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