SEVEN
NOT ALWAYS LOVED
THE RAILWAYS WERE not only the country’s largest industry and biggest employer, but also a visible and physical demonstration of colonial rule. By the turn of the century, through merger and expansion, the railway companies had become extremely powerful entities and the government responded by launching an inquiry into the administration and working of the railways. The period from the beginning of the century up to Independence was characterized by numerous such government-inspired inquiries and commissions into various aspects of the operation and development of the railways, stimulated by the ever-present feeling that the railways were not functioning effectively. There was, too, constant angst in government circles, in both India and Britain, about the relationship between the state and the railways. In the event, the early decades of the twentieth century would see a gradual strengthening of government control over the railways as their importance to the Indian economy grew and as the way they were run attracted increasing criticism from those seeking independence. The process of nationalization and consolidation into a single entity was to prove inexorable, and one by one the major companies were subsumed into state ownership. The constant tinkering with administrative aspects of the railways was a reflection of a far greater concern about their operation.
The government-inspired inquiries were invariably undertaken by advisers or experts from the UK, which gave their findings more credibility and resulted in a greater expectation of their recommendations being implemented. The first was undertaken just after the turn of the century by Sir Thomas Robertson, who was later described rather unkindly by J. N. Westwood, in his short history of Indian railways, as ‘one of those experts who became so familiar in the mid-twentieth century: men of no particular talent but regarded with some awe in underdeveloped countries’. Westwood went on to say that the result was a report produced after ‘months of agreeable all-expenses travel’ which consisted of ‘an ill-written string of platitudes’ resembling ‘the work of a first year undergraduate’.1
Nevertheless, parts of the report, published in 1903, were to prove influential. Its central recommendation, which was to transfer oversight of the railways from the Indian Public Works Department to a newly created three-member Railway Board, was swiftly implemented by the government, an arrangement that would survive, in various guises, to this day. The idea was that the Board would establish some order out of the complex structure of ownership and control in the railways, with their myriad different, and at times conflicting, arrangements. The creation of the Board gave railway managers a measure of independence, though the Board still reported to the Government of India’s Department of Commerce and Industry. Robertson also highlighted the fact that there was not enough investment in the railway system to ensure it was in good working order, let alone to keep up with growing demands for extra capacity, and therefore suggested the establishment of a railway capital fund, managed by the new Board, both to maintain the existing system of lines and build new ones.
Robertson’s effort was quickly followed by a report by Sir James Mackay (clearly a knighthood was a key qualification for this type of work) which, oddly, given the new regime had only just bedded in, sought to free the Railway Board from the daily oversight of the Department of Commerce and Industry and give it more independence from government. This was the start of the creation of a national rail network, owned by the government and managed by a relatively independent board, that would take until four years after Independence to come fully into fruition.
The colonial power’s attitude could be put, in modern parlance, as ‘What is there not to like about the railways?’ After all, the railways enabled millions to travel cheaply and rapidly, they created massive employment, they helped modernize India, boosted the economy and were a source of pride for its people. That, of course, only told half the story and it was inevitable that criticisms of the iron road helped stimulate the nascent nationalist movement and would play a part in its rise.
Nationalism had its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century. Following the 1857 Rebellion, a political movement for independence began to emerge among the more educated and westernized Indian middle classes. Its most significant manifestation was the establishment of the Indian National Congress in 1885. Congress was initially more a debating society than a political party, meeting annually and making gentle suggestions to the government, which mostly ignored them. By 1900, however, it had established itself across the nation as a political organization, though it was undermined by the fact it did not attract Muslim support.
Other political forces were stirring, some motivated by religious causes, others by radical, principally left-leaning, ideology. A key event which stimulated protest was the decision by Lord Curzon to partition Bengal in 1905; he felt the province was too large to administer properly but he also sought to split apart the two main religious groups. His decision resulted in the separation of the largely Hindu western part from the Muslim-dominated east and angered the more-educated sections of Hindu society, who, rightly, saw it as an attempt to curb growing nationalism and to reduce the influence of Bengal in national politics. It was part of a wider British strategy to encourage the Muslim and Hindu populations to identify with their religion rather than their country in order to weaken pressure for independence. In other words, it was another example of that great British colonial strategy of ‘divide and rule’. Even though the decision was reversed six years later, partition of Bengal was to remain a cause célèbre, and, indeed, the state would be divided again in 1947 when East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, was hewn out of India.
As the most potent symbol of the rule of the Raj, the way the railways were owned and operated was an early nationalist cause. This hostility to the iron road exhibited itself at two levels – a growing feeling among the educated classes that the railways were built solely in the interests of British commerce while being paid for largely by Indian taxpayers, and an increasing awareness among the masses travelling on them that they were being systematically mistreated. The railways were an easy target for the nationalists who exploited their failings to the full, as pointed out in a paper by two Indian historians: ‘The imperial rulers of course presented the introduction of railways as a great boon to India, made possible by its association with Britain … The Indian nationalists bought none of this. A critique of railway policy was an integral part of economic nationalism, the foundational phase of the Indian national movement.’2
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the nationalists were concerned that India had missed out on the economic development that the railways had stimulated in many other countries. Worse, there was a feeling that the advent of the railways had disrupted the economic ecology of India. Because the arrival of the railways had not been accompanied by a rapid upsurge in economic development, the destruction of indigenous handicraft industries by cheaper imports transported by rail was not matched, as had happened elsewhere, by the creation of new alternative jobs. The economist Mahadev Govind Ranade, a member of the Indian National Congress, summed up the argument by saying that the railway had not ‘only made competition with Europe more hopeless over larger areas, and facilitated the conveyance of foreign goods’, but had also ‘killed our local indigenous industries and made people more helpless than before by increasing their dependence and pressure on agriculture as their only resource’.3
To add to the complaints, many of the blue-collar and manual jobs associated with the railways, such as coalmining and steelwork, went to British-based companies, which therefore meant there were none of the sort of ‘multiplier’ effects that stimulate rapid growth and are at the root of Keynesian economics. As a result, the railways were accused of being responsible for much of the destitution found in rural areas, where traditional industries had been wiped out by competition enabled by the railways.
The nationalists argued, too, that because much of the capital came from Britain, the overall impact of the railways on the Indian economy was to shift money out of the subcontinent. Not only did this take place in the form of dividends and debt interest, which was the case in many other countries where the railways were built by foreign investors, but the Indians were additionally penalized because payments had to be made in pounds and the rupee was in a permanent state of decline against sterling. India’s balance of payments suffered further through having to pay for imported materials and for the services of European staff, who, as noted previously, took most of the top jobs, which, of course, created another source of resentment when these well-paid employees sent remittances back home. The overall effect on the Indian taxpayer, too, was largely negative since the railways required considerable subsidy and the nationalists were particularly critical of the guarantee arrangements because of the drain on India’s finances. However, this argument lost much of its force at the beginning of the 1900s when the overall financial situation of the railways improved so much that, taken as a whole, they began to make a profit, which meant, for the most part, they were no longer a burden on the Indian taxpayer. Even then, however, some of the guaranteed railways still required subsidy to pay the shareholders, as did new railways being built at the instigation of British-controlled companies and the London government.
The more violent elements among the nationalists started a campaign of sabotage against the railways in 1907, mostly concentrated in Bengal because of the widespread anger over Partition. There were repeated attempts to blow up trains carrying Andrew Fraser, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and during one such attack it was only by luck that his carriage stayed on the tracks despite being bent by the force of the explosion. There was also a series of attacks on trains carrying valuable consignments which were stolen to fund the nationalist cause. As with other periods of terrorist activity, it was difficult at times to determine whether these acts of dacoity (banditry) were perpetrated for political or simply criminal reasons. Either way, there was a sharp rise in such attacks in the years running up to the First World War, which caused enormous concern in government circles.
As ever, overreaction from the authorities stirred up further anger. A series of bombs thrown at trains in 1908 led the Eastern Bengal State Railway to establish a special patrol on the section of line around the Dum Dum junction on the outskirts of Calcutta, where most of the attacks had taken place. While this was a fairly unremarkable response, the fact that the annual cost of 75,000 rupees had to be financed through a special levy on local residents living within two miles of the line raised widespread resentment.
In 1908, the authorities responded with legislation that provided for harsher penalties for offenders carrying explosives, but it was not until the introduction of the more draconian Defence of India Act in 1915, which was specifically aimed at curtailing nationalist activity, that the outbreak of railway sabotage ceased, albeit temporarily. Inevitably, though, the repressive new legislation, which lapsed after the war, created yet more dissent and anger among the Indian population.
While the violent attacks on the railways abated during the war, the verbal ones did not. Bit by bit, the nationalists unpicked the arguments in favour of the railways. Interestingly, however, few of the critics of the railways suggested they should not have been built at all. Quite the opposite. They generally supported the creation of the network as an important modernizing force, but were critical of the way the development of the railways had favoured British interests and exploited local people.
One important line of thinking was that too much money had been spent on railways rather than on other potential ways of stimulating economic development. The most obvious example, according to the nationalists, was the failure to invest sufficiently in irrigation. Ensuring a supply of water, rather than constructing railways, was the key to increasing agricultural production and thereby reducing the risk of starvation and providing food security. This was particularly true of the period between 1892 and 1905, when the expansion of the railway system was at its peak, with nearly 1,000 miles added to the network in each of those years. These lines were not necessarily remunerative and this spurt in growth of the network angered the nationalists. Should the money not have been better spent on other investment? The railways, after all, were not delivering the wider economic benefits for the rest of society and were not the catalyst for economic take-off as they had been elsewhere. The railways, they argued, absorbed much available capital that could have been used to improve other parts of the Indian economy, notably agriculture.
The nationalists set the railways and irrigation against each other by arguing that both were large capital projects that were potential remedies for famine. Irrigation, they suggested, went to the heart of the problem of intermittent food deficiencies, while railways were a mere palliative, as they simply were used to transfer produce from one area to the other. Yet, in the early 1900s, far more money went on improving the railways than was invested in irrigation projects. Worse, according to critics, the whole focus of government activity and the attention of politicians were centred on the railways. As R. M. Sayani, the president of the India National Congress, argued in the Viceroy’s Legislative Council in 1898, ‘While railways absorb so large a measure of Government attention, irrigation canals, which are far more protective against famine, are allowed only … one thirteenth of the amount spent on the railways each year.’4 Irrigation works could, too, be financially far more rewarding than the railways, offering annual returns of between 6 and 9 per cent, according to contemporary economists. The most common explanation for the difference in levels of investment gave easy ammunition to the supporters of the nationalist cause, as expressed by R. C. Dutt, the prominent economic historian: ‘Preference was given to railways which facilitated British trade with India and not to canals which would have benefited Indian agriculture.’5
Simplistic, perhaps, but difficult to deny. The Viceroy, Lord Curzon, however, tried to counter these arguments in a speech introducing his 1900/1901 budget, when he argued that irrigation of desert tracts only encouraged population growth, thereby exacerbating food pressures. He insisted on pressing on with the railway expansion plans in order to ensure that remote parts of the hinterland were connected with the system. He did, nevertheless, appoint an Irrigation Commission, which recommended, in its report published in 1903, an increase in the area of irrigated land, but not on a scale sufficient to meet the complaints of the nationalists.
Rather ironically, the construction of railways through agricultural land actually created antagonism and tensions in some of the very rural areas they were designed to help because of the need to build embankments to protect the railway from flooding. As was often the case in India, what was supposed to happen in theory differed starkly from the reality. Embankments to raise the level of the track above the surrounding countryside were widely used in hilly terrain since railways require as level a surface as possible. Even where the topography was relatively flat, such as on the Gangetic plain, embankments were required to protect the railway from flash flooding in the monsoon period. However, it was a requirement under the legislation through which railways were built that the inevitable damage that the embankments caused to local drainage had to be alleviated by the companies through the construction of tunnels, culverts and drains. The local authorities were supposed to enforce this regulation by ensuring that sufficient infrastructure was provided by the railway company, but, as Ritika Prasad notes, ‘this legal mandate notwithstanding, railway embankments continued to be built with inadequate waterways; sometimes, railway administrations closed off or blocked waterways that had been sanctioned and built’.6
The railway companies were supposedly responsible for damage to agricultural land resulting from their embankments or from their actions in blocking water courses, but they were frequently able to wriggle out of making any payments because of the complex issue of determining the precise cause of such incidents. The companies even argued at times that the embankments acted as dams, preventing damage to the side of the line that did not flood.
Disputes over the damage from flooding caused by railway embankments were almost as old as the railway in India itself. Ritika Prasad cites an account from Burdwan in West Bengal, where the line, built by the East Indian Railway, caused massive flooding by the Damodar River. The local paper, the Urdu Guide, described the damage as unprecedented and extensive: ‘Thousands of dwellings have fallen, hundreds of lives been lost, countless number of cattle and a large quantity of grain been destroyed’, and was unequivocal about where the blame lay as the people living in the villages ‘had never dreamt of such dangers and losses, before the construction of the railway’.7 There were numerous other similar cases stretching well into the twentieth century and at times local people did manage to obtain compensation. For example, the Oudh & Rohilkund Railway was deemed responsible for severe floods in the Ramgana valley in Uttar Pradesh caused by the embankment blocking the normal drainage and, in 1873, was required to pay more than 5,000 rupees in compensation, as well as being forced to rectify the situation.
At other times, local people took matters into their own hands, which led to serious unrest. In August 1917, a group of 500 local farmers, angered by repeated flooding, tried to destroy several sections of the railway embankment of the Bengal & North Western Railway in the Monghyr District of northern Bihar. The embankment had long been a source of grievance to local people, who had complained that there were not enough drainage courses beneath the railway to allow for the free flow of water. In 1915, there had been exceptionally heavy rainfall and a branch line built over a dried-up stream, a tributary of the Ganges, had caused a flood, which local villagers complained had swept away their cattle and would have drowned them had it not been for the intervention of the local district magistrate, who arranged boats to convey them to safety. The railway argued that the damage was merely the result of the normal vagaries of the weather, rather than the fault of the embankments. Even though a magistrate subsequently endorsed the villagers’ complaints, the railway refused to act, arguing that additional culverts would undermine the whole embankment, and the local authorities refused to press the company to resolve the problem. Indeed, the railway’s actions in trying to prevent erosion of its embankments exacerbated the situation.
Further floods in the subsequent two years spurred the local people into action. When floodwaters rose again in August 1917, hundreds of local villagers organized themselves in several groups aiming to breach the embankment in a number of different places. They targeted the main line of the railway, which ran parallel with the Ganges at a height of around eight to ten feet and was clearly causing drainage problems since the water was several feet higher on the Ganges side. The authorities got wind of the attack and fired shots to disperse the protestors, but not before several breaches in the embankment had been made, partly as a result of their action but also as a result of the sheer scale of the inundation. The railway was blamed for blocking culverts, claiming it was necessary in order to prevent the line being washed away, but clearly this made things worse. The authorities were split about what to do, with some local police being sympathetic to the cause of the villagers whose crops were being wrecked, pushing them into destitution. The more senior district officials, however, tended to side with the railway company, but eventually decided that its action in blocking culverts was illegal and should not have been done without permission from the local authorities. Some prosecutions for sabotage under the Railways Act were initiated but it was difficult for the authorities to find the culprits, especially as most people had fled the floods by the time they tried to make arrests.
The dispute continued locally for several years and similar events occurred elsewhere, notably in Rajashahi in northern Bengal in 1922, where an incident came to the attention of Meghnad Saha, a noted astrophysicist who was several times nominated for a Nobel Prize. The floods that year were particularly heavy and destroyed the local paddy fields, which can withstand gradual flooding but not the onset of massive amounts of water. The subsequent investigations exonerated the railways, blaming heavy rain, but Saha, who was involved in the flood relief programme that followed, pointed out that similar heavy floods in 1871 had receded very quickly, saving the crops, whereas in 1922 the waters remained high for a long time. He argued that the railway embankment effectively acted as a dam and that the report blaming heavy rain was ‘an ill-concealed attempt to blame nature instead of railways’. There was no doubt, he said, that ‘ultimately the peasant was sacrificed to railway interests’.8 His teacher, P. C. Ray, went further and blamed the British owners of the railway companies for refusing to build the required culverts and bridges: ‘The fact is that railway lines are always constructed with an eye to the interest of foreign shareholder. The less the cost, greater the expectation of dividend.’9 Consequently, proposals for new railways in Bengal, particularly in the lowlands, attracted widespread opposition, as the Railway Gazette found that ‘any demand for further extension for railways in Bengal, especially for those railways running across the general line of the country, will meet with considerable criticism’.10
Clashes over flooding caused by the railways continued throughout the interwar period. In some areas, a game of cat and mouse between the police and villagers took place nightly during heavy rains as the authorities tried to stop local people opening culverts or breaching the embankments. As late as 1939, 36 local people were convicted of causing damage to the railway by breaching the embankment on two branch lines of the Eastern Bengal Railway in West Bengal, despite the fact that they said that the embankment had ruined their crops. (Interestingly, the same issue is arising in several parts of India today with the construction of new highways on embankments that are causing similar damage as those built for the railways.)
Floods caused by railway embankments were not the only type of environmental degradation laid at the feet of the railways, as Ritika Prasad notes: ‘The disruption caused by railway embankments was part of the profound and long-lasting impact that a range of colonial projects of “improvement” had on India’s natural environment’.11 In particular, the railways required vast quantities of wood, especially in the early days of construction, when it was needed for sleepers and other parts of the construction process, as well as for fuel, since many early locomotives were wood-burning. Parts of the Himalayan forest as well as forests in the Upper Ganges and Indus basins were devastated; Paul Varady, an American professor of environmental policy, has written that the railways were ‘agents of deforestation’ which helped cause soil erosion.
If these environmental considerations at times raised hostility against the railways, anger from the railway passengers about the depredations of travelling on the railways proved to be a far more potent force in creating a general sense of dissatisfaction about the rule of the Raj. One notable source of discontent was the treatment of pilgrims. Pilgrimage had long been a feature of the subcontinent’s history, conducted not only by followers of the main religions, Hinduism and Islam, but also by Sikhs, Jains and others. The numbers, even before the railway age, were large, but travelling was difficult and only a minority, mostly those relatively well-off, were able to undertake such journeys. The railways radically improved the experience of travel: rather than weeks on bullock cart and foot, the pilgrims could take a train journey for a few days at the most.
However, their experience of train travel was no picnic either. The high demand at particular times of the year meant that every available carriage had to be called into use, even those that were rotting in sidings during the rest of the time. Worse, many pilgrims suffered the indignity of travelling in covered freight wagons. These were not only dirty, since they were normally used for livestock and perishable goods, but had no sanitary facilities and ventilation in the worst type was only provided by keeping the side door open. As mentioned in Chapter 5, there had been some use of these on normal-service trains, particularly in fourth class, but the railways had phased them out for routine timetabled traffic. However, freight wagons continued to be used for pilgrims because the companies claimed that there was no other way of meeting demand of travel to holy places at peak times. This was not entirely true, since despite claims by the railway companies that these wagons were only deployed at the busiest times, Ritika Prasad found that ‘the phenomenon was more widespread. Passengers continued to be transported in “pilgrim specials” and “mela [festival] rakes” even when visiting places of pilgrimage that attracted people all the year round’.12
The local pilgrim committees, which were official bodies appointed in 1912, were highly critical of the use of these wagons, particularly because they had no sanitary facilities and it was inevitable that the wagons soon became major sources of infection. Nevertheless, the railway companies insisted on retaining this primitive form of accommodation and justified their decision with the usual obfuscation: ‘The NWR [North Western Railway] argued there was as much danger of infection in a passenger carriage as in a wagon, while the EIR [East Indian Railway] insisted that seats would increase the discomfort of passengers and wooden wagons were harder to disinfect and thus more likely to carry disease.’13 Several other railways, such as the Oudh & Rohilkund, the Madras & Southern Mahratta, and the Bombay, Baroda & Central India, were still using them during the period of the First World War, while the South Indian Railway was one of the few which overtly eschewed their use, despite overcrowding during pilgrimages.
Pressure from the committees led to the companies no longer using steel wagons without ventilation, which were clearly unsuitable in the summer heat. However, for the most part, the railway companies’ response was much like their earlier excuses about not providing toilets and cramming people into third-class carriages, arguing that these were the conditions in which local people were content to travel. This attitude was summed up neatly by the suggestion from the directors of the narrow-gauge Barsi Light Railway that the pilgrims on the way to Pandharpur (in Maharashtra) for the Vithoba temple were lucky to have an extra – and consequently cheap – way of travel that was denied to their European counterparts.
The pressure on the companies during the final years of the First World War not to use these wagons intensified after the end of the conflict and resulted in an agreement that they would only be deployed when there was genuinely no alternative. The Railway Board tried to discourage the operation of these wagons by requiring the companies to report every occasion they were deployed, but these records show clearly that they were used right up to Independence. Some companies resorted to charging pilgrims a premium, usually one anna, to provide better sanitary facilities, an arrangement that caused particular anger among passengers who thought they were being asked to pay for their religious beliefs.
The pilgrims and other passengers travelling in conventional third-class accommodation fared better, but conditions were by no means ideal and frequently led to complaints. As early as 1873, a doctor, M. C. Furnell, recounted the scene at Allahabad when his train stopped to pick up many pilgrims: ‘The confusion, noise and apparent helplessness of the people surpassed anything I have ever seen.’14 He went on to describe how the pilgrims, mostly elderly, were packed rather brutally by the British guard into the carriages until the train ‘swallowed the crowd … like a gorged boa constrictor’. He was rather shocked that when he pointed out to a European guard that the pilgrims were in some difficulties, the somewhat cheery response was that the ‘pilgrims is worse than ’osses, Sir’.
This type of treatment seems to have been routine well into the twentieth century. The advent of the railways may have made the pilgrims’ journey a lot faster, but not much more pleasant. Various petitions sent to the Viceroy from pilgrim organizations in 1914 replicated many earlier complaints about their treatment. The overcrowding and unsanitary conditions caused a range of problems. There was the ever-present fear of sexual impropriety and breaches of caste sensibilities, with one petition describing ‘the promiscuous huddling together’ entailed in railway journeys and stressing how such proximity left Hindu pilgrims ‘unable to eat or even drink water because people of other castes were present in the same compartment’.15 There were well-founded concerns, too, that disease would be spread by the cramped conditions and the failure by the companies to clean carriages. In response to this threat, the Government of India hired the internationally renowned rail travel company Thomas Cook and Son to improve facilities for pilgrims and to help them whilst in transit at stations. The arrangement, which began in 1886, lasted for seven years and, as Ian Kerr points out, was an ‘ironic effort’: ‘The English firm that pioneered tourist travel (including the use of railways for excursions) in its modern form, a Christian firm (Thomas Cook was devout) headquartered in London, had been given the task of facilitating the performance of the hajj by South-Asian Moslems.’16 Thomas Cook’s involvement petered out when fewer pilgrims sought to use the company’s services.
The privations of the journey did not prevent a significant increase in the numbers travelling to pay their respects to the gods once they were able to travel by train. The railways gave an opportunity for hundreds of thousands of new pilgrims, but, as we have seen, the companies made little effort to make the journeys of these pilgrims bearable. Mahatma Gandhi, in fact, was rather scathing about these new pilgrims, suggesting that, without going through the hardship of a long walk or journey on a bullock cart, the experience of worship was degraded. This seemed rather unfair. Holy places were now able to attract the old and the infirm who would not have been able to travel on the arduous roads. More women, too, became pilgrims because the trip took less time, ensuring they could return to their domestic duties more quickly, and because they could travel more safely.
The railway companies may not have treated the pilgrims well but they realized that pilgrimages were a good earner and ran publicity campaigns in conjunction with religious groups to attract greater numbers. In 1911, the Railway Board published a guide, strangely in English, a language spoken by few pilgrims, to places of pilgrimage, and there were occasional features in the Indian State Railways Magazine. Enterprising companies like the Bengal Nagpur Railway encouraged pilgrim travel to particular festivals by handing out leaflets in villages accompanied by the beating of drums. In the 1930s, there were even films produced by the Central Publicity Bureau of Indian Railways ‘encouraging travel to pilgrim centres’, to be screened in travelling cinema cars on the state-managed railways, though clearly these were aimed at the more affluent potential pilgrims. At the other end of the scale, ‘handbills, pamphlets and posters in the languages of South Asia were displayed and distributed at stations, municipal and local board offices and at schools in a context where the literate few could spread the message to the illiterate many’.17 The 1933/4 annual report by the Railway Board was enthusiastic about the fact that the attempts to foster pilgrim traffic had resulted ‘in a remarkable improvement over other years’. The railways were, in a way, the victims of their own success in stimulating pilgrimages.
As with so many aspects of the advent of the railway, its influence was transformational of the nature and extent of pilgrimages. The ability to travel by train to holy sites did not just allow far greater numbers of travellers – it revolutionized the very nature of the experience of pilgrimage. Numbers increased exponentially: ‘Railways were the mechanism, the necessary if not sufficient cause of mass pilgrimage.’18 This was the case right from the outset. In 1846, a surveyor for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway had, three years before the line was approved, undertaken a study into the fares that potential pilgrims would be prepared to pay in order to replace a ninety-two-mile journey by bullock cart with a railway journey taking a matter of hours. The holy sites also changed radically, expanding rapidly to cater for greater numbers. Moreover, the pilgrimage season grew as people no longer travelled in groups to arrive for specific holy days, but, instead, came at different times throughout the year. The holy days remained the busiest period, but the huge increase in numbers meant that many places attracted visitors all year round rather than solely at peak times. Pilgrimages became even more of a business than previously – although in truth there had always been a commercial side to the phenomenon.
Pilgrimages became bound up with another aspect of train travel that was to prove oppressive and attract much criticism from the Indian masses: the attempts to stop the railways becoming the means by which infectious diseases were transmitted across the subcontinent. The prevalence of disease had been largely dismissed in the days of the East India Company as merely one of the penalties of life in the tropics. However, during the Rebellion of 1857, many garrisons were undermanned because soldiers were struck down with disease, and the soldiers’ propensity to be ill increased when they travelled. Restricting the spread of disease, therefore, became an important part of military strategy, as Mark Harrison, the author of a book on the colonial public-health programme, explains: ‘Public health provisions in British India grew out of, and continued to be shaped by, anxieties aroused by the Indian mutiny of 1857; particularly the unhealthy state of British troops.’19 The greater good of the native population did not seem to have been a factor in these concerns.
The railways were perceived by the authorities as responsible for the spread of disease, and, therefore, during epidemics stringent control measures were imposed, to the great disquiet of passengers. This response to fears about the spread of disease resulted in travellers being treated as potential carriers who were submitted to a range of indignities. The railways acted as a kind of medical police force, imposing inhumane rules on those seeking to travel in areas affected by disease.
The authorities had become convinced that it was not a coincidence that the increase in the extent and severity of epidemics of cholera and plague in the second half of the nineteenth century happened simultaneously with the growth of the railways. There were lengthy debates about the precise mechanism by which the railways increased contagion of diseases. The numerous cholera epidemics across the subcontinent in the second half of the nineteenth century had led to epidemiologists analysing the source of these outbreaks. There were strong advocates on both sides – ‘contagionists’, who believed the railways were responsible, and ‘non-contagionists’, who pointed out that many areas reached easily by the railways did not have outbreaks of the disease and, commensurately, epidemics occurred in places with a sparse or little-used rail network. One of those most vehemently opposed to the idea that the railways spread cholera was the government’s sanitary commissioner, J. M. Cunningham, who concluded in his 1875 report that ‘over great parts of the country in which cholera was most severe, there are no railways and the roads are often indifferent’.20
There was naked politics at play here. Cunningham’s assertion was rather at odds with contemporary medical thinking and he was accused of pandering to the needs of the railway companies, which would have been hard hit by quarantine measures and, at a higher level, the needs of Britain’s free-trade policies, as foreign governments would be reluctant to take goods from India. As Ritika Prasad concludes, ‘questions about how quarantine would affect free trade were a staple in discussions about how transport technologies disseminated disease’,21 and, indeed, it was around the time the report was compiled in the mid-1870s that a substantial increase in railway mileage was taking place. Despite Cunningham’s report, by the 1890s the notion that increased train travel was, at least partly, responsible for spreading disease had taken hold. In fact, it is now known that cholera spread by contaminated water and food, and the mortality of local people is greatly increased in areas of famine as undernourished people do not have resistance to the disease. In reality, it is rare for the disease to be transmitted from person to person and therefore Cunningham was largely correct, even if he did not know why.
Plague was a different matter. The Bombay plague epidemic, which began in 1896, resulted in the setting up of inspection areas at many railway stations on several different railways across the nation. Although it was not until after the First World War that the precise nature of the transmission of plague through rat fleas was fully understood, there were suspicions that the railways facilitated its spread. Indeed, railways carried several possible transmitters, including sick passengers, rats, and merchandise or belongings with infected secretions. The authorities realized that a total land quarantine, cutting off Bombay from the rest of the country, was impossible and therefore focused their attention on the railways, or rather, specifically, on the passengers travelling in and out of the city.
The examinations carried out at these inspection areas were in many respects humiliating as they were often performed in an insensitive manner by heavy-handed European sanitary inspectors with little medical training. Essentially, once passengers got on their trains, they became prisoners of the railway and sanitary authorities. Complex rules setting out the process for inspection were issued and resulted in a degrading procedure, frequently involving long waits – and consequently delays – while examinations were carried out, sometimes in public. The carriage doors of trains were locked from the outside between inspection stations to prevent uncontrolled exits. On arrival, all passengers had to disembark onto the platform, with police watching for any attempts to leave the train on the trackside. Men and women were separated, with the latter being taken behind screens for privacy, where they were examined by female medical staff, some of whom were seconded from the Salvation Army. Particular attention was paid at the inspections to people who looked poor or were wearing dirty clothes. The medical staff had wide discretion in selecting those whose belongings they thought needed disinfection. Passengers refusing to be screened were considered ‘contumacious’ and were at risk of being locked in the carriage that was sent to a siding as a form of punitive quarantine.
The examinations offended the cultural and religious sensibilities of local people. The standard procedure consisted of checking people’s glands near the ear as well as the inside thigh, the armpit and the groin, all parts of the body which could reveal the swellings that are a telltale sign of plague infection. Even being touched by a white person or someone of a different caste would be seen as defiling, and such intimate contact was clearly deeply objectionable to many. Any passengers with signs of fever were detained and sent to be quarantined for seven days, while their goods were disinfected, with no compensation being offered for any damage or loss. Trains were only allowed to proceed once the medical officer had signed off the paperwork. Any coaches that had carried infected passengers were taken out of commission for ten days after being disinfected with a mixture of carbolic acid and water.
Not surprisingly, many passengers resented this intrusive examination and did everything possible to avoid it, such as hiding in carriages or trying to leave stations without being checked. The examinations were perceived by many as part of the British attempt to control the population. The railway companies, some still in the private sector, suffered during this period because not only did these indignities put people off travelling, but also the government discouraged unnecessary travel and tried to restrict the use of the railways. Passengers arriving from stations in areas listed as being at risk of plague were asked to provide detailed information about themselves, such as names and addresses and reason for travelling. This information could be followed up by local-authority officials and village headmen, and therefore large parts of India were effectively turned into a police state, with the railways as the main instrument of surveillance. The native population understandably felt that there was a punitive aspect to the whole process.
The quarantine hospitals were racially segregated, and different classes of Indians were also separated, with better accommodation offered to the more ‘respectable’ natives. Hospitalization and segregation often led to those selected for further examination losing their job and livelihoods, and, in order to avoid the searches, victims were frequently smuggled out and hidden in their own houses. Moreover, false rumours about the medical process spread rapidly through the population, such as claims that Western doctors killed Indians for experimental purposes, and that inoculation, which was developed by Waldemar Haffkine, a pioneering medical scientist, at the instigation of the Government of India, would lead to death or impotence (interestingly, similar rumours about vaccines are still prevalent today in polio and smallpox campaigns). There were even suggestions that the needles used were a yard long.
There was, too, opposition within government circles, both in India and in the UK. Partly, the objections were motivated by economic considerations, given the damaging effect on a key industry, but there were also complaints from pressure groups in the UK and from more affluent sections of Indian society (those travelling in first and second class were often – but by no means always – exempted from screening), aghast at the treatment of their poorer countrymen. Harrison notes that: ‘The desire to sanitise the Indian population, most evident among the military and certain officers of the IMS [Indian Medical Service], was held in check by financial considerations, logistical difficulties, and by opposition from British humanitarians and Indian elites.’22
None of these harsh measures proved very effective in countering disease. In the event, very few passengers were detained, and of those only a small percentage developed the disease. Government officials claimed the low number of infections discovered among railway passengers was the result of lack of cooperation, but in reality the very nature of the campaign was ill-conceived from the outset. The railways were not the main agents of dissemination and the plague continued to spread throughout the country. The railway companies were often reluctant to follow the stringent and detailed regulations concerning the spread of disease that had been set out in the Railways Act 1890 and resisted the imposition of inspection areas. The Great Indian Peninsula Railway, in particular, fought a long rearguard action against the government over being required to burn upholstery in any first- or second-class accommodation that had carried infected passengers.
The railways could, however, be held partly responsible for epidemics of cholera and plague that spread through groups of pilgrims in the early twentieth century. In this case, the terrible practice, mentioned above, of using goods wagons to carry pilgrims undoubtedly contributed, given their unsanitary condition, to the spread of disease.
While it was third-class passengers who bore the brunt of the discriminatory practices of the rail companies, elite Indians were not immune to suffering other types of railway-induced humiliation. And occasionally they got their revenge. An amusing but significant anecdote is the story of a journey in a first-class sleeper by Sir Asutosh Mukherjee, who, arriving before the other occupant, bagged the bottom bunk, which most people favour, and went to sleep. Later, when a British passenger who had booked into the same compartment arrived, he objected to sharing the cabin with an Indian, let alone having to use the top bunk. Spying Mukherjee’s sandals, which looked well-used, he threw them out of the window of the train and went up to his bed. Mukherjee, however, clearly noticed what had happened, because when the Englishman awoke, he found his jacket missing. After being questioned by his fellow passenger, Mukherjee replied, ‘your coat has gone to fetch my slippers’.23 The Englishman had failed to realize that Mukherjee was particularly distinguished – he was the first Indian to serve as chief justice at the Calcutta High Court and as vice-chancellor of Calcutta University. There were many such examples of British passengers objecting to sharing accommodation with Indians, even when they had paid the fare to travel in premium classes.
Given all the indignities suffered by Indian rail passengers, it was not surprising that the most skilled politician of the nationalist movement, Gandhi, exploited the widespread antagonism towards the railways. Early in his career, he had expressed criticism of the very existence of the railways. His influential book Hind Swaraj (Indian Home Rule), published in 1909, was an attack on modernism and he considered railways to be a particularly malign influence. The book is written as an interrogation between ‘The Editor’ and ‘The Reader’. The Reader is the ordinary Indian, curious about various aspects of the country’s history and politics, while the Editor is Gandhi himself, setting out his views and vision. The discussion soon turns to the railways after the Editor warns that ‘Railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished the country so much so that, if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined’, a deliberately ironic comment, given that Gandhi himself was a lawyer.24 In a long section Gandhi cites all the objections to the railways mentioned in this chapter. He suggests that the railways spread the bubonic plague, and increased the incidence of famines, as people were able to sell excess grain on the open market rather than locally. As mentioned above, Gandhi averred that the railways had cheapened the notion of pilgrimage and accentuated the evil nature of man because bad men were enabled to fulfil their nefarious designs with greater rapidity: ‘The holy places of India have become unholy. Formerly, people went to these places with very great difficulty. Generally, therefore, only the real devotees visited such places. Nowadays rogues visit them in order to practice their roguery.’25 This was part of a wider denunciation of modern society in which Gandhi felt the role of the railways was to propagate evil. Questioned by his interlocutor as to why they did not spread ‘good’ as well, he replied that ‘Good travels at a snail’s pace – it can, therefore, have little to do with the railways. Those who want to do good are not selfish, they are not in a hurry, they know that to impregnate people with good requires a long time.’26 Above all, the railways were the reason for the continued occupation of India by the British: ‘but for the railways, the English could not have such a hold on India as they have’.27
More pertinent was Gandhi’s famous letter to the railway authorities, written in 1917, two years after his return from twenty years in South Africa, in which he sets out, with some wit, his criticisms of the railways. Gandhi made a point of travelling with the people, in third class, although, as a lawyer, he could well have afforded better accommodation. Remarkably, he claimed to have spent a quarter of his time since his return travelling on the railways, an insight into their importance as a means of transport but also to their slowness. In the letter, addressed to the editor of The Leader, and later issued as a pamphlet, he took the railway companies to task over the way they breached the rules on passenger numbers and cleanliness.
He describes the discomfort and overcrowding during a trip of 750 miles from Bombay to Madras that required two overnight stays. It showed how the conditions in which people had to travel had changed little since the nineteenth century. Indeed, because there was a massive increase in passenger numbers in the period running up to the First World War, conditions, if anything, were worse. He describes how, initially, until Poona, 120 miles from Bombay, there were not more than the specified limit of twenty-two passengers in his carriage, but, after that, despite the efforts of his travelling companions to keep people out, there were thirty-five or more during most of the trip. At night, ‘some lay on the floor in the midst of dirt and some had to keep standing. A free fight was at one time avoided only by the intervention of some of the older passengers who did not want to add to the discomfort by an exhibition of temper.’28 Dirt was his other chief complaint:
Not during the whole of the journey was the compartment once swept or cleaned. The result was every time you walked on the floor or rather cut your way through the passengers seated on the floor, you waded through dirt. The closet was also not cleaned during the journey and there was no water in the water tank. Refreshments sold to the passengers were dirty-looking, handed by dirtier hands, coming out of filthy receptacles and weighed in equally unattractive scales.29
He went through all the familiar grievances. He pointed out that first class was five times the cost of a third-class ticket but the passenger in third class did not enjoy one tenth, let alone one fifth, of the facilities. He reiterated the argument that it was the third-class passengers who paid for the luxuries of those travelling in the better accommodation. While he recognized it was wartime, he argued that the service should be either stopped entirely or run properly, as war was no excuse for the terrible conditions imposed on the passengers. He pointed out that smoking took place everywhere, even in areas where it was not permitted. The toilets were particularly disgusting and ‘defied description’ as the army of flies around them were a warning against their use: ‘I have not the power to adequately describe them without committing a breach of the laws of decent speech,’ he wrote, and asked rhetorically that, given the unhygienic conditions: ‘Is it any wonder that plague has become endemic in India?’30
In a typically populist move, Gandhi suggested that the rajahs, the imperial councillors and even the Viceroy himself should travel in third class and that would ensure rapid change. Gandhi’s continued dislike of the railways was exacerbated by a later incident when his youngest son, Devdas, was asked to leave his compartment after two European women complained he was inappropriately dressed. Devdas was wearing what had become standard for nationalists, a dhoti (a long piece of cloth worn round the legs and tucked into itself), a vest and a cap. An argument ensued and Devdas only avoided arrest because his identity became known.
As Gandhi intimated, the war had taken its toll on the railways. As in the UK, the railways had been used extensively to export goods and material needed by the troops and suffered from under-investment and a neglect of maintenance and renewal. Given the poor state of the railways, and the growing anger among the population about their performance, immediately after the war the Government of India set up yet another committee to investigate their operation. Chaired by Sir (inevitably) William Acworth, it was to prove the most influential of this string of investigations and resulted in major changes, and indeed considerable improvements, for India’s railways.