FIVE
LIFE ON THE LINES
AS WE HAVE seen, by the turn of the century, the Indian railways were a fiercely complicated and rather incoherent set of lines with a variety of gauges, and a wide range of ownership and operating structures. Dalhousie’s vision of a unified system with a single gauge had been disrupted by subsequent political differences and changes in policy that resulted in the creation of a plethora of companies, ranging from fully state-owned to completely free-standing – though all were obliged to run services in line with government requirements. The system was not the result of a clear strategy on what kind of railway system was best for India. Rather, it was, in modern management speak, suboptimal, as Dalhousie’s vision had been subverted by circumstances and capitalism.
The system’s deficiencies were all too apparent for the growing number of passengers. Their needs were rarely at the forefront of the thinking of the various companies’ directors based in far-distant London, who were solely concerned with the financial bottom line rather than the comfort or needs of their passengers. This was the Victorian era, when parsimony was saintly and profligacy a sin. Right from the outset, Indian train travellers, particularly those travelling in the cheaper classes, felt the impact of that philosophy.
By the end of the century, the Indians had got the railway habit. It had taken a bit of time, however. After almost two decades of existence, the railways carried only 19 million passengers in 1871, but this figure grew more than tenfold by the end of the century. The vast majority of these journeys were in third class, since barely 10 per cent of Indians could afford second or first. While conditions varied somewhat between different companies and routes, by and large in third class ‘their discomforts and indignities exposed them collectively to the intertwined structures of capitalist profit’.1
As in the UK, the promoters of the early lines had expected the railways to be principally freight carriers, hauling raw materials to ports and distributing imported manufactured goods inland. The East India Company had been sceptical of the desire or ability of the impoverished Indian population to travel on the railways and had expressed those doubts publicly, suggesting there would be little business from a population ‘rendered immobile by poverty, a landscape of isolated habitations and religious restrictions’.2 The company was to be proved utterly wrong and even the expectation that religious and cultural issues would deter people from travelling proved misplaced.
At the beginning, curiosity attracted half a million people to travel on the inaugural line between Bombay and Thana in the first year, and some 4 million used the railways in 1860 on what was still a tiny network. There were other promising examples, such as the fact that 300,000 people travelled on trains between Lahore and Amritsar in the year following its opening in early 1862.
However, the early lines were not constructed with the idea of maximizing the number of passengers, but were, as we have seen, built principally to carry freight to and from the ports and to ensure that troops could be mobilized quickly and despatched rapidly to trouble spots. The railways quickly proved their worth in that respect. Kerr mentions that ‘when disturbances led by the Kukas occurred in Punjab in January 1872 … four days were needed to move a mountain battery of artillery, 100 cavalrymen, a regiment of British infantry and a regiment of Gurkhas 161 miles from Delhi to Ambala’.3 While noting that this was rather slow, since there had been a delay caused by a collapsed bridge, by historic standards it was something of a triumph. A much more unequivocally successful and longer use of the railways to deploy troops was in the albeit disastrous Second Afghan War: ‘At the height of deployment, eight troop trains per day carried men with all their guns, supplies, horses, baggage and stores through Punjab.’4
As more lines were completed, the companies realized that they were missing a trick in not providing for India’s growing population. The success on the inaugural lines established the fact that there was a strong demand for rail travel but accommodating it was a task fraught with numerous intractable issues for the railway companies. The first problem was the heterogeneous nature of the Indian population. Not only was there the troubled issue of religion, with the deep divisions between the Muslim and Hindu populations, but there was the even more complex question of caste. Add to this the desire of some sections of the population for women-only carriages and the specific demands of more affluent Indians, and the dilemmas facing the railway operators were all too apparent. The extent to which they needed to accommodate these cultural, social and religious considerations was an issue that would tax many directors’ meetings over the coming decades.
The railways all provided first-, second- and third-class accommodation, and some even had a fourth, ‘coolie’, class intended to attract ‘people seen walking between towns and villages on the public roads and railway tracks’5 (this was clearly not successful, since even today the railway tracks are full of people using them as the shortest route for their journey). Several of the early railways, notably the East Indian and the Great Indian Peninsula, experimented with the provision of open wagons, without seating, for fourth-class travellers, some of whom travelled with their livestock, but it was third class that was used by the vast majority of travellers. Indeed, for the whole colonial period, more than nine out of ten passengers travelled in third class. Later on, an intermediate class emerged between second and third, often as a result of upgrading fourth to third but sometimes as an additional distinction.
The companies were extremely reluctant to break down the provision of accommodation on their trains to meet the demands for separate accommodation for every specific religious group or caste. Not only would providing these facilities be expensive, but they were, rightly, concerned that such separation would make filling up their trains far more difficult. They feared the prospect of Hindus clamouring to get on trains that had lots of empty carriages earmarked for Mahommedans (as they were called at the time) or vice versa.
One early suggestion had been that Europeans would all travel in first class, and then separate sets of accommodation in both first and second class would be offered to Hindus and Muslims, with yet more separate compartments for women. In fact, the first decision which the railways had to make was whether to go for separate compartments, as in the UK, or open carriages like those in the US, where a central passageway allowed passengers to walk along its whole length. In the end, the latter seemed more appropriate for a democratic society of pioneers like the US than for India, given its cultural, social and religious divides, and the Indian railway companies universally chose the compartment structure.
Having compartments did not, however, solve the difficulties over allocation of space. The railway companies initially provided compartments allocated on the basis of class, gender and race but not caste. There were first- and second-class carriages which were often, but by no means always, divided into carriages for Europeans and Indians, and European women. Third class was assumed to be entirely for Indians, though in fact some poorer Europeans used it, with some companies providing separate compartments for women.
The disparity in standards was enormous, far more marked even than in the class-ridden UK, and reflected the different worlds in which Indians and Europeans lived. According to Laura Bear, the author of a book on the social implications of early Indian railway development, ‘First-class carriages were lavishly upholstered like Victorian drawing rooms with beds that pulled down, their own bathing facilities and a small room for servants.’6 In fact, ‘so grandiose were the furnishings of second class carriages with their wicker and cane seating panels’ that she reckons even second class was better than anything provided in the UK. Samuel L. Clemens (better known by his nom de plume, Mark Twain), an experienced traveller who toured extensively round India in 1896, was delighted with his accommodation: ‘On each side of the car, and running fore and aft, was a broad leather-covered sofa – to sit on in the day and sleep on at night. Over each sofa hung, by straps, a wide, flat, leather-covered shelf – to sleep on. In the daytime you can hitch it up against the wall, out of the way – and then you have a big unencumbered and most comfortable room to spread out in.’ He concluded that first-class Indian accommodation was the best of any luxury trains in the world: ‘No car in any country is quite its equal for comfort (and privacy).’7
No such joy for his fellow travellers. The contrast with third class, used, as mentioned before, by 90 per cent – or more on many railways – of travellers, who, according to Mark Twain, ‘were packed and crammed into cars that held each about fifty’,8 could not have been greater. While a few poor whites were forced to venture into third class, they were a rarity; the vast majority of its occupants were Indian and the conditions they endured were a reflection of the hierarchies of the colonial system. By the turn of the century, the average Indian train carried just one first-class passenger (suburban trains had no first class, which rather reduces that average), five in second class, eleven in intermediate and 187 in third. Those proportions would, by and large, remain the same up to Independence in 1947.
Third class, thanks to sheer numbers, was the money spinner for the railway companies but that was not reflected in the provision they made for the different classes. An assessment in 1894 by Horace Bell, the consulting engineer for railways, quoted a manager who believed ‘it would pay him to give every first-class passenger twenty rupees to stay away’.9 It was not like today’s airlines which make their money out of their premium-class passengers. On the contrary, the luxurious facilities offered in the top two classes were expensive to provide but used by a tiny minority. One could argue that it was precisely because the conditions in third class were so cramped and the facilities so basic (or non-existent) that it was so profitable, but, in fact, there would still have been ample money to be made had the railway companies spent substantially more on making life just a bit more tolerable for its poorer passengers. In a report for the Government of India published in 1903, Thomas Robertson, a special commissioner who had been sent to India to assess the functioning of the railway system, ‘emphasized how unappreciative railway administrations were of their third-class traffic, which he described as “the backbone of the passenger business of every railway in India”’.10
And so it was. There was one mitigating factor in the companies’ attitude: the fact that fares were kept low for third-class passengers. Initially, in the 1850s the railway companies had pitched their fares relatively high because, protected by the government guarantee of a 5 per cent return on their investors’ money, they were unconcerned with the number of travellers. However, under pressure from the Government of India, the ultimate paymaster, they reduced fares and consequently, rather unexpectedly, attracted considerable custom. (As an example, the East Indian Railway charged ¼ of an anna per mile in third, ¾ of an anna in second and two annas in first, giving an eightfold ratio between the highest and lowest, far greater than the ratio in the UK or on railways elsewhere.) These fares might have seemed low but, in his report, Robertson argued they could have been reduced further while still enabling the companies to be profitable. He argued that fares and freight rates should have been set at around one sixth of those in the UK, given the disparity in incomes and wages, but they were, in fact, considerably higher than that.
The quid pro quo of these relatively low fares was basic provision in overcrowded carriages that allowed for no human dignity. Ritika Prasad, author of a book on the impact of the railways on India, quotes an official from the North-Western Provinces whose description typifies the railway experience for Indians in the nineteenth century: ‘The natives [were] penned up in carriages, 10 or 12 in a compartment, with seats 14 inches wide and 15 inches between them, with their legs dangling down in a way the most uncomfortable to them, and with no space to lie down to get any real rest.’11
The overcrowding was the result of the fact that the railway companies sold tickets for their trains with little regard to how much accommodation was available. Despite this, the companies blamed the Indians themselves, implying that they preferred overcrowded conditions in exchange for cheap fares. Some officials even suggested that Indians would prefer to travel in carriages with no seats if they were cheaper. A manager of the Calcutta & South-Eastern Railway, Captain F. Firebrace, told a railway conference in 1871 that Indian passengers would ‘put up with every inconvenience in order to save themselves the extra pie [there were 192 pies to a rupee] per mile’. He therefore suggested that the key to economic success for the railways was to provide the barest accommodation for Indians. In fact, the evidence was to the contrary, as Firebrace himself reported. He quoted the fact that on his own railway when third- or fourth-class accommodation was provided at the same fare, passengers would make great efforts to rush to fill the better-appointed compartments.
It was not only a matter of discomfort. Death as a result of this overcrowding was not uncommon, particularly in desert crossings during the fierce heat of the summer. The companies steadfastly refused to accept that the higher rate of mortality on trains travelling in the hot conditions was the result of overcrowding. While the local population died in considerable numbers, the dangers were not confined to them. During a rapid troop transfer in the summer of 1915, thirty-two British men perished from heat exhaustion on a train crossing the Sind desert when temperatures reached 125°F and no ice to cool the train had been provided. That tragedy, incidentally, caused a scandal back in the UK resulting in the sacking of the Quartermaster-General in India, a Brigadier-General Roe, who had foolishly allowed the ship on which the troops arrived to dock at Karachi rather than Bombay. That meant the poor troops, unaccustomed to Indian conditions, had to cross the Sind desert, a journey that was usually not allowed in the summer heat. Indians, however, were expected to routinely put up with such conditions, despite travelling in far more cramped carriages than the military.
The discomfort and danger were heightened by the fact that railway companies were in the habit of locking their third-class passengers into the carriages, a practice that was still, at the time the first railways were built in India, the norm in parts of Europe and had been partly responsible for the high death toll in several accidents, notably one near Paris on one of France’s first lines. In India, the custom was institutionalized, becoming the norm despite the obvious safety risks it entailed and the string of previous disasters around the world.
The awful conditions in third class led to repeated complaints but change was resisted strongly by the companies, even though the Government of India itself was critical of the levels of overcrowding and pressed for improvements. Companies were supposedly required to display the number of passengers allowed in each carriage and were banned from exceeding these limits, but there was little enforcement of these rules. This inaction was very much the result of the contemporary norms whereby interference by the state in the affairs of private companies was perceived as inappropriate and an unnecessary restraint on entrepreneurs. This attitude affected rules governing many other aspects of railway operations and partly explains the ability of the railway companies to simply ignore regulations from government. Self-regulation was the order of the day, despite considerable evidence that it did little to restrain the worst excesses of the railway companies. Rather than make improvements, the companies were inclined to blame the behaviour and customs of their own passengers for the poor conditions on trains. As Prasad puts it, even when the companies were presented with clear examples of the issuing of an excessive number of tickets for a particular train, this was ‘attributed to a peculiar habit that they argued was endemic to native passengers: of “following one another like sheep into a crowded carriage”’.12 There were even suggestions from railway managers that Indians, apparently unlike the rest of the human race, disliked empty compartments where they could sit in comfort. As for the high death rate in hot conditions, the companies again blamed it on the passengers themselves for boarding the train when they were too ‘old, ill or unfit to travel’.13
Overcrowding was the railway companies’ dirty secret, a pretty open one to anyone using the railways, but one which they repeatedly refused to recognize. Even modest suggestions, such as the requirement issued in the early 1900s to reduce the number of passengers in each compartment to six for long journeys, were ignored by the railways. There was, though, an even dirtier secret: toilets, or rather the lack of them. Somehow, no thought had been given to their provision by the railway companies. Or at least not in third class. Moreover, rather than simply acquiescing to complaints about the absence of sanitary facilities, the companies remained reluctant to provide for this very basic need, and it was not until toilets became a political issue in the early twentieth century that the matter was resolved, and even then it took several years.
The amount of debate and discussion expended on the matter of toilets was remarkable and quite bizarre given that the case for their provision seemed irrefutable. Admittedly, the style of carriages made installation more difficult. In the US, open-plan coaches had quickly become the norm, partly because of the long distances travelled. No such considerations had been taken into account by the Indian railway companies when they chose the compartment-style layout. The lack of a corridor meant providing toilets was impossible, since having one in each compartment was clearly impractical. Some trains had a connecting running board outside that allowed transfer between compartments, but this was clearly too perilous for most passengers and was used principally by railway staff.
There was something almost sadistic in the companies’ obdurate and continuing refusal to consider this issue, particularly in relation to women and the elderly, who found it far harder to improvise either on the train or at stops. In the first couple of decades, not only were there no toilets in any class but, remarkably, many railway officials were reluctant to unlock the doors of the third-class compartments to let their occupants out to use station facilities. Moreover, sometimes trains did not stop long enough for passengers to risk going to the toilet through fear of not being able to return in time to their carriage. A North-Western Provinces official, Colonel Fraser, reported: ‘When I arrive at a station, I am at once let out on the platform while the Natives are detained, penned up in a crowded state till the ticket-collector has taken their tickets – a very slow process when there are many passengers.’14
Again, the railway companies took up their usual defensive ‘not our fault, guv’ stance in response to complaints. They claimed that safety regulations required them to lock the passengers in between stations but the railway officials were often slow to open the doors once the train stopped. In fact, the regulations clearly stated that they were supposed to allow passengers out if they wanted to step onto the platform, but ‘even as reports of third-class passengers remaining locked up in carriages trickled in, railway companies argued that they were complying with all requirements’.15
While toilet facilities for first- and second-class passengers quickly became the norm, often with en suite facilities in every compartment in first, the railway companies resisted providing them for third class. On the station platforms, privies and urinals were provided for the European passengers in buildings while Indians had to make do with tattis, in effect holes in the ground protected by flimsy bamboo or grass shelters.
The companies fought a long campaign against being forced to provide onboard toilets in third class. At a Railway Conference in 1882, their representatives spoke strongly against demands for universal provision, even though the idea was supported by senior military commanders anxious for their native troops to be accommodated. The companies argued that the use of station facilities was sufficient but some went further, offering spurious excuses. One contributor to the Conference made the point that allowing excrement to be dropped on the line – retention tanks were for the future – would harm the permanent way and require a large labour force to clean it up. Another submission, rather revealingly, mentioned that the main consideration was perhaps not sanitation but profitability. Its author, a railway official, argued that providing toilets on trains would be costly and result in a reduction of 6 or 7 per cent in available revenue-earning accommodation. In 1884, the consulting engineer for Bombay, in response to demands for facilities, argued that it was difficult enough ‘to keep a closet in a 1st class compartment occupied by two or three European travellers sweet and clean during a long journey’, let alone one used by ‘30 or 40 native passengers’.16 That perhaps said rather more about contemporary Western toilet habits than possibly he intended.
The Indian Railways Act passed in 1890 required railways ‘to provide latrine accommodation to one compartment reserved for females when the train … runs for a distance exceeding fifty miles’. The Public Works Department of the government, which was at the time responsible for the railways, twice sent out circulars reminding companies of their obligations, but its policy of maintaining only the lightest regulatory touch meant those injunctions went unheeded. It was not until 1902, when a prominent Indian, Ramachandra Gungadhar Karwe, wrote a note to the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, after a lengthy tour around the railway system, that concerted action was at last taken. Karwe pointed out that while the companies provided onboard toilet facilities to first-and second-class passengers, it was those in third who provided the bulk of their revenue and yet suffered from lack of facilities. Karwe begged Curzon to show ‘mercy to the poor’ and, while there are doubts whether Curzon ever read the note, it certainly led to a change in attitude.
Curzon was highly critical of the railway companies’ reluctance to respond to the requirements of the 1890 Act. His official memoirs17 later revealed that he found their attitude ‘old-fashioned, prejudiced and mistaken’ and that he rejected the idea that excreta would be dropped on the line in such quantities that it would ‘frighten the gang men’. As an aside, he highlighted an issue that might well have been of concern to the London-based railway companies, steeped, as they were, in Victorian morals, by dismissing the notion that the toilets might be used for an ‘immoral purpose’ when stopped at stations – the contemporary equivalent of the ‘mile high’ club beloved of today’s oversexed air passengers. He went into remarkable detail on the sanitary issue, even suggesting that to ensure faeces were not dumped at stations, there should be a mechanical arrangement ‘by which the bottom of every pan was closed as soon as a train entered a station, and released as soon as it leaves’. It seems a brilliant idea but clearly the scheme was not implemented given the plethora of ‘do not flush this toilet at stations’ signs found not only in India but across the world. Merely locking the toilet doors at stations, as happens in some countries, might have been a simpler solution to both the sanitary and moral issues.
Curzon immediately issued orders to local government to ensure that railways began providing facilities ‘as soon as possible’ in all intermediate and third-class carriages on fast trains, and later on slower services. Sensibly, suburban services running for less than fifty miles were exempt and consequently, by 1908, more than 5,000 third-class carriages had been fitted out with toilets, which showed that where there was a will, there was a way. Nevertheless, although relief was at hand for many passengers, not all railways complied, and even by the outbreak of the Second World War fewer than half of the Bengal & North Western Railway third-class carriages were fitted with toilets.
One of the reasons for treating third-class passengers so badly was the notion that they included numerous criminal elements, who necessitated a disciplined approach. While the vast majority of rail passengers were law-abiding, there is no doubt that the railways afforded unprecedented potential for thieves and ‘ne’er-do-wells’ to steal and rob. The railway thief was as old as the railways themselves, but in India there was a particular problem as organized gangs from outlaw tribes, with generations of criminal experience behind them, adapted their traditional practices to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by crowded stations and trains. There were, of course, the normal casual thieves prominent on many systems, such as pickpockets who specialized in working the areas around ticket offices and the opportunists who would make away with unattended baggage at stations. The hot weather, which meant windows on trains were permanently open, offered the opportunity for thieves to walk along the running boards on coaches without corridors and remove valuables from clothing or bags left lying around by insufficiently alert passengers.
It was the activity of certain gangs and tribes using the identical modus operandi which frightened the law-abiding traveller and the railway companies alike. The long-distance trains, which included overnight travel en route, offered a particularly enticing prospect for groups who specialized in targeting and robbing rail passengers. The level of sophistication was such that it seemed a shame that their ingenuity could not be put to more honest endeavour. These gangs were often based in tribal villages and highly trained in the skills required for their particular speciality, having been apprenticed – Oliver Twist-like – to their life of crime at an early age. One method was for two men to operate as a pair in a compartment. The first would wrap himself in a large blanket to cover the activity of the second, who would crawl underneath the seats with a sharp knife in his mouth – a technique that involved not inconsiderable skill – and slit open bags, handing the stolen valuables to his partner. In order to delay any discovery, he would sew up the tear, allowing him and his colleague to make their escape before suspicion was aroused. Westwood reckoned the most sophisticated of these gangs were members of an outlaw tribe from near Aligarh, in what is now Uttar Pradesh, who used long-nosed secateurs in the course of their agricultural work. In the hot season, when activity on the farms stopped, ‘they took these secateurs on railway expeditions, and would imperceptibly snip off the necklaces and bangles of sleeping passengers. The more experienced, faced with victims asleep in an inconvenient position, would tickle the soles of their feet with a feather until they turned.’18 Another tribe specialized in the old dummy bag trick. They would carry a bag stuffed with old newspapers and rags, sidle up to a hapless passenger carrying a similar one, and swop them when the opportunity arose.
Various measures were taken over the years to reduce the ability of thieves to operate on the railway. Bars on windows – a feature of trains today – and doors that were lockable from the inside helped, as did removing the running boards from outside trains without corridors. The gangs largely faded away in the interwar years as a result of targeted policing, more sophisticated investigation methods, such as fingerprinting, and centralized reporting of incidents, which helped to pinpoint the activities of organized groups.
The authorities found policing third-class passengers easier than making their lives better. While being so reluctant to improve the lot of these passengers, the railway companies in contrast expended much energy on the matter of the travelling arrangements for ‘respectable’ women, the small minority of relatively affluent ladies able to afford higher-class accommodation. The provision of three or four separate classes was deemed not to take into account the requirement of the well-heeled and, consequently, mostly very conservative elements of Indian society. The zamindars – landed gentry – and the Indian aristocracy were consulted by the companies in 1869, through the agency of the British Indian Association, to which many belonged, on the issue of women travelling on the railway. Across the country, local members of the Association were asked for their views, following numerous representations to the companies from the upper echelons of Indian society who had complained that respectable women were unable to travel in conditions that befitted their rank. There were even reports in the local press that female missionaries were travelling in third class in order to proselytize and convert their fellow travellers to Christianity.
The zamindars made a clear distinction between lower-class and, by implication, less respectable women, who were, in any case, seen in public all the time, and their own family members, who were shielded, thanks to their wealth, from the view of strangers. These two distinct types of women, they suggested, should be kept apart as mixing with these lower-caste women would in effect contaminate their superior sisters. In any case, the lifestyles of these poorer women, they argued, meant that they did not need separate accommodation on trains. The zamindars suggested that rather than women-only carriages, where the classes and castes mixed, there should be ‘family compartments’, where male escorts would be able to look after their women folk, who ‘become quite helpless in the absence of their male relatives and protectors’. Bizarrely, they suggested that these compartments would not even need seats, since their women were used to sitting on the floor cross-legged, and that benches were ‘a form of seat Indian women are never accustomed to and make use of with great reluctance’. So, the carriages should be emptied of seats and be ‘plain and unadorned so that the inmates may freely use it in their own way’.19 Effectively, they were suggesting that the majority of women could be bunched together in conditions that befitted them, while the minority of ‘respectable’ ladies travelled with their families in secluded compartments, which some even wanted screened off so that strangers could not see the women. The Association’s views were picked up in the press, which ‘stressed the “serious inconvenience” that “Hindu ladies faced” when travelling “in the same carriage with women of the lower classes such as sweepers, chamars [an untouchable caste] and the like”’.20 In their view, class was a more important consideration than gender.
The zamindars were particularly concerned about interaction with railway personnel and sought to ensure they would have no interaction with middle- and upper-class women. They grumbled that the staff, particularly the Europeans and Eurasians, ‘give themselves airs at every step and generally look down upon the passengers as if they were creatures of an inferior order or goods soon to be packed off’ – a familiar complaint made by many of today’s travellers on subcontinental railways. Simply talking to a man not in the family was deemed intolerable and therefore female railway guards and waiting-room attendants should be employed. The fact that these women would have to deal with male passengers, too, was an irrelevance, of course, since they would be of a lower – and therefore by implication less respectable – class.
These dilemmas were the result of the fact that the railways were breaking new ground in Indian society. The public spaces of the railways, whether waiting rooms or train compartments, were often the first place where Indians of every caste and class had ever mingled and, unlike in the bazaars and streets, were enclosed together for long periods. This unprecedented mixing was bound to raise fundamental cultural issues and later resulted in conflict and litigation. Interestingly, the railways were both a levelling experience, since all but the poorest could use them, but simultaneously also reaffirmed, and at times heightened, class, religious and caste hierarchies and differences. One can almost hear the groans of the railway company managers who had to deal with these sensibilities in the knowledge that causing offence to such an important element of society could be disastrous for their companies. Equally, so could accommodating these demands, since they were financially burdensome, resulting in unfilled seats on trains where potential passengers might well be turned away because they were of the wrong sex, religion or caste. Moreover, acquiescing to these demands from conservative elements damaged the railways’ reputation as a liberalizing force in Indian society, opening it up to European – and by implication progressive – mores. One of the justifications for government support for the railways was that they would transform India into a modern state, and therefore pandering to what were seen as these primitive customs went against the grain. As Laura Bear puts it, the measures introduced by the railway companies ‘helped to mark Indian women with signs of respectability or immorality depending on which ticket they could afford to buy for their passage’.21 That was not supposed to be their role.
The contortions required to meet these demands could be viewed as an early example of businesses facing the complexities of what today is known as ‘political correctness’ and led to the railway companies seeking solutions that satisfied as many interests as possible. The issue of female ticket collectors was, however, generally seen as a step too far for the companies, mainly because the task was entirely carried out by Europeans and Eurasians and they feared that employing Indian women would open up the way for fraud, while the notion that respectable European women would want to work on the railways was unthinkable.
The zamindars’ views proved to be influential in persuading some of the railway companies to change their policies. In July 1869, the lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces, William Muir, produced a minute that set the tone. Muir was one of those British administrators who saw the role of the colonial power as one of spreading civilization and enlightenment to the Indian masses, but he accepted that existing practices had to be taken into account. He recognized that the separation of the sexes was ‘not only practised among the rich, but also among the vast majority of respectable classes, whatever their means’22 and therefore needed to be accommodated, simply to ensure that women were able to travel, as that would help bring about ‘general enlightenment’ of the population. He suggested, therefore, that reserved first-class compartments for the upper classes should be provided, as well as a compartment to which women would have access in their palkis (screened carriages carried to the station by servants). There was also to be a third or intermediate class (slightly better than third but not as good as second), with compartments at each end shielded by venetian blinds, in which families would be able to travel together while ensuring the women could not be seen by other passengers. For other women passengers in third class, there would be separate carriages, but somehow ‘prostitutes’ and other disreputable women would be barred; Muir said they would be easy to identify but did not explain how.
The East Indian Railway was the most assiduous in following these rules. Second-class accommodation was provided for Indian families in a US-style open-plan coach with a passageway down the middle. On one side, there was private space for ladies, including toilet facilities, while on the other male relatives could intermingle. Women-only accommodation was also provided in third class by separating two compartments in each carriage, one of which was designated for full purdah, with no access from the platform, while the male relatives could sit in the adjoining compartment. For women travelling without their families, there were all-female open carriages. Even waiting rooms with separate accommodation for Hindus and Muslims were provided by the East Indian in its efforts to follow Muir’s injunction to the letter.
The East Indian, though, was something of an exception. Other companies were reluctant to follow, not least because of the cost and the lost revenue. Some, in fact, actually scrapped female-only carriages because they accepted the argument that respectable women would invariably travel with their families, while others merely provided screens to shield women from view, more or less successfully. Others refused to provide separate accommodation for women, except in third class, arguing that very few passengers would benefit since not many Indian travellers could afford even intermediate, let alone second or first class. The most serious case, which, in fact, was the one which prompted the railway companies to make changes, occurred in 1867, when a woman on the East Indian Railway was assaulted by a fellow traveller, a European called Samuel Horn. In an attempt to escape, she jumped out of a window and was killed. The complaint from the Indian population was not only about the extent of assaults, but also the comparative leniency with which those accused or even convicted of the assaults were treated.
Every solution, however, was fraught with difficulties and pitfalls. The biggest sufferers from these changes, more often than not, were precisely those that these convolutions were supposed to help – women travelling on their own – since the very separation from the safety of the crowd made them vulnerable to attack. The contemporary newspapers were full of incidents of women being assaulted, or raped, sometimes by railway personnel, often after they had been unable to pay their fare or had unwittingly overridden the station for which they had a ticket. Ticket collectors, too, were not averse to taking advantage of their position for a bit of inappropriate touching. There were also reports of women becoming separated from their husbands with whom they were travelling, due to some ticketing discrepancy or simply in the crowded conditions in large stations, and as a result being assaulted or even raped. These incidents were, of course, the exception rather than the rule, and for the most part relations between passengers and railway officials passed off without trouble.
None of this was new or unexpected in a society where even touching a member of a different caste was abhorrent to many. Arguments sometimes arose because women travelling without men refused to hand over their tickets directly to an official as it involved touching a man, preferring to ensure there was no contact by leaving them on a table or chair, and the ticket collector, finding this unacceptable, would refuse to pick them up. As we will see in Chapter 7, the issue of assaults on women became a cause célèbre during the fight for nationalism, and some of the stories appearing in newspapers were embellished to suit the political aims of those reporting them, in particular by exaggerating the proportion of attacks carried out by European and Eurasian railway employees rather than fellow travellers. However, there is no doubt that women were put at risk on the railways precisely because of attempts to protect those perceived to be ‘respectable’. The implication of the separation of the more affluent women from their peers was that anyone travelling in all-female accommodation was therefore assumed not to be respectable and perhaps a prostitute or loose woman.
By 1871, as a result of trying to accommodate these various requirements, there were various individual carriages running on the system marked ‘first-class European, first-class Indian, second-class European and Eurasian, intermediate-class Indian, third-class Indian, third-class female, European female, family and fourth-class coolie’.23 The following year, Lord Northbrooke, the new Governor-General, told the railway companies that they needed to simplify their class structures and types of rolling stock. His efforts were largely in vain since, as we have seen, the companies were in the habit of ignoring such requests from government. However, no company, not even the East Indian, provided all these different types of accommodation simultaneously, but, nevertheless, the increasing breakdown of types of passengers into discrete groups was a constant headache for railway managers. The tradition of seclusion varied, in fact, from region to region and in large parts of India there was little demand for these complicated arrangements. The railway companies, though, run from central headquarters in India and ultimately governed from London, found it difficult to accommodate the precise and often disparate requirements of their passengers. Eventually, the Indian Railways Act 1890 mandated female-only carriages for the lowest class on every passenger train but, as with toilets, suburban trains were excluded. Even then, it took years for all the companies to comply.
As well as issues around women and sanitary facilities, there were complicated questions over the provision of food and drink. Similarly to the complications over seating arrangements, the issues of caste and religion had to be addressed. The railway officials were more receptive to the need to provide different eating facilities for Muslim and Hindu passengers than they were over the question of sanitary arrangements. There was, however, still a contrasting attitude towards the provision of facilities for Europeans and those for ‘natives’. Station refreshment rooms for Europeans rapidly became the norm, but these were deemed unnecessary for Indians because, it was argued, ‘natives’ did not generally take their meals at regular hours and therefore were best served by vendors on platforms. The system, while appearing haphazard in the hubbub of the platform environment, was actually tightly regulated by the railway companies. The vendors – who are still commonplace today – had to buy a licence from the railway and wear clothing that identified them, and were expected to sell food that was fresh and hygienic. Those who occupied stalls had to pay rent to the railway, and, yet again, there appeared to be a measure of discrimination favouring Europeans. Ritika Prasad notes that ‘On the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, the annual fee for a European refreshment room was fixed at 360 Rupees, while those for native stalls went as high as 3,500 Rupees per annum.’24 This is in spite of the fact that a stall with no seating covered an area far less than the refreshment room, which was in essence a small restaurant.
After the turn of the century, the railway authorities did begin to recommend to the companies that refreshment rooms for Indians, as well as Europeans, should be provided on stations served by long-distance trains. Consequently, by the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, they had become commonplace. Hindu establishments, which were more widely available, were usually split into veg and non-veg sections and some even offered meals for Muslims. At other stations, there were entirely separate facilities for the two religions. The company which made the most effort in catering to the needs of its wide variety of passengers was the Madras & Southern Mahratta Railway, which ‘provided not only a “general stall for the sale of sweets for all castes” and “a kitchen with a Brahmin cook who cooks for all castes” but also a separate dining room each for Brahmins and non-Brahmins, as well as “a Muhammadan cook” and separate dining rooms for Muslim passengers’.25 The East Indian Railway, in its efforts to ensure that taboos were not broken, encumbered itself with four types of food inspector – ‘Junior Mahomedan’ and ‘Junior Hindu’, and ‘Senior’ equivalents for both religions. Caste, class and religion were both serious and expensive matters for the railway authorities.
There was also some pressure to provide dining cars on trains, but, unlike in Europe and the US, they were very slow to catch on in India. That failure can be explained both by the reluctance of the companies to introduce them and by cultural expectations. Several companies objected to the idea in principle, saying that it would be impossible to cater for the range of religious and caste requirements of their passengers. Moreover, such cars would reduce the amount of accommodation available to third-class passengers. Experiments by a few more entrepreneurial companies to provide dining cars proved to be short-lived, often because they fell foul of religious prejudices. In 1912, the East Indian Railway introduced dining cars on the line between Calcutta (Howrah) and Mughal Serai in the Punjab, but soon withdrew them after finding that ‘high caste Hindus were averse to eating “in the same compartment as a Mohammedan or a low-caste Hindu”’.26 Providing separate facilities did not seem to work either. On the Bombay, Baroda & Central Indian Railway, which did offer segregated cars for Hindus and Muslims, the failure was put down to the reluctance of third-class passengers to leave their seats – presumably on the grounds that they were wary of losing them – and the competition from platform sellers, whose wares were cheaper.
The provision of water was a surprisingly contentious issue. The reluctance of the railways to allow third-class passengers off the trains meant they found it difficult to access the hydrants and taps provided on platforms. Instead, passengers were reliant on the watermen who carried buckets and ladles to supply them for the journey ahead. There were often not enough vendors, especially in hot weather, and in this regard the companies were relatively responsive both to the overall shortage of watermen and in ensuring that the right ones were available. Upper-caste Hindus would only accept water from Brahmin watermen and Hindus and Muslims required separate provision. One compromise was to have a Brahmin for the upper-caste Hindus and a lower-caste Hindu bhistee for everyone else. The railways were keen to show they recognized these sensibilities, with the Great Indian Peninsula Railway emphasizing it provided watermen ‘of different castes’ for ‘various classes of passenger’.
It was not only as passengers that Indians suffered discrimination. The railways were becoming massive employers and yet again the contrast between the treatment of European and local people was all too obvious.