RAILWAY TRACKS AND MILESTONES
The first train ride in India wasn’t the celebrated Bori Bunder to Thane run of 1853; it was in 1837, on the Red Hill Railroad that operated in Chintadripet, near Chennai. So we learn from Indian Railways, whose authors met on a Railways committee and later found themselves commissioned to write an ‘anecdotal history’ of the Indian Railways, from the 1830s to Independence. Early debates, reproduced from archives, are particularly absorbing. Would combining irrigation and transport through waterways be more appropriate for India? Would Indians take to train travel, given their divisions? How should the railways be paid for?
Over the next century, dozens of railway companies were formed, princely states laid their own tracks and these routes were eventually consolidated into the Indian Railways. The book runs briskly through railway gauges, the naming of locomotives, tunnels that don’t meet in the middle, a double murder on a train, A.H. Wheeler and, of course, Gandhi, but slows down at times, as with an 11page table on ‘Evolution of Policies and Committees’. Written as part of a series—The Story of Indian Business—it is particularly informative and accessible on the economic history of the Indian Railways.
“To visualise the Indian Railways in representation has probably become more gratifying than experiencing a journey in its compartments,” says Arup K. Chatterjee in The Purveyors of Destiny. The book is a profile of the railways through its appearance in culture—books, travel accounts, architecture, cinema, music, food, tea and even the texture of our nostalgia. It conjures up a rail-window view of that period of Indian history: the railways as a mark of British superiority, as a line of defence after the 1857 uprising, as a chain-pulling, fund-collecting arena for the Independence movement, as a vehicle for horrific images of Partition and then as a source of national pride. The analysis is at times heavy-handedly academic—a lot of reification and metonymy—and at times delightfully revelatory. Take the idea of the Pamban bridge, at the southernmost tip of the mainland. From 1914 to 2010, it was India’s longest sea bridge, built under the British, but with Indian labour. Chatterjee says it “recapitulated the building of the Ram Setu”. So, in a way, this modern bridge always existed, making it an easy national symbol.
Whoever built it, we know who rebuilt the Pamban bridge after it was washed away in 1964. It was a team led by E. Sreedharan, civil engineer, technocrat and seemingly the only person in India to finish projects on time and within budget—and now the subject of a biography by Rajendra Aklekar. The symbolic value of Pamban bridge meant that there was immense pressure to rebuild it quickly. Sreedharan was summoned from a holiday and given three months—not enough time to fabricate the steel girders required. He decided to reuse the old girders that had sunk in the sea. The efforts of local fishermen and Mapilla Khalasi boat builders and specialised equipment designed by Sreedharan saw the bridge rebuilt in 46 days.
India’s Railway Man takes us through Sreedharan’s other successes—the Konkan Railway, the Calcutta, Delhi and Kochi metros—and introduces us to the man and his work ethic. Aklekar is self-effacing as a biographer and readily hands over parts of the book: first-person accounts by Sreedharan; a note from his daughter; 20 pages on Sreedharan by his spiritual guru; praise and criticism by his colleagues. Like a railway compartment, the book accommodates many voices.
THE FIRST TRAIN RIDE IN INDIA WAS IN 1837, ON THE RED HILL RAILROAD THAT OPERATED IN CHINTADRIPET, NEAR CHENNAI