite the recent surge in road construction and the introduction of low-cost airlines, the very heavily used railways remain the backbone of the Indian transport system.

  Train travel in India is not an easy experience, even for the Westerner with ample funds, but do not be put off. First, you have to book the journey, which can be done online via the Indian Railways website; this, however, is full of confusing information and unnecessary complications. Moreover, Indian websites are quite often unobtainable, in my experience, as it takes a long time to connect.

  In London, there is a special agency which deals with Indian Railways and can work out the route for you – so a bow to Shankar at S. D. Enterprises in Wembley, who sold me the India railpasses, a real bargain at just £147 for twenty-one days of second-class AC travel (just double that for first-class AC), but also, crucially, booked all the trains, which is the tough bit.

  When you get to India, even if you have not booked online, you need to confirm by entering the PNR – Passenger Number Registration – for each leg of the journey into the system before you travel, a process that is made more tedious by having to relog on to the site every time by filling in a Captcha form. That, however, is the easy bit. The information about your coach and berth number only becomes available on the website a few hours before departure, although it is sometimes posted up at the station on old-fashioned computer paper an hour or so before the train leaves. But not always. At Kolkata, despite queuing for half an hour and only reaching the ticket office by barging my way to the front, which is the sole way to get there in India, the woman behind the counter refused to accept my PNR number, even when I pushed it through to her on a piece of paper. It was only when a couple of fellow travellers loudly complained that she eventually entered the number in her computer and provided the carriage and berth number. There was no apology. Otherwise it would have been guesswork to find the right carriage on a train that was half a kilometre long.

  Just to add to the complexity, the various zones of Indian Railways differ in their approach over food provision. On some trains there are endless chains of seemingly officially sanctioned sellers, offering almost as varied a selection of food and drink as their counterparts on the platform. The best is the chai seller who for a few rupees will pour out a small cup of chai, a tiny sugary milky brew that in some parts of the country is heavily spiced with masala. On other trains, there is nothing on offer. The long-distance trains usually, but not always, provide meals to passengers in first and second class, consisting of a byriani, for 75 rupees, or rice with a selection of moderately spicy dishes for 120. It is always edible and sometimes delicious, depending on the skill of the pantry chef.

  On other trains, there are no sellers or even meals provided and the only opportunity for sustenance is to buy food from the platform traders, who, despite serving a Westerner who clearly had more money than they would ever have, never attempted to cheat me. The main problem is change, as handing over a 100-rupee note causes consternation, and a 500-rupee note – made illegal since my trip – was impossible to offload on the platform.

  Sanitary conditions, too, can be inconsistent. On the train between Chennai and Kolkata, there was, again, a steady stream of cleaners who would either sweep or spray disinfectant which they wiped up with a filthy mop, ensuring its effect was negligible. On others, there would only be a fellow occasionally dropping in to empty the bucket used as a dustbin, or, quite possibly, no one would turn up at all.

  Despite all this, for the most part the trains deliver you on time – and certainly, given their cheapness, on budget – and in one piece, as their safety record has improved immeasurably in recent years. The key is, as those overused slogans suggest, to keep calm and enjoy the journey. Things may indeed go wrong, but the experience, in a world that has become all too predictable and over-conscious of risk, is what matters. So this book may be a history of Indian railways, but it is also an injunction to go there and enjoy the ride. There is no better way to see India, and there is no better country in the world to explore. Few are disappointed.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  MY THANKS TO Rajendra Aklekar for showing me Mumbai’s stations and helping in many other ways, including reading the
draft; Bernard Gambrill and Peter Lewis for reading the draft; Rupert Brennan Brown (once); Ian Kerr; Ram Chandra Acharya; David Elworthy; Roy Denison; and James Nightingale at Atlantic Books, my faithful publishers. A special thanks to Paul Waters at the British Overseas Railways Historical Trust (which, incidentally, needs bigger premises) for allowing me to use the library extensively and opening it up for me several times. And of course to my partner, Deborah Maby, who makes the lonely days writing worthwhile. Apologies to anyone left out and of course all errors are my responsibility. If you find any mistakes or blatant omissions, do not hesitate to contact me via my website, www.christianwolmar.co.uk, and do follow me on Twitter @christianwolmar

  Christian Wolmar

  April 2017

  ONE

  A RAILWAY FOR INDIA

  THE BRITISH NEVER really conquered India. But the railways did. Remarkably, the British takeover of India was a commercial operation, carried out by the East India Company in conjunction, at various times, with the British government and its army.

  The East India Company first arrived in India as early as 1600 but was for much of its first century what it said on the tin, a trading company interested in profit principally from cloth and spices, and later in a wider variety of produce such as silk, tea and opium. Gradually, though, the Company became something more: an overt weapon of imperialism. By the mid-eighteenth century, ‘company’ troops were fighting the French for control of India and over the next decades, through a mixture of treaties with local maharajahs and wars against both local and European opponents, the Company ruled over large swathes of its territory. There were, however, still large chunks, such as Hyderabad and parts of the vast Deccan plain, that were under the control of local maharajahs, and Portugal and France still had coastal interests.