SIX
WORKING ON THE LINE
BY THE TURN of the century, with a network of 23,600 route miles, the railways had not only established themselves but become a key part, indeed the mainstay, of the subcontinent’s transport system. In a country with little industrial development, the railways were by far the biggest employer, and, through a vast array of functions needed to train, keep and pay for that huge labour force, they were developing a series of institutions that were instrumental in modernizing the nation.
The raw figures of the level of employment on the railways were quite astonishing (and actually remain so to this day, as we will see in the final chapter). For the construction of the railways, the best estimate is that an average of around 200,000 people were directly employed during the whole forty-year period running up to the end of the nineteenth century. This estimate excludes all the workers in the supply chain, whether simply transporting material to the worksites or providing plant and equipment for the railways, which might have amounted to a similar number.
However, the number of workers constructing the railway would soon be exceeded by those directly employed in the wide variety of tasks to operate and maintain the iron road. By 1870, there were already around 70,000 permanent railway workers, and in 1905, after a strong growth spurt in the early years of the twentieth century, 437,500 were employed directly by the railways, of which 6,300 were European and 8,600 Eurasian. (Therefore, while Eurasians, who were also known as Anglo-Indians, or by the somewhat derogatory term ‘chi-chis’, formed less than a half of 1 per cent of the population, they accounted for 2 per cent of railway workers.) This disproportionate pattern was partly the result of a deliberate policy of apprenticeship and recruitment by the railway companies and their targeting of orphanages where Eurasian children, who were the result of brief liaisons between soldiers and local women, often ended up. As well as simply recruiting from these orphanages, the 1850 Apprentices Act gave the railways, as employers, the right to take on the role of parent for these children in return for indenturing them as apprentices, thereby providing a ready source of workers who were seen as more reliable and loyal than their pure native counterparts – and were, of course, far cheaper than men brought over from the UK.
Right from the outset, the arrival of the railways in a country that was still essentially feudal and agricultural had an impact that far exceeded their direct reach. Naturally, the prejudices and institutionalized racism which pervaded the provision of services, outlined in the previous chapter, were a constant influence on the employment practices of the railway companies and inevitably resulted in strife and conflict. While the companies were aware that the expansion of the railways would require a huge permanent workforce to run and maintain them, there was great apprehension about employing Indians for safety-critical tasks. In 1844, well before the opening of the first line, Rowland Stephenson, the founder of the East Indian Railway Company, warned that European staff would have to be responsible for all aspects of train operation in order to protect the interests of British investors. This notion was further elaborated by the Parliamentary Commission on the Colonisation of India, which set out the qualities required by British personnel working in India, as it was worried that those without sufficient resilience would fall foul of the ‘degeneracy’ prevalent in the subcontinent. The British would take on all the supervisory roles, but only the right sort of chap would be up to the task and be able to resist the Eastern temptations. Therefore, when the East Indian Railway started recruiting, the pattern for office work naturally followed the traditions of the Indian Civil Service, with British managers and Indian subordinates. However, as Laura Bear notes, in the railways this model was extended to all aspects of its functioning: ‘More surprisingly, any work that dealt with the running or repair of trains also had to be in the hands of British agency.’ There was an added justification for this – the fear of disaster: ‘The threat of technological accident that hung over all railway enterprises took on a particular tenor in India.’1 The concern that Indians were simply not up to the task of ensuring the safety of the railways underpinned the justification for excluding them from vast swathes of managerial and supervisory roles.
There was some tension in this respect between the companies and the Government of India, which oversaw their work and was the ultimate paymaster. Local labour was, after all, considerably cheaper and consequently there were repeated calls for many of the manual tasks, such as engine driver or train guards, to be ‘Indianized’ in order to enable the railways to make sufficient profits and thereby no longer require continued government support. In response, the companies, unfussed about whether their 5 per cent rate of return came from the fare box or government subsidies, placed a series of overt and covert barriers in the way of Indians progressing up the career ladder. For example, Indians were widely employed as firemen, stoking the fires of locomotives, often in pairs, while Europeans or Eurasians would drive the train. In the UK there was an established process by which after a period of several years, firemen would be promoted to replace drivers who had retired, but this did not happen in India as even highly experienced local firemen were simply barred from taking on the role. While accepting the separation of office tasks between Europeans and locals, Lord Canning, the Governor-General from 1856 to 1862, made repeated calls for Indians to be allowed to drive trains or take up posts as stationmasters, but the railway companies resisted. Instead, the East Indian Railway, for example, sought to try out particular ethnic groups, such as Sikhs, Parsees and even Chinese, in various roles but ultimately considered that they were only suited to lesser tasks in each area of work. Therefore Indians were allowed to shunt locomotives around yards or drive goods trains on branch lines, but were barred from operating services that carried passengers. They became stationmasters but only in minor locations with little traffic rather than at major stations. Backed by their government guarantees, the railway companies could afford the luxury of using expensive European labour which fitted well with their prejudices.
Their reluctance prompted the Government of India to adopt an official policy of Indianization in 1870, when it announced that all posts should be open to locals. Even that radical shift failed to make much difference. There were always good reasons to stop Indians being promoted, with the ever-present implication that accidents would result if they rose above their station. Laura Bear uncovered countless examples in old railway company files of explanations from railway managers, such as Indians did not have ‘the judgement and presence of mind’ to deal with emergencies, or that they ‘seldom have the character to enforce strict obedience’. Indians could not become engine drivers because they lacked sufficient ‘talent, energy, general knowledge and reliability’ and would be unable to cope with the hard work as a result of ‘privations which caste rules subject them to’. Essentially, the qualities required were, strangely enough, those in which Englishmen apparently excelled and which they uniquely possessed. The locomotive superintendent, for example, needed to be ‘a sharp, ready hardworking man with sound judgment, great nerve when suddenly brought into danger. He must have in himself a sharp turn for mechanics which makes him fond of his profession. He must be sober and of good constitution.’2
There was, in fact, another largely unstated but crucial reason why Indians could not be allowed to take over too many key positions within the railways, which was revealed by a senior British official. A certain proportion of trustworthy Europeans and Eurasians had to be retained, he argued, in order to maintain ‘the security of the country, both from a military point of view and from the point of internal security, and that had to be taken into account in dealing with the recruitment of staff’.3 If Indians ran the railways, the trains might not be available to deal with a repeat of the events of 1857.
Europeans were not only paid far more than their Indian colleagues, but, as an inducement for them to come to India, their wages were greater than they would have received for carrying out the same job in the UK – an average, in 1870, of £270 per annum for a driver compared with £115 back home. In addition, there were numerous other expenses associated with employing them that further dented the rail companies’ profits. Most were on four-year contracts, which included a P&O trip back to the UK at its termination, and all received allowances for housing and moving home. Not only were salaries better than in the UK but there were plenty of opportunities for overtime. Moreover, the sickness rate among Europeans was high because of the heat and the prevalence of fevers, resulting in long absences or, sometimes, death. They were also ‘notorious for their licentious lifestyle, drunkenness and verbal abuse of Indians’.4 These absences, together with difficulties of recruitment, meant that on occassion there was an overall shortage of drivers, notably when extra trains were needed to deliver grain at times of famine or to bring people to the numerous large festivals held regularly around the country.
Despite the extra costs and the difficulties of recruiting Europeans, there was a great reluctance to allow Indians to carry out what were seen as supervisory or safety-related tasks. Moreover, the European and Eurasian staff were ever ready to thwart attempts to be replaced by Indians and this led them to create a local branch of the UK-based Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, India’s first trade union, in order to protect their interests. The pressure to reduce wage bills did, over time, lead to some ‘Indianization’. By 1881, although a third of the East Indian’s 375 drivers were Indian, they were still confined to minor duties and only allowed to drive on plain line track with no curves or gradients, and handle slow-moving goods trains. By contrast, all but 61 of the 790 firemen were Indians.
Bear notes that Indian guards, deemed to have a key safety role, ‘were only permitted on goods and coal trains when their responsibilities were shared with a brakeman’.5 Given the limitations placed on Indians, it hardly seemed worthwhile training them and, indeed, the East Indian Railway reined back on its experiment within a few years, arguing that ‘men of the Babu [a respectable Hindu male] class have not the physique for the work or the spirit of loyalty which goes so far with the bulk of the European staff of Guards in ensuring hearty and willing cooperation in times of real pressure’.6
The policy of reserving many tasks for Europeans, including several that were the preserve of working-class men, engendered its own complications. As well as requiring more pay than Indians, Europeans were difficult in another respect. While it was relatively easy to lure young men without families to the subcontinent with offers of wages higher than they would receive in the UK, retaining them, especially when they married and had children, was not easy. The railway companies had to strive to create conditions which made living in India not just bearable but actually attractive to these men. There was, too, the constant worry about both their moral and physical health, as highlighted in the 1858 report of the Committee on the Colonisation of India. The solution came in the form of railway communities, backed by a clear set of rules governing the behaviour of railway workers, both Europeans and Indians, and which addressed the ever-growing concerns about the moral risks created by the spread of the railways.
As early as 1859, less than a decade into the railway age, the companies and the government began to establish railway colonies. These, ideally, would be quite separate from the existing Indian towns, where the bazaars and brothels were a constant temptation, and would provide all the facilities needed to create a home from home. Their ostensible purpose was twofold, to guard against degeneracy but also to offer a space where European values could survive and thrive. However, the thinking behind the establishment of these colonies went much deeper. The railway system and, indeed, the whole colonial project would be put at risk if thousands of men arrived from the UK and behaved in a way that was counter to the prevailing Victorian ethos. They would set a terrible example and arouse hostility from the locals. Previously, administering India had been carried out by a small group of civil servants, essentially from the officer class. The only members of the working classes who were needed to maintain control by the colonial power were the lower ranks of the army and they were subject to military discipline and rules. Now, with the arrival of large numbers of men to carry out a wide variety of tasks on the railway, similar rules as those in the military were required to police and discipline them.
The effect of this was to turn the railway system into a kind of state within a state. The powers given to Indian railway companies to control both passengers and staff were far more extensive than those accorded to their counterparts back in the UK. The first Indian Railway Act passed in 1854, in the immediate aftermath of the opening of the first line, reflected British practice but went beyond it in terms of the regulation of employees. The rail companies in Britain had aspects of a military regime, as expressed through uniforms and the rigidity of the hierarchy (British Rail used to have separate canteens for officers, NCOs or middle management, and the rest), but it was nothing like as rigid as the system created by law and regulation in India.
The duties of all staff, from stationmasters and platform porters to signallers and drivers, were prescribed by a lengthy series of regulations set out in a rule book which they were required to carry at all times. Each set of workers had a clearly defined hierarchy, akin to the way that the military operates, which meant, for example, the stationmaster was responsible for all personnel at his station and permanent way staff were answerable to an inspector. Employees could face immediate dismissal or have fines imposed for transgression of the rules but they did have the right to appeal to the ‘agent’, invariably the European who was in charge of the railway and reported to the directors in London. Each company added its own by-laws to the standard regulations, in line with its particular circumstances. The rigidity of the hierarchy was a response to the specific conditions of the subcontinent and, in particular, the fundamental mistrust by the company directors of both local and European workers: ‘A strict hierarchy founded on both military models and a notion of moral obligation for self-governance emerged as the solution for the inadequacies of the Indian and potentially wayward European/Eurasian railway worker.’7
It was not only the workers who were subject to the strict rule of law on the railways. The railway companies assumed extensive powers over passengers as soon as they set foot on railway land. The laws went well beyond British practice in numerous ways, such as giving the companies jurisdiction over the station and adjoining premises, unlike in the UK, where that was confined to the track itself. Additionally, whereas in the UK passengers who were apprehended by railway staff had the right, if innocent, of suing for false arrest, there was no such equivalent legislation in India. The railways were judge and jury, and the difference with UK legislation was neither trivial nor accidental. It effectively meant that staff saw themselves as having the right to police passengers and, inevitably, such unfettered authority led to abuses and, worse, a general attitude of contempt towards users of the railway. There are still signs today on the railway which remind passengers that ‘Ticketless Travel is a Social Evil’. This tight control over passengers at stations exhibited itself most strongly in relation to the fear and threat of disease, as examined in the next chapter.
There were no fewer than twenty-three offences that could be committed by passengers, many of which were not even against the law in the UK. Misbehaving Europeans were also of particular concern, which led to the passing of the European Vagrancy Act in 1869; this law gave magistrates the power to send Europeans found begging or destitute at railway stations (and elsewhere) to workhouses and, for repeat offenders, to be transported to Australia. Oddly, as Laura Bear notes, ‘the result of the Vagrancy Act was that any European spotted on the railway platform by station staff or the police was immediately under suspicion simply for travelling’.8 Not, of course, if they were able to buy a first-class ticket. However, poor whites in third class were at risk of being wrongfully arrested and there were numerous reports of the railway authorities mistreating them, which are all the more poignant because many were former rail workers who had fallen on hard times, often as a result of alcoholism. White people who fell foul of the law, or were the victims of crime, were not, however, expected to have to deal with Indian police officers. Instead, the railway police force had a much higher proportion of Europeans than its counterpart in the towns and cities. That was to ensure that the fundamental police functions for the British community were carried out by Europeans, not Indians. A special rank of ‘reserve inspectors’, aided by a few sergeants – both relatively lowly positions that would normally be expected to be filled by Indians – was created for Europeans to ensure that there was always a white officer available to deal with their compatriots, whether as miscreants or victims. This was not based on any operational needs, but, rather, ‘the existence of a special class of European inspectors and sergeants, while owing nothing to any legitimate administrative or public safety concern, speaks volumes about the race-oriented peculiarities of British colonial society’.9 Partly, this was out of a desire to provide the sort of service that British people might expect from police officers back home: ‘They were white policemen for a white people whose natural expectations of police accountability and courteous manner were far greater than anything the villagers and townsfolk of colonial India could ever expect from their police.’10
The railway companies’ intense concern over wayward whites and idle Indians underpinned the policy of establishing railway communities or colonies separate from the towns and cities in which they were located. These communities were also crucial in the companies’ efforts to attract European workers to India to work on the railway. By definition, railway jobs are located at many different places and it was unthinkable that new arrivals from Europe would be expected to live cheek by jowl with Indians. It was fortuitous, therefore, that the creation of these communities, motivated by concerns over degeneracy, also helped make life more palatable to the incomers and consequently reduce the high turnover of staff, which was both inconvenient and expensive for the companies.
The housing in these communities was deliberately designed not to be like barracks for soldiers, who lived in large communal dormitories, but rather to create the sense of a real home. The cottages were built to house two men sharing or a married couple as, later on, women were encouraged to travel to India to join their husbands due to the fact that having a family was seen as likely to help them keep on the straight and narrow. In order to facilitate the arrival of women and children, companies paid for half the passage and at times even advanced the rest.
The deliberate way that these railway communities were created as enclaves meant they had to be set well apart physically from the towns and villages adjoining them. In particular, they were to be sited as far away as possible from bazaars and native housing. If locals started to encroach, or a bazaar sprung up in the vicinity, the native huts would be torn down and relocated. Bazaars, in particular, were perceived as a great threat as they were considered to be places where morals were lax and prostitutes rife. The East Indian Railway even introduced Sanitary Police ‘for the proper enforcement of sanitary regulations and for the security of the settlement’.11 Even the vegetation was subject to a kind of biological apartheid. Any trace of local plants was to be removed and the areas around the houses were laid out with the sort of flowers and bushes that could be found in the garden of a British country cottage. The seeds were specially imported from a British company and provided free to the residents, who were expected to do the gardening in order to preserve their health and morals. There was an obsession with fresh air and ventilation, too, as according to a lecture given at the Railway Mechanics Institute in Howrah in 1863 ‘it is to a great extent the air we breathe which moulds the form, temper and genius of a people’.12 Good ventilation and other sanitary measures, the lecturer went on to say, were the only way of fostering British genius.
The communities in large towns became pastiches of English villages or small towns. The settlements would be laid out like American towns with a grid system and there would be a clear-cut classification – in its literal sense. The European managers would occupy houses at one end, often closest to the Anglican church (complete with spire), and would frequent a railway club, open only to senior staff, while a railway ‘institute’ would cater for the other ranks, who were housed on the opposite side of the enclave. There were numerous sports clubs, too, with separate ones for Europeans and Indians.
This policy of encouraging married staff in order to make the labour force more stable caused further complexity as it led to the need to provide schools. Initially, little thought had been given to the lack of educational facilities for the children of lower-paid European and Eurasian staff. A series of hill schools had been built in the 1860s, due to an initiative by Lord Canning, the Governor-General, but the fees were so high that only the children of well-paid administrators could afford them. After pressure from Archbishop Bayly of Calcutta, who was appalled to find that only a third of poorer European and Eurasian children attended school, the government pressed the railway companies into taking action. Following the churchman’s intervention, in 1879 the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, wrote a minute supporting the extension of schools to poorer European and Eurasian children, suggesting that funds would be made available from both government and private sources. As a result, a series of eleven schools in the hill stations were founded by the railway companies and churches, and several boarding schools were also opened in the plains, notably at Jamalpur in Delhi on the line between Delhi and Calcutta. The poorer European railway workers were encouraged to send their children to these schools, which had an emphasis on vocational rather than academic education, teaching the pupils basic skills of woodwork and needlework, but, more importantly, encouraging them to learn and develop European mores.
Throughout this schooling, which normally ended at fourteen, the boys were required to carry out frequent military drills, and the older ones were attached to railway battalions of the Auxiliary Force, known as the Railway Volunteer Force, or simply the ‘volunteers’. This was somewhat of a misnomer. These units were an important part of uniting the Europeans in the workforce and of acting as a permanent deterrent to repeats of the 1857 Rebellion, given that the authorities realized there were never enough fulltime soldiers to crush a nationwide insurrection, and consequently involvement in the ‘volunteers’ was effectively mandatory. This was noted by Rudyard Kipling, writing in 1888, on a visit to the headquarters of the East Indian Railway in Jamalpur, who revealed:
On Tuesdays and Fridays the volunteers parade. A and B Companies, 150 strong in all, of the E.I.R. [East Indian Railway]. Volunteers are stationed here with the band. Their uniform, grey with red facings, is not lovely, but they know how to shoot and drill. They have to. The ‘Company’ makes it a condition of service that a man must be a volunteer; and volunteer in something more than name he must be, or someone will ask the reason why.13
Kipling pointed out that it was these men who would need to defend local Europeans in the event of a mutiny, since there were no army barracks in the 350 miles between Calcutta and Danapur, and even the latter was more than 100 miles away from Jamalpur. The real intent of the force, rather than the endless drilling and ceremonial activity, was exposed by the fact that Indians were barred from joining. The ‘volunteers’ were issued with rifles and a uniform but not much else, as Kipling complained: ‘They are as mobile a corps as can be desired, and … hence the Government may possibly be led to take a real interest in them and spend a few thousand rupees in providing them with real soldiers’ kits – not uniform and rifle merely.’ They did have access to a firing range which, Kipling noted from the condition of the grass, was well-used, especially by army veterans who, he observed, were much sought-after recruits to the railway.
On some railways, training was even more serious. The Oudh & Rohilkand Railway gave 12-pounder quick-firing guns and old machine guns to the railway corps. They were mounted, according to the Railway Gazette, ‘in an armoured train, with which there is extensive annual practice in combination with other arms, regular and volunteer’. The Gazette reporter was impressed at the extensive training that was given: ‘The attendance at the annual camps runs to a figure not far short of one third of the total strength and at these the men bivouac, build block houses, dig trenches and exercise with the trains, doing as much as is possible to fit them for the efficient defence of the long lines of railway communications in time of war. Another 200 men had training in ambulance trains.’14
There were plans to make military use of the railway in a more direct way. On a visit to Lahore, just prior to his trip to Jamalpur, Kipling had noted the workshops there had built an armoured train fitted with heavy artillery and machine guns, which he assumed was a precursor to many others. However, in the event, armoured trains proved to be an unwieldy weapon and were little used, apart from, according to a Colonel Phillips writing in 1968, the deployment of the Lahore train on field days, ‘when its main function appeared to be to supply tiffin [afternoon tea] to the officers, a dining car being added to its composition for the purpose’.15
Kipling found Jamalpur, which, like most of the communities, had deliberately been sited far away from any existing large city or Indian settlement, pleasant but somewhat overbearing, a recreation of an Arcadia that never was:
Its designers allowed room for growth, and made the houses of one general design – some of brick, some of stone, some three, four, and six roomed, some single men’s barracks and some two-storied – all for the use of the employés. King’s Road, Prince’s Road, Queen’s Road, and Victoria Road – Jamalpur is loyal – cut the breadth of the station; and Albert Road, Church Street, and Steam Road the length of it. Neither on these roads nor on any of the cool-shaded smaller ones is anything unclean or unsightly to be found.
There was a thriving Masonic lodge, whose members proudly boasted that all the fittings had been made by them, half a dozen well-used tennis courts in the grounds of the Institute, a library with thousands of books, and swimming baths. It was, Kipling reckoned, all too quiet, as there was none of the hustle-bustle that characterized towns and cities back in the UK. There was little necessity for ‘wheeled vehicles’ since most people could walk easily to work.
For the white men, wages were good and the career ladder as high as their ambitions wanted it to be. Even those starting as ticket collectors at 65 rupees per month could soon be earning ten times that and be in charge of several hundred Indian workers. Other Europeans had been recruited from the United Kingdom – Scotland was a particularly fertile source of engineers – to fill key posts, such as head of department, locomotive superintendent or stationmaster. Kipling toured the workshops and engine sheds at Jamalpur, which was heaving with hundreds of local men working in a hierarchy under a few heads of department who were:
silent, heavy-handed men, captains of five hundred or more … They are men worth hearing deferentially. They hail from Manchester and the Clyde, and the great ironworks of the North: pleasant as cold water in a thirsty land is it to hear again the full Northumbrian burr or the long-drawn Yorkshire ‘aye’. Under their great gravity of demeanour – a man who is in charge of a few lakhs’ worth of plant cannot afford to be riotously mirthful – lurks melody and humour.
For the Indian workers, life was of course very different. Just as with the workers building the railway mentioned in Chapter 3, the recruitment of large numbers of local people to operate and maintain the system was a task without precedent. While there were a smattering of industry and a few factories by the mid-nineteenth century, there was nothing on the scale of the railways. The very concept of paid labour was novel for most Indians, apart from agricultural workers employed seasonally, but the railway companies realized that for reasons of both economy and practicality most of their employees would have to be hired locally.
There was a plethora of tasks, and while many were relatively menial, they still required training, basic competence and the discipline of the work ethic. Almost half the workforce was engaged in activity which was called ‘engineering’, though most were solely concerned with keeping the track in good repair, a massive and continuous task that was safety-critical. Clerical staff, looking after accounts and stores, policing the network and providing medical services accounted for about one in twenty workers, while most of the rest were in ‘telegraph and traffic’, which included the more skilled tasks, such as driving trains and providing the workforce for the workshops and engine sheds that sprang up around the country to maintain the locomotives and other railway equipment.
While many staff were scattered throughout the network to work at stations or on permanent way gangs, the biggest centres of employment by far were the workshops like the one visited by Kipling at Jamalpur, which at the time employed more than 4,000 people and would eventually, by the mid-twentieth century, have almost three times that number of workers. There were numerous similar sites across India, including a handful of similar large complexes to Jamalpur, and a far greater number of smaller engine sheds scattered throughout the nation which housed locomotives overnight and carried out basic maintenance. The large workshops undertook every task required to keep railways operating and the workforce was divided into a huge range of ‘shops’, which Ian Kerr, citing the huge Moghulpura works in Lahore built just before the First World War to replace an older, smaller site, sets out in a list: ‘The tender shop, the erecting shop, the fitting shop, the light machine shop, the heavy machine shop, the tool room, the brass finishing shop, the millwright shop, the boiler shop, the coppersmith shop, the blacksmith and spring shop, the brass and iron foundries, the pattern shop and the case hardening and tool hardening shop.’16
The existence of such a wide variety of functions reveals the range of skills that the largely Indian workforce had to acquire. But, just as with the workers who built the railways, there were complaints that they were not as efficient as their UK counterparts. An official commission into the efficiency of Indian labour at the time of the First World War found ‘there was general agreement between the European officers at Jamalpur that the outturn work per man was not more than one-third that of corresponding workmen in British shops’.17 Of course, wages were concomitantly far lower and it is unclear the extent to which this assessment was accurate. Certainly, the range of jobs that they carried out helped develop a key skills base that stood the railways in good stead. They included fitters, turners, blacksmiths, carpenters, tinsmiths, machine men and many more.
It was not only blue-collar workers. Kipling was full of admiration for the babus, the Indian clerks who filled every office in huge numbers: ‘The Babus in the traffic department, in the stores’ issue department, in all the departments where men sit through the long, long Indian day among ledgers, and check and pencil and deal in figures and items and rupees, may be counted by hundreds.’18 He pointed out that it was thanks to them that the railway companies were financially viable since not only did they do an excellent job, but it would have been prohibitively expensive for the railways to depend on imported European clerical staff, who would have cost far more:
The Babus make beautiful accountants, and if we could only see it, a merciful Providence has made the Babu for figures and detail. Without him, the dividends of any company would be eaten up by the expenses of English or city-bred clerks. The Babu is a great man, and, to respect him, you must see five score or so of him in a room a hundred yards long, bending over ledgers, ledgers, and yet more ledgers – silent as the Sphinx and busy as a bee. He is the lubricant of the great machinery of the Company whose ways and works cannot be dealt with in a single scrawl.19
Of course, for all these men, there was no equivalent of the railway communities built for the European and Eurasian staff. Consequently, large settlements arose around the major workshops, often tacitly sanctioned but always at risk of being pulled down.
A study by two economists suggests that the railways, both in construction and in operation, employed 50 per cent of those working in the ‘modern’ sector, the businesses and small companies involved in capital enterprise, throughout the whole period between 1850 and 1940. There is both a positive and negative side to that figure. On the one hand, it demonstrates the importance of the railways in stimulating the beginning of industrialization in India, but on the other shows the extent to which the railways failed to be the catalyst for wider economic development as they had been during the nineteenth century in so many other countries around the world. If the railways had stimulated greater development across a range of industries, then they would have represented a far lower percentage of this type of employment. While the railways undoubtedly represented a great new asset for India, enabling people to travel in a way that would have been impossible otherwise and facilitating the transport of goods to open up markets, they were also a missed opportunity because they were part of a colonial project whose motives did not include the rapid development of the Indian economy (or take-off, as economists call it).
As we saw in Chapter 3, the methods of construction of railways imported from the UK were, over time, subject to some adaptation necessary for the hugely different environment on the subcontinent. There was a gradual recognition that in some respects local methods, the result of traditions handed down through the generations, could provide the basis for different types of work processes. In basic tasks, such as earth moving and dredging, European techniques were adapted through the medium of traditional Indian ways of working to create an amalgam that was far more labour-intensive than contemporary practices elsewhere. This included animal labour, with bullocks being widely employed to carry out heavy lifting, in contrast to the methods in the UK, where by the end of the century sophisticated machinery was widely deployed. For example, at the site of the construction of the Bezawada Bridge on the East Coast State Railway in the 1890s, the dredging was undertaken by a team of sixteen dredgers, requiring a total of sixty-four bullocks. A Railway Board report reckoned they were ‘as fast, efficient and cheap as the other more civilized methods’, a reference to steam-worked dredgers. The steam dredger was ‘only so much better than the primitive bullock system as to justify its retention as a reserve to overawe the bullock-drivers, who were a troublesome and bad-tempered lot, always ready to strike’.20 While the greatest adaptations to Indian conditions were in the simpler more labour-intensive tasks, other more complex aspects of railway building, such as tunnelling, track laying and especially bridge building, ‘were never transferred undiluted’.21
In contrast, as far as the operation and maintenance of the rail network were concerned, by and large, British machinery was simply imposed with little consideration of local circumstances. This was particularly true of locomotive and carriage technology. The occasional adaptation was made to standard equipment, such as the addition of US-style cowcatchers – which are effectively cow killers – to the front of locomotives because, unlike in the UK, the railway was not fenced, but usually ‘only minor cosmetic adaptations were made’.22
The same attitude which resulted in Indian people being considered incapable of carrying out many tasks also underlay the attitude towards the ability to manufacture railway equipment locally to the required high standard. According to Mark Tully, the veteran BBC India correspondent, ‘as early as 1865, India demonstrated the possibility of establishing railway industries by manufacturing a locomotive which competed in price and quality with British products’.23 However, the railway companies ignored that development, continuing to buy expensive British equipment, a situation which continued throughout the colonial period. By Independence in 1947, only 700 locally produced engines had been introduced on Indian railways, while 12,000 (94 per cent of the total) had been imported from the UK. John Hurd, the author of a chapter on railways in The Cambridge Economic History of India, suggests that this was a key limiting factor in India’s ability to begin the industrialization process: ‘India’s loss from the purchase policies of the railways was not limited to her lack of progress in developing heavy industry. She also failed to reap the benefits of the spread effects of industry which would have occurred.’24 There was nevertheless some limited technology transfer in the workshops. J. N. Sahni, the official historian of the Indian railways, notes that ‘in the early stages almost all spare parts for the maintenance of rolling stock were imported from Britain but to attain self-sufficiency, their manufacture was gradually developed in the railway workshops and other indigenous factories’.25 However, this process was slow and it was not until Independence that it was accelerated to create genuine self-sufficiency.
Because India was a captive market for British-built locomotives, the wider economic effects of the huge investment in the railways benefited the UK. Indeed, of the world’s nations which built major railway networks in the nineteenth century, such as Britain, the US, France and Germany, India was the only one which by the end of the century had not become a base for major locomotive production. Japan, too, offers an interesting contrast in this respect. From a situation where it imported all its equipment when the first railway was built in 1872 – nearly two decades after India’s first line – Japan was manufacturing three quarters of its railway carriages by the turn of the century. In order to boost locomotive production, which required greater engineering knowhow than carriage manufacturing, the Japanese government set up four companies to build locomotives and within a few years they came to dominate the domestic market. Consequently, the railways were a key catalyst in Japan’s industrialization which took off in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth.
While India was not allowed to manufacture locomotives and other railway equipment and Indians were barred from many jobs on the operating railway, the British owners of the railway companies had no choice but to employ them for the majority of tasks in the workshops. The companies could not possibly import the huge number of staff required to keep the railway functioning and were forced to take on thousands of local people. There was no little irony in the fact that the same workforce reputed to be unable to manufacture locomotives or even to drive a train with passengers had to be skilled enough to maintain and operate the complex and varied machinery needed to keep the railways running efficiently and, crucially, safely every day.
The breakdown of the workshops into a series of different ‘shops’ led to the division of the workforce into a plethora of separate groups and, as a result, the formation of small unions, which often recruited solely from those employed on a particular task. These divisions were reinforced by the fact that activities in certain shops and operating divisions became the specialism of particular racial groups, thus entrenching the separation. For example, on the East Indian Railway in 1900, according to Laura Bear, ‘a quarter of locomotive department employees were Muslims. In contrast Muslims were a tiny minority in the traffic department in roles as stationmasters, signallers, and the like’.26 Also, in the Kharagpur workshop in West Bengal, ‘Punjabis built the carriages, specializing in the fine carpentry necessary for this task. Biharis and West Bengal Muslims worked on the boilers. Members of North Indian hill tribes were put to work in the foundry making the components for the carriages.’27 And so on. In that way, particular jobs became associated with particular castes and racial groups.
It was inevitable that the management style of the railways, combined with the sheer scale of the enterprise, would result in industrial unrest both in the workshops and in railway operations generally. There had, of course, been sporadic strikes and protests during the construction of the railways, but the temporary and unorganized nature of the workforce meant they were generally quickly resolved, quite often through mass dismissals.
The situation in the workshops, with vast numbers of permanent workers, was bound to be more conducive to difficult industrial relations and conflict. One of the first recorded instances of strike activity in the workshops was on the vast Lahore site, first established in the 1860s and the biggest in India at the time (of course, now in Pakistan). It was the hub of the North Western Railway, which, by 1905, through merger and expansion, encompassed a system of 4,000 route miles that required 750 locomotives and 2,400 coaches to provide for the passengers, as well as 11,600 wagons to carry freight, and employed a total of 63,000 people. In March 1895, a group of 150 workers in the iron moulders’ shop went on strike in protest against the introduction of a system of piecework payments, rather than the fixed wage they had been receiving. This change infuriated a workforce already aggrieved by the harsh treatment of the management, whose response was, perhaps predictably, to dismiss most of those who had withdrawn their labour. The strike escalated as fellow workers in the carriage works came out in sympathy and within a week around 2,800 of the 4,000 workers in the workshops had joined in. The management, however, held firm, helped by the fact that the Europeans and Eurasians stayed at work and remained loyal to the company, putting in extra shifts which enabled the workshops to keep functioning. Nor did the strike spread to the operational railway, which would have damaged North Western’s revenue. As a result, most of the workers soon sought to go back to work but many were barred from doing so by the company. As is common in such disputes, the management identified ‘ringleaders’, many of whom were mistris – supervisors in the shops – and those singled out were put in front of local magistrates for breaches of railway legislation to be bound over to keep the peace.
Even though on this occasion the action was largely unsuccessful, Ian Kerr suggests this was a key event in making railway workers, by far the biggest industrial group in India, aware of their ability to wield their industrial muscle: ‘Regardless of its outcome, the 1895 strike represented a significant manifestation of worker consciousness among the workshop employees.’28 Indeed, industrial disputes on the railways became commonplace with, for example, signallers on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway going on strike for higher wages in 1900, and numerous other disputes across the network in the early 1900s. It was not only Indians, and when trouble spread to white workers, the authorities became even more concerned. In 1897, the Eurasian and European guards on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway walked out in protest at the arbitrary fining system imposed by management for breaches of behaviour, and there was a further strike by Eurasian guards and drivers on the Indian Midland Railway three years later.
Worse, there were several train-wrecking incidents in the troubled North-Western Provinces, carried out by Indians aggrieved by the railway. The combination of these attacks and strikes led Lord Curzon to call for the creation of a commission to look at the issue of railway defence, which reported in 1902. The Commission noted that the role of the Volunteer Force, which Kipling had observed training, would be essential in the event of any recurring troubles but required reinforcing and professionalizing. The volunteers, it recommended, should be given clear tasks in the event of an emergency, e.g. protecting key parts of railway property, such as tunnels and bridges. Each section would be allocated a segment of the railway to protect and would ensure the safe passage of the garrisoned troops in the event of an emergency, enabling them to travel rapidly to counter rebellions. The ‘volunteers’, therefore, would be transformed into a quasi-military force, far better organized than hitherto. It was to focus on being prepared for action, rather than merely undertaking endless ceremonial drills, turning what had been a rather shambolic Dad’s Army into something that was more akin to today’s semi-professional Territorial Army. According to Laura Bear, this change in role was important in two respects: ‘European and Eurasian railway workers would be made to feel their duties and loyalties more keenly … They would act as a line of defence against any uprising, whether this took the form of political strikes, external attack, or internal rebellion against British rule.’29 Giving the members of the force these added responsibilities inculcated them more in the colonial ethos.
A separate simultaneous inquiry was also held into the possibility of employing more Europeans and Eurasians and to examine the roles played by the ‘different creeds and castes’ in the railway. The report confirmed the concentration of particular groups in specific roles and suggested that there should be a more even distribution among the various tasks. How that could be achieved was unclear. The reason for the concentrations, as mentioned above, was the tendency of groups from the same caste and religion to work together on particular aspects of the railway and there was great resistance to breaking up these affinity groups. Regional, caste and religious identity could not simply be disregarded without causing widespread disaffection.
More significantly, the authors suggested that increasing numbers of Eurasians and Indian Christians – deemed to be more reliable than members of the indigenous religions – should be employed on the railways, rather reversing the 1870 policy of Indianization. The railway companies rather baulked at this idea. They were concerned, as before, about costs, given that the Eurasians were better paid than Indians in order to maintain their European lifestyle. Moreover, they could not be sent to remote stations away from other members of their communities as they could not be expected to live solely amongst Indians. They had a separate status, even if they were not quite European.
The railway companies eventually compromised, agreeing to recruit more Eurasian guards and locomotive crews, which meant allowing Indians to drive a wider range of trains and take more responsibility for safety. The best way was to get them young by apprenticing Eurasian and local European boys, the sons of existing workers, and similarly there was a recruitment drive for young Christian Indians. One advantage was that they tended to be more rootless than native Indians, who were tied to their caste and religious groups, which meant that it was easier to move them around the railway to take up jobs in different locations.
The Eurasians became increasingly important in the government’s eyes as a source of stability in the railways. They were rarely allowed into the top echelons of the hierarchy, but they filled many middle-grade posts and were paid at rates between those of European and Indian workers. For the most part, they were fiercely loyal to the Raj and ‘became the key passenger and mail train operatives and strike breakers’.30 There was no little irony here. Some of the Eurasians were nothing of the sort and were pure-bred Indians who decided to go European if they were light-skinned or could point to some distant white ancestor. Sometimes they managed to become ‘Eurasian’ by virtue of obtaining a supervisory job and then gradually adopting European mores and mixing with Eurasians, a kind of polar opposite of ‘going native’. There were obvious advantages in doing this thanks to the Eurasians’ higher earning capacity and better living conditions.
The encouragement of more Eurasians into the industry did not resolve the industrial-relations issues that had been festering for many years. In fact, quite the opposite. In 1906, for example, there were strikes against several railway companies across India. On the East Indian Railway in July, there was a strike by clerks of the traffic and locomotive departments at Asansol in West Bengal, which led to the formation of a union but was quickly defeated. The railway dismissed 206 men for failing to fulfil their duty and endangering the public by striking, while those who stayed at work were rewarded with medals. At Kharagpur, a major workshop in West Bengal, the workers in the carriage construction department struck for better pay and increased grain allowances. The relationship of the small number of Eurasian and European staff with the Indians remained strained, not least because of the latter’s dissatisfaction at the lack of opportunities for promotion. As the Acworth Committee, which reported just after the First World War, put it, ‘the 7,000 [Eurasian and European workers] were like a thin film of oil on the top of a glass of water, resting upon but hardly mixing with the 700,000 [Indian workers] below’.
Inevitably, the strikes became part of a wider political movement. As the authorities feared, swadeshi – political agitators – helped stir up these disputes, and while most disputes were undoubtedly based on well-founded grievances, they were seen as an opportunity by nationalists to garner support for their cause. The swadeshi were not averse to resorting to unscrupulous tactics in attempts to force out those reluctant strikers. Laura Bear recounts that ‘those who didn’t strike were threatened with being made to eat cow or pig flesh, according to their Hindu or Muslim origins’.31 There were even piles of cow bones strategically placed along the roads to the workshops to throw at potential scabs. The strikes could last for quite a long time as the workers received outside support, and while the particular battles tended to end in failure, the accumulation of industrial action in many parts of the country, together with the authorities’ fear that it would lead to wider political discontent, meant they did result in gradual improvements in pay and conditions. As we shall see in the next chapter, one consequence of the unions becoming stronger and more politicized was that the outbreaks of industrial unrest inevitably became increasingly entangled with the nationalist cause.