RAILWAYS & THE RAJ
HOW THE AGE OF STEAM TRANSFORMED INDIA
Atlantic Books, 363pp, £25, Oldie price £16.33 inc p&p ‘All human life is here’ used to be the
News of the World’s boast. It could also serve as a motto for Indian Railways, as anyone who has ever experienced its teeming, caravanserai-like stations would surely attest. ‘And who better to chronicle Indian Railways,’ asked Peter Carty in the Spectator, ‘than Christian Wolmar, a railway obsessive’ whose eleventh book on rail and its history this is. The
Financial Times’s Andrew Martin agreed. ‘Wolmar’s many railway histories bring a crystalline clarity – and human interest – to bear in place of what might be called railway engineer’s prose.’
Not that you can ignore the nuts and bolts. With 75,000 miles of track, well over a million employees and 25 million passengers a day to service, Indian Railways faces the same scale of challenges as the NHS. Its inception dates back 150 years to the Raj. While the Romans built roads, the British built railways. And with the same end in mind: control. As Andrew Martin noted: ‘For the nationalists, the railways represented imperialism on wheels.’ They did their best to ensure that the trains did not run on time, by planting cows on the line or promiscuously pulling the communication cord.
But when the wheels came off the Raj, the trains and the many different companies that owned them were not derailed but nationalised. And if, as Peter Carty suggested, ‘buying a ticket without assistance remains a rash undertaking’, he thought ‘the railways are still the most enjoyable way to travel in India’. Andrew Martin quoted Wolmar: ‘Railways and India are a good fit.’ Adding, ‘And he is a good fit as their chronicler.’