No Indian Railway = No India?
Imagining the Nation
In the mid-1880s the Indian political figure Madhav Rao (successively diwan of the princely states of Travancore, 1858-1872, Indore, 1873-1875, and Baroda), exclaimed: "What a glorious change the railway has made to old and long neglected India." He asserted that "if India is to become a homogeneous nation, and is ever to achieve solidarity, it must be by means of Railways as a means of transport, and by means of the English language as a medium of communication". Roughly a century later in the 1980s, the late Madhavrao Scindia, then Minister of State for Railways, wrote: "Apart from indicating the milestones of its progress from Bori Bunder to the Metro Railway at Calcutta, from a colonial instrument to being a major artery of national life today, the history of our Railways will also depict the romantic story of our national striving for economic self-sufficiency, and the birth and growth of modern India". More recently, the homepage of Indian Railways' Internet site proclaimed proudly that "IR" brought people together.
What Madhav Rao believed was happening, Madhavrao a century later accepted as a fait accompli, and the powerful techno-bureaucrats of IR happily embraced in their never-ending struggle to justify IR's claim to a substantial share of the national budget. The railways, India's pre-eminent form of mass transportation, had contributed significantly to the creation and integration of the Indian nation. This is a claim, suitably qualified and nuanced, that finds support among more scholarly writers, and which is sympathetically endorsed here. Indeed, some historians have argued that without the development of a large network of railways, there would have been no India as we know it; in effect, no railways, no India. Perhaps so, or perhaps the assertion is misleading since the making of modern India would have unfolded very differently in the absence of railways, though it still would have unfolded.
Tracks to nationhood
It is clear that the railways were enormously consequential in the formation of the modern Indian state and nation in their present configuration. The widespread network of dependable, all-weather transportation provided by the railways did integrate aspects of Southasian life within regions and across the breadth of the Subcontinent. One example of this integration is found in the work of the economic historian John Hurd, who demonstrates the central role the railways played in fostering the emergence of national markets in food grains, such as wheat, rice and jowar, and non-food crops, such as cotton. This process accelerated from the early 1870s onward as the railway network expanded from 7,678 route kilometres in 1871 to 43,443 in 1905.
The railways of India were, and are, a large-scale technical system. The pa ticular importance of a large-scale technical system – the source of its generalised importance well beyond the confines of what it is the large-scale system does (e.g., railways transport passengers and goods; electrical grids transmit a form of energy; telephone systems communicate the spoken and written word) – comes from the capacity of such a system to facilitate or sustain the functioning of many other systems. The railways of colonial India were infra-structural and structural. They became a giant enterprise but they also facilitated, sustained and linked much else, not only the commodity markets so single-mindedly studied by neoclassical economists, but many aspects of India's political economy and socio-cultural life.
Pilgrimage, one of the oldest and most practiced aspects of Southasian socio-cultural life, was deeply affected by the speedy, mass transportation railways afforded. Railways, it can be said, add both mass and the masses to the practice of pilgrimage. More and more people – far more than the substantial numbers that already engaged in pilgrimage before the railway age – undertook pilgrimages, thanks to the railways.
Because of the greater ease and security of railway travel, many of these new pilgrims were women (regardless of the deplorable state of many pilgrim trains in the colonial era). Other additions came from the poorer strata, the masses, of Indian society for whom the quicker journey by train made pilgrimage possible in the interstices between demands for their labour. This became a widespread phenomenon that saw increases in numbers, not only at the periodic Kumbha Melas when millions were in attendance, but also at places like Tirupati or Tarakeswar to which, day in and day out, year after year, more pilgrims came.
Railways came early to the Indian subcontinent- much earlier than to other parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. By 1901, India had the world's fourth longest railway network (although exact ranking can be disputed) as measured by route miles in operation, a ranking the country still holds. Route mileage continued to increase and reached an impressive 72,002 km in 1947, the first year in which over one billion passengers were carried, with each passenger travelling, on average, 57 km (total passenger kilometres exceeded 67 billion). In the same year, the last of the colonial era, net tonne kilometres of goods carried exceeded 41 billion. In 1993-94, some 45 years into independence, total passenger kilometres totalled 296 billion and total tonne-kilometres, 257 billion.
Colonial Birthright
The British realised early on the economic, military and administrative benefits railways would bring in strengthening colonial rule in India. Indeed, for many mid-19th century Britons, the railways were believed to be central to a progressive, British-imposed transformation of India. Thus, even before the advent of direct colonial rule, the decision was made in 1849 to build railways in India. The first short line, Bombay (Bori Bunder) to Thana, opened soon after in 1853. The influential and powerful Governor-General Lord Dalhousie (1848-1856), who led India's colonially-inspired leap into the railway age, claimed credit for having let loose in India the "great engines of social improvement, which sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations – mean Railways, uniform postage, and the Electric Telegraph." Ironically, many Indians did agree, then as they do today, with the great colonial proconsul.
MK Gandhi, of course, disagreed with this assessment, arguing that railways "propagate evil". He wrote in a memorable sentence that, "Good travels at a snail's pace – it can, therefore have little to do with the railways". The much-traveled Bholanauth Chunder rode a train out of Howrah in October of 1860 and soon after wrote that Hindus "look upon the railways as a marvel and a miracle – a novel incarnation for the regeneration of Bharat-versh". Something of this transformation, or at least the discourse of progressive transformation and the belief in it, is captured in the postal cover and stamp issued in the early 1950s to commemorate the centenary of railways in India. The postal cover represents a celebratory appropriation of the technological accomplishment of the colonial past to the projects of Indian national modernity – "the birth and growth of modern India" in Madhavrao Scindia's phrase.
There was nothing altruistic about the British imposition of a colonial railway system on Southasia, the British discourse of 'progress' notwithstanding. The railways were an instrument, perhaps the central element, of colonial rule and imperial capitalism. Railways strengthened the colonial state. Gandhi saw this more clearly than most, hence his forthright condemnation, but in so doing they facilitated the growth of an Indian state and hence an Indian nation, as they continue to do. An apt statement was made in this regard by the Polish statesman, Count Pilsudski, who said: "Nations do not make states and nationalisms, but the other way around". The two Raos and the IR website may have simplified a complex set of processes, but they were not fundamentally wrong.
Network for a Nation
Until very recent times, railways were the primary vehicle of travel and social communication in India. IR knit India together and made it possible for Indians, in increasing numbers as the years passed, to imagine themselves as a possible unity, a possible nation (The railways played a smaller role in nation-state building processes in post-colonial Pakistan and Bangladesh than in the case of India, although they did assist the cause of Muslim nationalism before 1947 by facilitating travel and communication.)
Economic interchange and social communication, direct and indirect, was enormously increased by the railways. For example, the railway travels of the early opinion-makers reveal that they were among the first to imagine the national community. Diwan Madhav Rao's views were indirectly corroborated by the Bengali actress Binodini Das, who felt in the 1870s and 1880s that travel outside of Bengal was like travel to a foreign land. She wrote about the relief she and her colleagues felt upon their return home after three months of travelling and performing "in the west" (which meant as far as Lahore), which she described as "foreign lands". Nevertheless, as with the Parsi theatre companies, rail transport helped to create a cross-regional stage for Bengali theatre companies. Much of India slowly became the stage upon which actors, actresses and audiences alike came to play shared parts, as did the 13,839 delegates who attended, largely by train one suspects, the annual meetings of the Indian National Congress between 1892 and 1909.
Information flows are essential to the imagining of the nation. If train travel made face-to-face contact with hitherto distant Indians possible, it also made the critical, on-going, indirect contact provided by the written word possible on a voluminous scale. Newspapers, books, pamphlets and journals were distributed on an increasingly large-scale, both regionally, in the vernacular languages of India (helping to strengthen regionalism), arid crucially, for the nationalist elite, in English, the link language. The railways brought to the emerging national bourgeoisie much of their reading material just as it took them, or their letters, to other parts of India. The British took the distribution of the printed word seriously and continually worried about its potentially seditious effects.
Riding the Rails
However, the rosy, even triumphal, story of the appropriation of the colonial railway system to the projects of national modernity, and the integration that accompanied railway development, should not be confused with the growth of an equality of opportunity for most Indians. The railways of the Subcontinent, colonial and postcolonial, have been and remain instruments of capitalist development: combined yet uneven and unequal development, or what Elizabeth Whitcombe once labelled "expansion and induced imbalance". Development and underdevelopment go hand in hand with capital accumulation in one area, matched by an over-accumulation of labour in another.
Transport systems connect the polar sites of cap1tahst development. Improved transport (including road transport later on) made it easier for capital to obtain and exploit those usually employed as casual labourers – the circulating labour of the intermediate regime between agriculture and capital-intensive industry so well-examined in the writing of the anthropologist Jan Bremen, but whose roots go deep into the colonial railway age. However, labour also rode the rails from the third quarter of the 19th century onward to seek work in the emerging industrial sector of the economy. Men from the countryside of the Western Deccan went to the textile mills of Bombay. Others from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa went to the jute mills of greater Calcutta. Improved transportation integrated labour markets but, of course, that did not mean that labour got a fair share of the value it helped to create. At the beginning of the 21st century, only seven percent of India's labour force is in the so-called organised sector. The intermediate regime still predominates.
The full story of the consequences of the integrative effects of Southasian railways on state strengthening, on the national movement(s) and on subsequent nation-building activities has yet to be written. Academic investigative research must be made which situates the railways within a sequence of communication innovations: the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the bus lorry, the airplane, television and cyber-links. Nonetheless, the railways were and remain at the infrastructural core of what made it possible for the Indian state economy, in colonial times and after 1947, to function as an increasingly integrated entity.
The closing decades of the 20th century saw India move increasingly from rail-dominated transport to road-dominated transport as measured by total passenger kilometres and total tonne-kilometres effected, although much road transport takes place over shorter distances (and is, in terms of India's environmental future, less energy-efficient and more polluting). The railways continue to integrate ever wider areas and do so with greater efficiency. While India has not become the "homogenous" nation that Madhav Rao envisioned more than a century ago, railroads remain part of the critical infrastructure on which the Indian state, nation and economy are built.